skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd like to hear a good discussion about education. I'm certainly concerned about it. I don't bother with debates about public education though, because the answer is so obvious: privatization.

I have a 15 month old:
http://flickr.com/photos/abbyalexandra/2617520542/in/photost...

I think I can teach him everything he needs to know about math, science and computer science. It would make sense to do this with others, because learning is a collaborative beast.

I have more education than the majority of science and math teachers (except coursework in education itself - though I tutored for 10 years).

Why don't more adults get together in loose organizations to teach their kids? I'm talking about the technorati here, not the average person who is less capable than the teachers I've had.

Do people avoid this because of the time it would take? Do they think the socialization process of schooling is too important to miss?
Last.fm Launches API 2.0
My high school years also were not like this, but I always assumed that was because my high school made a special effort to stamp out the sort of ostracism and cliquishness that the article described. It seemed like the natural tendency was toward these, but when the school first started up, teachers made a point of making clear that these sorts of behaviors were not okay, and then as the students grew up, they propagated the culture to the younger students. Our first essential question was "What is community?", and much of the first year of the school's existence centered around that.

It probably also helped that when you're in a graduating class of 32, there are no labels. Everybody's an individual, because there aren't enough people to form useful abstractions around social groups.

My middle school years were like this, which makes me think that the natural order in a public school tends toward the social system the article describes.
JSON Diff Released
Hidden Cause of Social Failure [video]
Forget rewriting, they should open the source. That's just about the only thing they could do that would make their operating system interesting to me. I don't know much about business, but it also might be just the shark they would need to jump in order to reverse their gradual decline.
On the other hand, if the trolls were blocked, the article would be about how MySpace censors content it disagrees with.
Do you mean porns? I mean seriously because that was my thought before. Unfortunately there is no piracy control in china for digital download. Even Chinese government tries to suppress it but it just can't be stopped.

But for most Chinese men, they only like East Asians. So most porns there are made from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Of course some of them now import some girls from Ukraine for brides when they make big money. But that's rare. Most of them thought American females are too large for them to handle.
Google Data API for Google Finance
I've been using it for several years. It does one thing and it does it very well - reservations. I don't have to call anyone over the phone anymore. I can check several restaurants and find one available at a glance, not by calling several places in turn. I love it.

There are adjacent features that could be added. Since they know for a fact who I am and that I was there, my review could be very valuable to others. Better yet, others review could be very valuable to me, especially when I'm out of town. An automatic system that matches people with my taste and shows "good" (for me) restaurants when I'm away from home would be great for me and for good restaurants around the world.
Good list of Orange County blogs/info sites for the entrepreneurial community
True story: 100% of the people I know who were hit by a train are fine now.

(That man has the constitution of a bull. I stand in awe of his fortitude.)
Um, not trying to put YOU down, but... What do you think the odds are that someone said something similar to Google when they started:

"Gosh, guys. There are 10 search engines out there with pretty good market share that have been iterating and improving their code/algorithms for YEARS. A "search engine" is one of those extremely complex businesses that requires years of practical experience to get right-- your "pagerank" concept looks alright at first glance but could turn out to be disastrous."

Dramatic innovation can come from iteration and experience or it can come from unlikely sources (as startups prove over and over again).

Personally, I think the OP's article is full of ideas that I decidedly don't agree with... But there are a vast pile of ridiculous ideas I didn't agree with in the past that turned out to be right.
Me?

I haven't got a clue what my purpose in life is. I'm still happy with what I've got, though.
Arab World also has a similar problem. And anger from young men there already exploded and made a landmark in NYC. (I lived in LES in NYC in 9/11/2001 and breathed for a month of air with asbestos and smoke.) So we've already known what is possible to be done by angry young men.

-- edit --

Why this is considered offensive? Will anyone tell me?
I don't get it. The site looks like it belongs to a domain squatter.

They don't understand their market at all. My dad would be completely confused.
the human brain may just use Bayesian statistics

The art in using Bayesian statistics is properly choosing and weighting priors, which might explain (assuming your theory is correct) why some people consistently make better decisions than others.

Note also that computers are good at doing stupid things fast, while people are better at doing complex things slowly. Use the right tool for the job.
Is this the reason why I think girls from East Europe are more attractive? It is interesting to look at this from sexual selection point of view.

On the other hand. I really wish the old tradition in china goes away. There was a time in the 20th century when both Communists and Nationalists in China pushed forward gender egalitarian agenda. But it only reached urban area and the people in country sides are still deeply rooted in old tradition (but at the same time, we all know the people in country side have to favor male off springs for agriculture purpose) So we are watching a very big experiment in society that may last for 100 years.
You should join the discussion on reddit:

1) Spez actually weighs in on such matters

2) the suitability of supervised/unsupervised algorithms for recommending links is discussed (note that Amazon and other highly successful recommendation engines rely upon multi-layered feedback to self-tune, hence my bias towards supervised algorithms)

3) the churn and refresh rate, along with maximization of the desirable turnover and minimization of bombing, is discussed in the context of the 'hot' algorithm and potentially useful changes to the algorithm

You might find it worth your while.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=230966
A First Look Inside Peer39 & Its Semantic Advertising Technology
The design is not great, but based on their success I would be much more inclined to believe you don't understand their market.
I've long admired OpenTable. They've slipped into massive dominance of a large and growing industry, and done so almost entirely unnoticed.

Also once in place, there's huge inertia preventing a restaurant from switching to a competitor, even if a good enough one emerged. Truly impressive.
im in ur subconscious, hacking ur memes

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash]
I heard that once some pranksters got sent down for soap-bombing the fountain in the engineering department, just after their finals. Hence 4 years work and no degree. The wrath of the university can be more scary that the police in many ways.
And how do you feel about they service? Do you think it can be improved?

Maybe. I think that they do an extremely good job of the one thing they set out to do, and it would be very hard to challenge them right now, given the strong relationships they have built with their partners.

Personally, I suspect that finding a niche where the main player is far less competent than OpenTable would make for a more compelling business opportunity, unless you honestly believe that the fall-through recommendation strategy

1) hasn't occurred to them,
2) isn't already being developed internally to OpenTable,
3) isn't applicable to other services with more churn.

The final point is the one I would choose to concentrate upon -- find an industry where the players are less loyal and more open to increasing their marginal profits. Restaurants are exceptionally vulnerable to the whims of the public, yet the business is exceptionally prone to supplier and brand loyalty. I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole, but that's just me.

OpenTable executes well, and I would be very leery of trying to take them on. It could be done, I just think it would be a lot more challenging than it first appears.
Since many (most?) of this community are nerdy people and cannot share your experience, would you please enlighten us with your motivation for such actions? I'm interested in hearing from the other side of the aisle.

Edit: Unless you are joking.
Patents vary hugely in value. The vast majority turn out to be worth almost nothing, while a few are worth billions. I'm pretty sure if you had this it would just accumulate all the worthless patents, while people and companies who owned the valuable ones would have no interest in joining.
Reduce Bounce Rates: Fight for the Second Click
What other company's revenue can be off by a multiple of 2 and still be profitable?

Good catch. Ridiculous company.
Interesting. Unfortuantely JSON can't distinguish between lists and sets. So you can't get a good diff of arrays.

Does:

['foo','bar','baz'] -> ['baz','bar','foo']

Diff to:

@@ -1,3 +1,3 @@
-baz
+foo
bar
-foo
+baz

Or are they the same?
It's not hard to see how macros could do this. Macros just transform code into other code, which is what optimizations do too. For example, if you have an s-expr representing a loop, imagine a function which accepts that s-expr and returns a new one with invariants moved outside the loop body.
Only if he had never used craigslist before.

I agree with your first comment though.
The quip that I heard, back in my cancer research days, was "if you have cancer, and you are a mouse, we can help you".

There was a positively awesome paper a few years back which put the problem in perspective: According to currently accepted theory, cancer is a disease which is caused by random mutations. The more cells with mutations, the greater the chance that you'll get cancer. So your cancer risk is proportional to the number of cells in your body (more candidates for mutation), to the age of those cells (more opportunities for mutagenic factors to strike the right genes in one cell or another -- this is why cancer incidence increases with age), and to the number of mutation-causing factors in your life. (Do not smoke. Seriously, quit smoking right now.)

Mice are very tiny creatures relative to humans, and they live a very short time (a three year old mouse is an old mouse). If mice had the same anti-cancer mechanisms as humans, a mouse with cancer would be vanishingly rare. As it is, it's still pretty hard to find a mouse with cancer, but it does happen -- but only because mice, who have no need for an infrastructure that will protect their cells for 70-plus years, haven't bothered to evolve the same anti-cancer mechanisms that humans have.

The upshot is that "cancer in mice" is a very different disease from "cancer in humans", so while curing cancer in mice is suggestive it is never conclusive.

One way to change the nature of this problem is to transplant human cancer cells into mice. Unfortunately, this technique only solves half the problem -- the cancer cells only make up a portion of a tumor, and their environment is very important. Worse, the mice have to be immunodeficient to make a human-cancer transplant take. That makes studies like the one cited here -- which involve the cancer-fighting activity of a mouse's own immune cells -- difficult to do with human xenografts. (I actually think that such a study is impossible, but I'm not a biologist so maybe there's a loophole I can't see.)
I guess that beating nerds made him look cooler and kept the other bullies away. (Except that it doesn't work in HN)
Rhapsody To Sell MP3s via Web, iLike, MTV and Yahoo
I think the majority of their current success is through integration into the restaurant websites. They understand how to get to their users, I just think they could be a lot better about giving them a good user experience.

And if they can get this much money with such a terrible customer experience, imagine how much money they could make if they made it easier to use, reputable-looking, and more visually appealing.
On the other hand, these engineers will desist from science at a later age than if they could easily marry.
Someone should have plead guilty... It will be interesting to see what happens to the Pirate Bay guys.
Ask YC: What's your best failure story?
I may have been labeled a nerd (or geek or who the hell knows; I never asked) in High School, but that didn't mean I was picked on. Okay, I take that back, I was picked on twice. Both times ended with the other person bleeding. I guess when you're 5'7" 150lbs and have the audacity to punch a 6'3" gorilla in the face in the middle of class, people stop messing with you.

Basically, we had our group of friends, everyone else left us alone, and that was that. Even when we did really nerdy/geeky stuff like play Magic the Gathering at lunch, haha. In our school the popular people focused on being popular, the true nerds focused on getting good grades, and nerds like me who just didn't care focused on sleeping and graduating with the worst GPA possible while self-schooling in the evenings. Everyone just kept to themselves, more or less.
I have so many ideas that I've stopped writing them down. Maybe I should start again just to show how many I have.

What I really need is time to build just one (more) of them.
BTW, if someone wants to start a competitor, we'd be
interested in funding one.
Every morning when I wake up
computers are good at doing stupid things fast, while people are better at doing complex things slowly

It's a good rule of thumb, reflecting our current ability to use computers. I'm looking at the problem from scientific perspective, not trying to get things done.

why some people consistently make better decisions than others

You don't have to look that deep to explain this. These people should just have better understanding of the domain. I don't think there are data saying some people are consistently better than others across domains. If such data exist (wink), you could say they have better modeling of the world in general.
Google Gets into Web Syndication with 'Family Guy' Creator
Who'll Go Gaga For Google Media Server?
(Don't mod him down. Earlier versions of the grandfather had way wide pre text.)
Auction pricing for exclusive places would generate a ton of revenue.
Gates thinks Yahoo acquisition unlikely
Call for a YC entry? Hmmmm. I liked this idea because it's mobile and relies on something besides ad revenue eyeballs to generate revenue.
You can implement a set as an object, though. One presumes (not having tried the tool) that it's not sensitive to order differences in object field initializers.

Basically, "set" isn't a native data structure in Javascript, so it doesn't exist in JSON either. You can use arrays for that purpose, but just as with code, you need to be a little careful. Probably you should consider storing all your "sets" in a normalized (e.g. sorted) form.
It's possible you're being modded down for your poor spelling and grammar. I've modded you back up to 1.
American people scare me, they are crazy.
Any suggestions on what one should think about when scaling a site?
Hi All,
Does anyone know a good resource (website, book, etc) on things to think about when scaling a website? For instance, I am looking for materials on:

1) How a scalable website is organized in terms of infrastructure (having a database server, having a web server, etc)?

2) Best practices for designing the database for a large website to prevent single-points-of-failure

3) What web services out there allow for easy scaling. I have heard of slicehost, Mosso, EC2, Google App Engine (any others? We use PHP)? Do you have to configure your own load balancer etc for these services?

4) Other useful things to think about when designing a scalable web application.

Thanks all
Yeah, I probably should. Paul Buchheit suggested this a long time ago.
a more relevant analogy is apple's mac-to-macosx switch. they completely dumped the old os and replaced it with a new one, relegating the old one to a poorly-integrated emulator.

it was very painful. the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the old guard was loud and angry. but it was good for the company in the long run. now the old macos emulator is all but gone, as are the complaints. it was short-term painful, but a long-term gigantic win.

the same would be true for windows, if it were rewritten from scratch. it's not that the code itself needs a rewrite, it's that the windows api is a patch on a bag on a pile of spit. the fact that microsoft has put such a high priority on backward compatibility is slowly strangling windows to death.
How your Google searches could help change Obscenity Laws
Part of the beauty, for me at least, is that 'restaurant reservations' is a likely-to-be-overlooked problem in the Web 2.0 era. I mean, where's the social networking component?! Can you friend other reservers?! Oh wait, you're going to eat dinner with people? Oh.

How many more problems like this are out there? Reminds me of DHH's "Fortune 1,000,000".
jeez... If I had a dollar for every headline which reads "cancer cured"...
rflmao
A server failure which had us working around the clock for three days.
Ok, but my original point was, "you won't be able to write a compiler for anything other than a (suboptimal) Lisp derivative" (I was probably wrong about suboptimal though, because it only applies to the compiler)
Let's post the same article every other day!
I don't know what metrics you'd use to decide it's "better". Certainly the native code generation on SBCL is pretty darn good.

I think Allegro has better tools and libraries, but SBCL is certainly suitable for professional work. At this point we're talking about matters of degrees.
In the 19th century, poets had huge audiences
Quicksilver for Emacs: anything.el
The Most Important Idea in Computer Science from Alan Kay
He's somewhat off about Plato. Plato was really complaining about fiction, not poetry.
"McCausland also ended up serving five months in prison before going on probation, part of which involved an odd request from his probation officer to start using Windows (instead of Linux) so that monitoring software could be installed on the machine."

This is dehumanizing treatment!
It's easy enough to check, and they do in fact diff to the above.
Why don't you try it, rather than post a comment with misleading statements like "you can't get a good diff of arrays"?
Sure, but that's decided by the diff tool, not by the data.
That's an interesting interview, but the few B&O products I have come in contact with are ugly (totally subjective, I know) and more importantly, don't seem made very well. They just feel cheap, which they are certainly not.
Microsoft seeks next big idea in Cambridge
The Steve Jobs Premium
My Mixed Feelings about Ruby
Awesome. But have you ever seen the movie "dazed and confused"? Remember that scene where the geeky, brainy guy figures that he can punch the dude who belittled and threatened him, on the assumption that he just needs to survive the next 10 seconds before someone breaks it up.

The nerd gets in a good punch, and the fight eventually gets broken up, but not until the nerd has been through a nice, fat beating.

I'm going to guess that you were a pretty good fighter, because in many of the public schools around San Francisco (no, folks, it's not all peace and love here) you could get seriously pounded for that.

The movies love to push this asinine, feel good notion that bullies are really cowards at heart, and all you need to do is crack them in the nose once and they start mewing like little kittens. What crap. You punch a local badass, he'll punch your ass 100 times. You better be ready to back that shit up. I'm not kidding.
Sony to bring the social to PlayStation 3 with firmware 2.40
Is there a translation for this in any other programming languages?
Microsoft to stop selling Windows XP on Monday
Three days into one of my businesses, in the middle of the marketing push while we were signing on lots of (paying) users, my business partner inadvertently deleted all the user passwords while messing around in the SQL console. We had no backup (we'd just launched 3 days earlier and automated backups were still on my todo list). I was in the office at my old job still. On the phone, I talked him through how to reset all the passwords again (to something different per user) and how to send a mail to all existing user with the new password. Brilliant spin: we presented it as a security upgrade. Along the way, I got him to do a database dump just in case we screwed something up while trying to fix things.

Two days later, I came back home from work and started working on the startup. By a stroke of luck, I took a db dump just before I started. A few hours later, I deployed some of my changes. Then, a little bit later, I noticed something strange: the total number of users had gone down over the last few hours. How bizarre.

Turns out my business partner had done the db dump in the one folder that got auto-executed every time I did an SQL deployment. So I'd just overwritten the db with a 2 day old version. I took a dump of the db again, restored the backup from 2 hours earlier, then manually added all the missing users back in.

No one noticed a thing - or said anything about it, anyway.

Morale: even the most stupid, huge screw-ups can be successfully covered up if you keep a cool head!
"are believed to have a joined a group calling itself the Allied Security Trust"

Awesome! This sounds like it would make a great FPS :-)
No, 15 years is not necessary, but you should at least gain some experience in the topic before speaking on it.
Good article, but I'm not sure what this means:

In the latest edition of The American, published by the
American Enterprise Institute, Grove writes that the
beauty of electric power is its ability to be produced
through multiple sources such as coal, wind and nuclear,
and its "stickiness" — it can be transported only over
land.

What do they mean by stickiness, and that electricity can only be transported over land? What is he talking about?
The Weatherbug API contest is open to international entries, you should check that one out. The link was on ProgrammableWeb. I think I'm going to code up an entry this weekend after reading this post!
AOL's Platform-A to Offer Guaranteed CPM to Facebook, Bebo Developers
Will the Large Hadron Collider Swallow Earth?
America is not an entity; it is a process. Processes can go awry but they are malleable and fixable. Do you resent your program because it crashes? No, you fix the bug and move on. It's the same thing with America.

American culture values action and results more than intellect. But it's hardly an anti-intellectual country. Such focus on action and results implies it's anti-navel-gazing/anti-analysis-paralysis which are things that often go hand-in-hand with intellectualism. But intellectualism which gets results always has respect in America.
coglethorpe,

don't miss that opentable is not just for consumers. to get restaurants on their system, opentable offers tools that help restaurant managers measure their staff and customers. i've heard the system captures and provides data (e.g., repeat visits by customers, tips by customer and waitress, table turn timing by waitress, etc.) that can help managers get real business benefits like growing revenue

i wonder what other appointment industries (e.g., hair salons, dentists) have a similar opportunity to help consumers and business managers