skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Honestly, we have the statistical techniques needed to figure out whether a given pattern in the CMB is real or not. I'm no statistician, but folks that are can do this kind of thing for breakfast.
All of the BSD licenses, and also the GPL, are free-software licenses, as well as open-source licenses. If you want to argue about which particular licenses are more or less free or open, you should do it in a separate thread, ideally on a separate site, instead of trying to derail this thread.
I don't really argue with that theorem at all. Perhaps manual labor and and raw materials will always go up, while energy, information and technology will always go down.

But if nurses cost too much, once we start applying technology to that problem, we could probably find ways to dramatically reduce the cost of nursing health care. Eg, robots, tele-doctors, cheap home healthcare etc.
I agree, this would be very powerful coupled with something like feedmyinbox.
Great points about the expectations of startups.

However, I've never met anyone below the MD at an investment bank who's working anywhere close to 9a-5p (unless you meant 9a to 5a which is more often the case with analysts).
Thanks for your advice. We've heard similar stories before (about how to find an US resident as a co-founder to do all the "work"). Working on our OPT may not be an option for now though, as we are not near to graduation...

But what if we don't found a company at all, just receiving app/ads income from our app to your personal accounts? any F1 students got problems with that before?
Buy this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Robin-Willia...

EDIT: It's a great book. It's not a "Hello World," but it will help you get to the point of being able to make one. It covers a lot of fundamental design concepts that I, as a developer, didn't know but am now glad I did.
Applying to Ph.D. Programs in Computer Science
A Critique Of Common Lisp [pdf] [1984]
Really? You thought he clearly explained what he is going to do? I can appreciate his passion, but I wouldn't say he was particularly clear about anything.
Buy one in which country?

If they bought one in only one country then they don't get all that many advantages. If they buy one in every country, that's expensive and ridiculously difficult.
Eclipse when writing Java
- you can kill an ox in 6 seconds with the refactoring tools ... unfortunately coding anything in Java is like killing an ox - there's a huge carcass and a funny smell when you're done

notepad++ for everything else (HTML css JavaScript erlang)
- fast
- light weight
- tabs
- syntax highlighting
Someone had a site (I can't remember the details but surely someone will chime in) with custom HN ranking of points divided by number of comments. It was surprisingly effective, though that might have just been the nature of the top stories at the time I checked it. If it did work it would be by also filtering out political and other call-to-action type posts particularly.

I'm with you, I hate the drama posts. I have a kind of half-arsed theory that what I dislike in the evolution of social sites is the inherent community building. I think it tends to get too self-referential.
With what tools? In theory, if you have a shared screen, and real-time voice communication, and remote whiteboards, and ideally real-time video, it should be basically the same as being there. The technology to do this is very, very expensive at the moment, though, which is presumably the raison d'etre of this startup.

You also miss out a lot on serendipity. Many of the best ideas that eventually become actual Google products happen because a bunch of folks are hanging out over beers, or they're sharing the latest cool thing they've stumbled across on the Internet, or they're shooting each other with nerf darts before going home. This sort of relaxed socialization seems to be exactly what you need to get creative ideas to bubble up to the surface. When you have to feel like you're "on a call" to get together with someone, you don't get this sort of spontaneous idea generation.
Yes, that's part of why I just posted about how I need a cofounder to start a company, lol. I didn't watch the Jay-Z interview, but I'm going to check it out, thanks for the post.
Is Google PowerMeter dead?
If you have a working version, and you think that it can generate revenue then you should see it through. Revenue helps to generate capacity to pursue future ideas. If you abandon it now, you are guaranteeing that you have the capacity to pursue a single project at least until the next project is done. An item to consider, would be can you box this thing and sell it off to generate revenue? Could you find a web marketing guy and hand it over to him for 20% cut with an agreement that you get the 20% but are only a passive partner, if he generates revenue he must find a technical person to extend it, maybe you stipulate that you must approve of the selection. I imagine if it is a half way decent idea you could find a guy to run with it. Point is you want to ensure that it generates revenue for you or outright fails before you move on. New ideas always have a importance factor that you mind adds weight to so make sure you are not going to fall trap to the newest idea is always the best one. My recommendation would be find a way to see it through to revenue, with as little investment of time as possible. Consider either an outright sale or finding someone that wants to carry the torch.
Would we be seeing live procedural generation of this sort in games in the near future?
Sounds nice at first but if Google can afford to hire the most experienced, why would they do something that goes against their bottom line?

From what I've seen, you've got a lot of developers commanding 60-80k salaries. From a startup perspective, I don't really understand why this is the only acceptable path.

It just seems smarter to locate near some technical colleges in cities that have a lower cost of living, and pay entry level developers a salary between 35-45k to start. As they improve their skills, you up their salary... assuming that improvement comes with an increase in revenues/profits.
I don't see a response to the question....
Uhh, it took me a while to understand this post, but... that ain't a simulation.
Definitely get Git/Mercurial set up sooner rather than later - it's actually very easy to get the hang of the basics and it will give you a noticeable productivity boost (having a decent history of everything you've done is surprisingly helpful at times). You can still use dropbox as a kind of backup for your repository - no need to muck about setting up servers etc.

If you don't mind going for mercurial instead of git then take a look at hginit.com. Then if you're on windows, go and install tortoiseHg.
I'm glad someone else already posted this so I didn't have to sacrifice my own karma by doing it myself.
Ask HN: Name your company after your first product?
Most YC companies have eponymous names. You make a product called Airbnb, so you call your company Airbnb Inc. There are some counter-examples (like 280 North), but they seem to be the exceptions.

But then there are the various "Labs" startups and 37 signals type shops that use umbrella names, which seems to work better if you release multiple products.

I'd appreciate any advice about which approach to take, assuming you're starting a fairly normal company that is going to start with one product but is likely to eventually build more.
Yeah, if only Microsoft had promoted Lisp the way they had Xenix, or the Zune, then _everybody_ would be using Lisp! Or if Sun had picked up the cause, then Lisp would be used in all those set-top boxes the way Java is today. Oh, wait...

Microsoft actually did have a diversity approach for their language tools division in the 1980s -- ever heard of MuLISP? The problem was that Lisp on MS-DOS or Windows 3 was not really a good fit for most (any?) personal computer at that time. Certainly not when compared with the likes of Turbo Pascal, say.

It seems to me that programming languages get their moment in the sun if they offer some significant technical advantage for that particular time and market. Perl took off because it did seem better for some things at the time, for example, while the latest versions have seemed (to me, at least) as a desperate cry for attention when other dynamic languages have gotten most of the programmer love.

If there's anything the last dozen years of language adoption have shown us, it is that "promotion" is only part of the equation and it can manifest in either a top-down or bottom-up fashion. (See Python or Ruby for examples of the latter.)
Any form of real source control is a better setup than just using Dropbox. I happen to do Git+Dropbox right now, but anything will do.

Source control just provides lots of benefits for logging and rolling back and around. Git and Mercurial, as distributed version control systems, just happen to be easiest since you don't need to really setup a repository, and just have all the data on local disk. It really is practically free.

Go to your source directory now:

1. git init # makes the directory a git repository

2. git add . # adds everything in that directory

3. git commit # commits it
Do you guys consider giving sms bulk discount? Like a tiered pricing?
To be more precise, any secure iterated hash using a sufficient number of iterations and a salt.
Shouldn't the title read "Is google power meter dead?"
MtGox.com is a good site to use. However, MtGox is only site worth using. All others are not as convenient. That being said, paypal aren't used on almost all site because paypal can do chargeback.

Bitcoin is open source. You can inspect the source code if you want.
The question is "what do you think of peak oil?". Of course I don't know exactly will happen. But I can certainly make an educated guess based on what I do know.
Confessions of a Mac Switcher: Part 2
Hacker News' Reading Level
Mises, Hayek, and Friedman
One of the purposes of Previous Look is to capture the fast changing content of a webpage like /new so that past content can be reviewed quickly. For now http://www.previouslook.com/hnews/new has an 15-minute interval snapshot window, which seems to be enough to not miss anything.
The patent was upheld in Canada.
It did strike me as odd that if they're trying to solve that problem, having some people, you know, actually work remotely, would in fact indicate if the product was solving problems - dogfooding and all that.

I've felt those "week vs 15 minute" issues. Some of that is developer-specific, no doubt, but that's fundamentally a communication issue that needs to be managed.

I've also worked gigs where people were in the same room and didn't talk to each other, or wouldn't answer emails due to office politics, and in general stuff that should have taken 15 minutes still took a week, even though everyone was in the same building.
Netbeans has grown quite nicely in the last few years.
EDIT: Check out the response to waterside81's comment above.

What would you like to know?

The post is quite frankly too long already, but I figured folks would want a decent amount of information. Like I said, Ask ?'s.

Thanks for your comment.
It's not just enough to have or even "use" data. They carefully chose metrics that matter. In their business model, for example, they saw that photo sharing was a primary driver of longevity and of driving additional usage down the social graph.

Therefore, the metrics where carefully chosen to foster those behaviors. Having a goal and then choosing measure to support it is surprisingly rare, not just among designers, but across businesses.

And just picking things like "Volume sales... and Profit!" as your metrics are kind of specious. Yes, every business wants those, but that just delays the real question: what behaviors by your customers will make that happen for you? And once you think you have those, look for metrics that diagnose that those behaviors are happening, or can help you diagnose why they aren't.

We all have data. Picking useful metrics and linking them, well, that's insight.
Gah... The problem here is that this likely won't hurt Gawker very much. It will, however, hurt the people whose accounts were compromised. Gawker was asking for it; they weren't.

I don't support the crackers here, but I do have to admit to a little schadenfreude at seeing Gawker get taken down a peg. Not only are they a worthless tabloid, but they're dicks about it, too.
The "consensus" is that time started at the Big Bang and there is no meaningful referent for "before the Big Bang". However, the consensus is also that the theory that says this is flawed in several known ways, not least of which is the lack of unification between quantum and relativistic gravity that you may have heard about. This is the consensus theory not because it is perfect, but because nobody has yet managed to put together an alternative that does better across the board. Really the upshot is that nobody really knows, even for small values of "know".
Not a chance. The moment they did this all other networks would remove the iPhone as soon as they possibly could.
What we're up against is that providing raw numbers for usage limits leads to several problems. Among them:

1. Competition. If you provide N gigabytes of storage/bandwidth, another provider will offer N * 2, and they instantly look more competitive, even if they aren't even actually capable of providing that. So, back when we provided limited plans, we were constantly being forced to increase our resource promises to unrealistic levels just to avoid looking stingy.

2. Expectations. If you provide N gigabytes of whatever, customers will expect (and demand!) that their site be able to use up all of their provided resources. This is both on a policy level ("what do you mean I saturated the interface?") and on a technical level ("why can't I serve 100 gigabytes of dynamic HTML a month?") This becomes an increasing issue as competition drives the provides up, and the actual resources you're supposed to provide are absurdly high. (Consider for instance 100tb.com, which was mentioned earlier in this thread - good luck actually pushing 300+ MBit constantly.)

In practice, the policy we've got now actually works better in some ways for customers because they don't have to care whether they're exceeding resource limits, either subjective OR objective. So long as they're running a site which complies with our Terms of Service, we'll do our best to keep it going, even if it gets big.
I like it, though I might stick to the version I developed two months ago - http://hackerslide.com/ - as I prefer HN's natural colors ;-)
A GlimmerBlocker filter which improves the layout for mobile: http://glimmerblocker.org/site/filters/mobile-optimized.xml

Pastebin version.
css: http://pastebin.com/AE1UzYvU
js transform of html source: http://pastebin.com/9069JULs

Most of the improvements could be made by a seperate mobile stylesheet if more classNames were added to the generated html.
The simplicity of the design is one of the main things I like about this site. It's like the things I make for myself: a handy tool.
why is the UI so completely neglected?

Because when I spend time on HN my top priority is features that will make the content better. I believe that matches the priorities of the users-- that users would rather use a site with good stories and comments and a primitive UI than one with a slick UI and worse stories and comments. And time is a zero-sum game. Spending more time on UI = spending less on quality.

The focus on content quality above all is the reason you find yourself saying later "If there were any other community like this..."

You're simply wrong about the moderation. Nearly every story that gets killed is either autokilled, or a dup, or flagged to death by users. I would guess moderators manually kill less than 10 non-dup stories a day. You're also wrong that YC cos get special privileges.
The question is not if people got in problem for that, the question is, is it illegal. And no, as far as I know, it is not legal. Still I know people who do it and it really depends on if you want to stay in the country and try to become a resident etc. If you do, it could be too risky.

How about starting a company back in your home-country?
And packaged binaries for OS X can be found at http://emacsformacosx.com/. I prefer standard GNU Emacs to Aquamacs.
It would be equally interesting to only see the reading level of the articles, rather than the comments.
Barnes & Noble tested this 10 years ago and their solution was to add a second "confirmation" click. That would seem to be about the minimum necessary to avoid infringement.
Integrating Go with C: the ZooKeeper binding experience.
BTW, not all data are encrypted in an Office file. Usually only three or four entire streams are encrypted in Word/Excel.
I believe Google Code is only for open-source projects.
Our limits are based on policy, not numbers. The policy is (roughly) outlined at http://www.dreamhost.com/unlimited.html if you're curious.
An elevated reading level is not necessarily a sign of more thoughtful or insightful comments. It could just be contrived banality disguised as conceptual depth.
How many people really care about the security of their Gawker account though? They just want comment on a blog post; in order to do that, they must remember a password. "password" achieves that admirably. Now, if they are using "password" as the password for their bank account...they could have a real problem.

It would be great for people if tools like 1Password were more prevalent, even built in to browsers. It becomes trivial both to create and maintain an unlimited number of secure passwords.
That's because in a debt based economy, deflation means a shrinking of the money supply, and a shrinking of the money supply means less money is being lent, and less money being lent means economic stagnation.

An economy based on bitcoins couldn't work like this - because deflation doesn't shrink the money supply, and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with less money being lent.
This is a huge breach yet users have to scroll down a full page on Gizmodo.com to find a small article about it.
With those sorts of numbers (100 tb/day ≈ 10 Gbps, for instance), nobody can offer that amount of traffic under "unlimited" terms. One of the limitations I mentioned is that we won't upgrade infrastructure just to support individual customers, and this would definitely fall under those criteria.
1) I could accept I'm wrong about stories being killed by humans, but I know the titles get edited by humans. I remember one story I posted about some really ancient, accurate maps, and I made the title something like "Accurate maps from the 1500s unearthed." And then some moderator made it the story headline instead "Named building in DC hosts map show" or something equally uninformative.

2) I'm positive YC companies get at least one special privilege - the ability to post jobs.

3) I've been told YC accounts are excluded from anti-spam measures, but I can't prove it.

EDIT: Also, regarding the zero-sum-game argument. All of us developers know we have limited time to spend on things. But a HUGE change to a non-priority that takes almost no time (for example improving the CSS on mobile) should be squeezed in between these experiments that may or may not make the content better, and take hours.
Bitcoiners already downing everyone that think they can generate bitcoin for free.

"Unless you have a GPU farm, go buy bitcoins instead" and variations thereof.
He said other than the JVM.
This is yet another reason for software developers to unionize. Otherwise it'll continue to be a race to the bottom as developers continue undercutting each other and giving away any leverage they may have had.
I'm not sure. I'm experimenting with keeping fewer items in memory, which means less time spent GCing. It could also be that load is lower on sundays.
This is a disgusting action from UK2/SL.

If you promise 100TB of data transfer on 1Gbps, you have to keep your word (not matter what). Otherwise, don't venture in offering such deal. Essentially, they're kicking out the tail end of the "distribution". A lot of SL clients have been reporting network latency and sometimes packet drops over the last few months. SL is most likely seeing this in their MRTG graphs and have no choice but to enforce the ToS, which does have a CDN clause by the way. The right approach would be to expand their network and purchase additional bandwidth. But I guess they're there to increase their margins.

I have to confess that, as a provider, one has to anticipate things like this for the sake of keeping the business afloat and the clients. The upstream could at any moment pull the plug on you (literally). There's so much one has to watch out for. These are things one loses sleep over.

It's unsettling to say the least. I'm reevaluating SL/UK2 as a possible partner (it used to be high up there in the list but no more).

Regards

Joe
I can second a recommendation for Textastic. Specifically, it uses Fraise's syntax definition files, so it has support for a crapload of languages: (http://www.textasticapp.com/manual/lessons/Which_file_types_...)

I see people complaining that you'd have to be an idiot to write code on a touchscreen device, but I honestly don't have any issue with it.
I am pretty sure that is not the problem.
To be fair, at the time I thought Air was a great idea and even flirted with learning AS and focussing a not-insignificant amount of time accounting for it in my ideas. However, and I think HTML5 surprised everybody, the market has zigged where Adobe zagged. These transitions take ages to complete, but when companies like YouTube make their choices, people listen and many times follow suit. We'll see how they wiggle through the next few years, technologically, but they may be headed for a low-grade tragedy (see: Corel).
This is absolutely true. I think Tropo does as well.
>> "A free competitor in the software world can have more users, but that doesn't necessarily mean your business is failing."

But this isn't like free end user software. An Android phone isn't "free" to the end user. People are paying money for Android phones, instead of spending that money to buy BlackBerries. The fact that the OS is free to the manufacturer providing the phones is of no consequence. What is of consequence is that there's this new player in the smartphone market that is gobbling up marketshare that used to belong in part to RIM. I don't see how saying, "oh, that was going to happen anyway" makes the argument any less stinging.
Really?! Aw crap. Thanks.
With regard to OpenCourseWare, MIT are not selling secret knowledge, but a certificate stating the bearer is smart enough to go through their courses and has done all the work necessary to complete them. This should be the m.o. of all learning institutions.
I don't know how saying "Danielle Morrill said" is not a quote. But let the audience here, and the future, judge whether or not we "keep up". I think time will tell.
> Exactly - the point is that BSD doesn't limit me at all, and the GPL limits me fairly severely.

But the BSD allows you to limit what your users can do, the GPL does not. Again, this is how all our democracies and human rights work.
OpenID as a solution, not so much. It's a roundabout solution to a bigger problem. A solid password distribution and management strategy is far more effective. 1Password for Mac handles that pretty well for me.