skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is Groupon Worth Six Billion Dollars?
Just don't vote. Clearly lots of folks here do have these skills.
Or just paste.ly
Definitely some interesting thoughts here, but the author is overreaching.

> Google/Yahoo news isn't the new model - they've been surpassed by Facebook already.

Including Yahoo here lends the sentence credibility because of how they have been failing at everything they try to do for years, but this is just projecting trends into the future with little justification. Facebook or Twitter have not yet proven that they can harvest all their data to produce a search engine that can rival Google. Without that they simply don't have the form factor to dominate news.

> The good news for media is that when they embraces the new model, I think they will make far more money than they ever have in the past due to the combination of broader distribution and better targeting leading to larger ad revenues.

This is incumbent on the aggregator having the right combination of UX acumen and generous profit sharing with publishers. But even if that pans out, "broader distribution" also means more competition for ever-thinner attention, and also the data available on the Internet may reveal that old advertising budgets were unjustified. If they aren't making more money, then publishers are not going to cede control to an aggregator, they'll go down with the ship if they have to.

Also, I don't think branded channels are going anywhere. People crave a certain amount of diversity. If Facebook comes to dominate news, however unlikely, there will be rebellion and many trendsetters will use something different, even if inferior, just for differences sake.
I'm in information security, so my tech conferences might be a little different than some others.

I couldn't make time in my schedule for ShmooCon, so I will unfortunately be missing that one this year.

I will hopefully be able to make it to SOURCE Boston.

I will be attending Black Hat and DEFCON in Las Vegas this summer.

And I will try to make it to ToorCon San Diego again late in the year, as I spoke there this year and enjoyed the experience quite a bit.

I generally only go to one conference per quarter, but they are always a great time both for networking and learning.
Even for seemingly logical people, until you've done battle with a computer by programming, you probably don't realize how sloppy your thinking really is. Programming will make you more logical just as push-ups will make you more muscular.
Anonymous Movement is Fueled by Cowardice
[...] the people that receive these loans probably don't know what microfinance loans are; that's to say they probably just call them loans.

And this is the crux of the issue.

The table only denotes what the borrower took the loan for, and not for what actual use the money was put to. Basically it boils down to this: once the money is in their hands, unless the borrowers have had some information dissemination of a substantial sort, it can be used for any purpose.

It is typically the lending party's duty to take solid steps towards educating the borrower as to the actual purpose of the loans, and MFIs in India (IMHO) were initially doing a stellar job of this (ok, well, SKS at least - I sat in on some of their 'group training seminars'). I'm not close to the domain now for about a year though, so I couldn't comment for sure any more.

As an aside: (I don't think they'll take action against me for saying good things about them, so I'll go right ahead) SKS' impairment levels were so ridiculously low that I would end up manually re-calculating the figures to ensure Mondrian wasn't lying to me or our software wasn't badly broken.

As another aside: there is also an emerging trend of 'micro-insurance' products (livestock insurance, crop insurance, 'hut' insurance, etc.) being offered by MFIs as well as large insurance companies which I did a field study on, which reached conclusions similar to what I learned from the SKS project - the illiterate and poor initially cannot even conceive that someone would want to help them out without shafting them, but with substantial education to a few key influential and smart members of the community, the message can be gotten across.
Ask HN: getting married tonight - tips for success?
Tonight I am getting married. I am also 3 months in to a new venture that is obviously taking up a lot of time.<p>I am curious what pointers HNers might have for maintaining a healthy marriage while also growing a successful startup.
Any chance this could run in Rhino or does the node.js dependency demand V8?

Feature for feature, how does this compare to HTMLUnit?
Looks like crap on my iMac.
When the change is made, changing the results of the HTTP GET to some javascipt comments explaining what happened and pointing them to some CDNs which offer the same service would be a good idea.
In a nutshell, I need to make myself, my interests, and my life more of a priority. I tend to be a yes-man who helps everyone and anyone, then at the end of the day find I have no time left for myself and my own endeavours.

I'm happy to say I lost 50 lbs about 4 years ago and have gained very little of it back.

I need to

- Get enough sleep on a regular basis

- Hit the gym more often

- Fire some of my clients who are PITAs

- Travel more

- Balance my time better

- Knock more things off my life bucket list. This year I went snowmobiling and skydiving, woot :)
Don't get too bummed yet. Lots of guys can grow a better beard at 30 than at 24.
You will learn a great deal by posting your work for others to see. At first it will feel uncomfortable. You will be concerned that others will mock your work (and they might). But, by the 3rd or 4th time you post your work you will start to feel comfortable with it. The important point is that others will benefit from your experience. Karma.
I have absolutely no programming skills. I thoroughly enjoy HN and appreciate the coders point of view since I have worked with a bunch throughout the years. For 2011 I resolve to learn Python or Ruby.
I would contact PG, they have a lot of experience with OCR and can use people like distributed proofreaders to fix the mistakes.

At minimum if you give them a copy then they will keep it secure if you later lose interest
I've held about 10 jobs in Silicon Valley. I can tell you, the environment at Apple was rather different, and my friends who work there paint a picture of their employment there that is indeed quite different from many other stories I've heard, and jobs I've held.
Programmers are Tiny Gods
No, SCC is quite different from Larrabee; it uses a mesh instead of a ring, lacks the vector unit, lacks cache coherence, etc.
Until very recently I had no meaningful coding experience besides a little Excel macro-ing and modifying WordPress' PHP. My New Year's resolution is to make my web app a reality, but I don't know how to code. I am on week 3 of learning Python through MIT's OCW (and many other resources), and I'll let you know when I'm done with my app!
I have programming ability
i dont have the attention span for a book. that said, i read voraciously from a variety of resources using instapaper. i read a minimum of 2-3 hours per day everyday.

i haven't opened a book in over a year, and haven't finished a book in years.
Sorry, added.
Doubtful. WakeMate is just incredibly buggy, in general. I've gotten it to work exactly once since I got it (on the supposedly better supported iPhone). Otherwise, it seems to need constant rebooting.

They've said that they're working on fixing battery life issues (at least as reported by Engadget).

The defective charger is a separate issue entirely.
I recall reading that the original study indicating red wine was good for the heart was based on studies of a chemical in the wine which was given to rats as part of the study. To get the same amount the rats got, and assumably the same benefit, you'd have to drink a ridiculous amount (1000's of gallons a year IIRC).
Hmm,

"The maintainer is in for the long-haul, and has been working on this code for longer than you have. Chances are, he will keep doing this even after you have long moved into your next project."

That might be a common pattern but it seems like it's sort-of a dead end pattern. If put yourself out there as The Maintainer in that way, you've basically said no is going to be able to make major contributions without you - going it alone become a self-perpetuating process and it's indeed not surprising that no one will stick around.

I have a large project that I hope to release in the next 1-3 months. I've put a large amount of effort into it. I'm also putting effort into making the code good enough that others can come on board and make significant extensions to it. Following the existing code style certainly but quite possible rearranging functionality, breaking up and rearranging function if it's useful and so-forth.

A VCS like git that lets everyone have the branch they like can be good here. Do what you love and inclusion in the main branch should follow sooner or later...
Which company was that, did they manufacture the internals or just the box the drive comes in? Maybe Seagate?
That's one of the coolest pieces of equipment I've ever seen.
i don't play WOW or any other MMOG. But I think that old saying that most things in moderation are good for you, seems to apply here as well. I have no concrete evidence to back this and I haven't defined 'most' or 'moderation' but I have noticed that most people understand this intuitively. Are there exceptions, maybe. Particularly, in this community of people, who spend all their time on one idea trying to make it successful. However, I could make the argument that doing it takes a toll on you and your relationships. Anyways, i can't argue it all that well, but it feels like a good rule of thumb.
I think this is an example of extremely dry English humor being absolutely baffling to Americans (I'm a bit of each, so I think I can get away with saying things like that).

From the article:

>Boring 2010 sprang to life when Mr. Ward heard that an event called the Interesting Conference had been canceled, and he sent out a joke tweet about the need to have a Boring Conference instead. He was taken aback when dozens of people responded enthusiastically.
I agree: most of you MBA guys will suck, fail and never figure it out. Some of you will. Everyone should try though.
i love reading about the tech industry and entrepreneurship, work in a management role for a small business, and have leveraged many of the concepts I've learned about on hacker news in my job.

not only is hacker news my primary news source (among a field of many), it is the only news blog i comment on. in fact, besides facebook it is the only place that i leave comments or write on the Internet.

it is a great resource with an even better community. and while i dont program, everyday i find something or learn about something that i implement in the business i help run.
I don't see why it's worth paying so much money just to be able to do your normal work and see a Windows logo all day.
much prefer VIM from novice to pro by: Derek SMART.
Convenience is not safety. Your point is not directly relevant to the Franklin quote.
If you would love to do your own stuff so much, why do you lack motivation?
> However, since the scanning was done recently, the scans may be copyrighted by the Hockliffe Collection.

In the U.S. at least, scans probably aren't subject to a separate copyright; they're too direct and uncreative a copy, so they just inherit the copyright of the original work. Wikimedia Commons advises people to operate as if scans aren't separately copyrightable, anyway: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:When_to_use_the_PD...
Not married yet but have lived with my girlfriend for the last year while building a startup and having contracting to pay the bills.

Biggest thing I've learned is to set aside enough time to do things just the two of you with the computer off and the cell phone silenced.

Make sure your love knows they are first priority in your life. When you are stressed communicate why you are stressed, don't just try to extinguish it. Ask for help when you need it, you aren't alone anymore :).

And get a clear financials plan. Stressing about money plus the day to day stress of building a startup can really damage relationships.
ok but how is it different from the millions of people using Facebook or foursquare stating when they leave home or where they leave their precious gear? Lots of cases of people who got their ferrari or jaguar xkrs stolen because they bragged about holidays on facebook.

It seems a lot of noise for me for just one camera. The new PMW-F3s from Sony costs as much as one epic and are as formidable/game-chaning as the epic, but apparently everything about RED should be seen like big news...
I use this site as a 2nd Reddit when all the links turn purple.
I gotta say that I find this almost impossible to use. As I go to click on a video (or words on the main page which when I finally got to one are unclickable) the object I'm trying to hit moves out of the way. Seems like more than a game than an effective way to search.

I gave some thought to 3d UIs a while back, and was thinking more along the lines of direction and depth. Not sure if that works for video I guess it depends on what you find people searching for.
"C++, C#, Java etc. just seem too difficult to learn."

In a lot of respects, they are -- there's a lot of ceremony and boilerplate around getting started that's there to please the compiler (and programmer job security) rather than the programmer. If you want to learn to code, I'd try something like Python, Ruby, or JavaScript first -- you say you're a "linear, spaghetti-code thinker," but that pretty much describes everyone who's starting out. Something in the Python/Ruby/JS mold would make it easier for you to see relationships between different parts of your code and make the leap from linear thinking to something more organized, without the noise that languages like C#/C++/Java impose on you.

Good luck!
5 Predictions for Startups in 2011
four2go! I've completed my web application.  Now what?
Books are random-access; you don't necessarily need to read the entire book to benefit from it.

But anyway. As a non-book-reader, where do you see local bookstores heading? I suspect that nothing they could do to their stock or their prices would draw you in?
"Boredom is counter-revolutionary"
It serves as a base. The number of people with out the skills alone is not so useful without knowing how many people saw it.
Seeing as it's nearly one-of-a-kind, that's going to be really hard to fence.

If you have the kind of skills required to sell this stolen camera, you might as well have gone into enterprise sales or something, and avoided the whole "grand larceny" rap.
My mom is a psychologist, so I'll tell you what she told me before I got married:

A Native American couple was to get married, and the medicine man came to them and said, "There are three of you here: the groom, the bride and death. The relationship you have right now will die. But from its ashes can spring a new relationship. That new relationship will be different, less exciting in some ways, maybe, but deeper and stronger. And that new relationship will die, but from its ashes a new one can spring again. This will go on and on for your lifetime together."

Expect that your relationship will change and be prepared to change with it. Expect to forgive the past and expect to discover the future.

About balancing work and a new venture, my only advice is to always make clear to her/him that s/he is the first priority. You may have to spend more time with the venture, but it is always number two. And be prepared to continually show, over and over, what you feel is obvious: how much you love them and how important they are to you. Never assume they know.

P.S. Congratulations and my warmest wishes for your future together!
>Everyday stuff made in the US: cars (e.g., my mom's Toyota), airplanes, medical devices, construction supplies.

Cars appear generally to be bought/made close to the point of use - "far eastern" cars are made in the UK for example. I'd guess that Toyotas used in Europe are mainly made in Europe now, but stand to be corrected. Sp[eculating further I'd say the same will be true of construction supplies - I've heard of prefab stuff being moved around Europe a lot but I imagine demand and transportation costs allow/require production close to point of use. Aeroplanes and medical devices, yes they should have come to mind.

I've also heard that it is best to have precision dies and things made elsewhere and then shipped to China for the mass production part of the process.

WRT the link I wonder how resource use has increased over that time too. How much of this increased level of production is down to increasing population confounded with a per head increase in resources?

Thanks for your reply.
Let's say you own a company that has driven most of the book industry out of business, and you suddenly decide to let Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch decide what books are ok for you to sell, and what books aren't.

You honestly think for a millisecond that there isn't a major free speech issue brewing here? Think again. Borders is about to collapse and even more bookstore deaths are imminent. Amazon already controls a huge chunk of book sales; soon, it could be 50% or more of the industry.
"The only way to be totally fireproof is to own a controlling stake in your company"

I wish the article was on 'how to own, keep and maintain controlling stake no matter how many rounds of funding you do' ...
Why would a baseline level of trust equate to 100% risk?
- lose some of the excess fat on my body

- make more time in my life for the people i love

- take up a physically exerting, mentally calming hobby

- generate more income

- constrain spending

- position myself to leave the country for more than 50% of 2012
It falls into a price range that doesn't exist outside of that company's products. Auxiliary products like lenses and stuff is pretty much the same price (since they aren't produced by that company).
Is it the fear, the secrecy or the interrogations that stand out the most?

http://www.geek.com/articles/apple/steve-wozniak-spills-the-...
I generally prefer Borders to Barnes-and-Noble because they always seemed to stock more titles. But I almost never buy anything at either of them without one of their 30-50% off coupons, which brings them close to Amazon's price.

I can't find it, but there's an article out there somewhere about how Boston Market has really struggled because they set their prices high and issue a lot of discount coupons, so a lot of their customers are bargain shoppers not people looking for higher quality.

I definitely wish that either book chain (or a new business) would focus more on the "experience" part of what these stores are now. They're always busy, but mostly full of people with laptops. I know some of them won't spend a dime there, but I suspect most of them would pay a couple bucks an hour for a comfortable seat, power, decent wifi, and access to snacks, drinks, books, and gadgets to buy. I know I would.
I think that under some circumstances, getting fired from one's own company could be cause for celebration. If the company is at least reasonably successful, it means that someone else has grown to feel a sufficient sense of ownership and responsibility about it that they're willing to put themselves on the line. And it sets you free to start the next one. Isn't that what you really want to do anyway?

-- Not always, I know. But thinking about various businesses I can imagine trying to start, most of them I wouldn't be so attached to that I'd want to keep doing them forever. And I can easily imagine that once I got over the shock of getting fired, I could come to appreciate the opportunity to move on, particularly if I got a little cash in the bargain.
+1, I work in marketing but have similar reasons.
Ask HN: What Are Your New Year's Resolutions?
Be it programming, productivity, start-ups, shipping, and whatever else that may be pertinent.
First, great work on this implementation. I can't imagine all the work that must have gone into this.

To me, this seems to only solve a corner case in the main problem of JS testing - testing the DOM without a browser. The first question that comes to mind is, is a DOM even useful in a headless browser when it comes to JS? For now, grant that we're only testing presence and manipulation of DOM elements and no CSS manipulations or accuracy -- which I'd argue is a decent case for testing. Now, testing presence and manipulation of DOM elements in the abstract isn't very useful, as different browsers might treat DOM manipulations differently. Using a headless browser that no one actually uses doesn't solve this problem.

I'd see a case for this in running something like QUnit[1] test that just test JS completeness, but again, implementations differ so testing in one environment that no one actually is using isn't good enough.

The only thing that I've come up with for a solution for actually testing JavaScript in a robust, real-world way is using QUnit and Selenium[2] to define the tests, with Testswarm[3] actually running the tests. This setup allows unit tests to be run against JS by itself (QUnir), mock interactions to take place to ensure bindings work properly (Selenium), and have these executed against real browsers in a distributed manner (Testswarm).

I concede that this isn't an ideal solution, and I wish there were more people working on solutions like Zombie.js that would combine all of these in one so that JS could finally be apart of our continuous integration testing. The only (sic) thing preventing this solution is that it needs to have headless, identical implementations of all the browser's JS engines and DOM parsers in order to be valid.

[1] http://docs.jquery.com/Qunit
[2] http://seleniumhq.org/
[3] https://github.com/jeresig/testswarm/wiki
Hear hear! There's someone else like me out there!
One additional thing to note is you can rent 4 of these for the cost of a single panavision film camera, excluding the now unnecessary cost of film stock. Tell a director he can have up to 4 cameras on a scene and keep them running all day with no additional cost and you have a very happy director.
Semantic Meaning of sdfsdf
Marriage is always a mistake, but it is important that you make it with the right person :-). I've been married for 3.5 years to the best girl in the world.

Best mistake I ever made.

As far as advice goes, make her feel included in your adventures and when she tells you about her day at least try to listen.

The main thing that changes when you get married is that you can no longer crash at other people's houses. Even at 4am she'll expect you to go home.
In the first two cases, humans have invented more effective ways of doing a task than the biological methods.

Kasparov acknowledges that computers are superior to unassisted humans at playing chess, so how is the third case (computer chess) different?

[B]rute-force methods of recreating systems are no longer working.

On the contrary, brute-force algorithms are working better and better as a result of the trend currently known as Moore's law. The faster the hardware, the less intelligent the software running on it has to be to do the same job.
Nonprofit Start-up Bay Citizen Adds $9.5 Million In Funding
This comment seems right on target. This was stolen so somebody can duplicate the technology and learn from it. This won't be fenced.
Nice! this reminds of a script I wrote that turned images into svg: https://gist.github.com/761332
I'd read this objection to the standard results previously - that the non-drinkers measured were former alcoholics. The following study claimed to get a similar result while controlling for this:

Mainstream press: http://singularityhub.com/2010/09/02/heavy-drinkers-outlive-...

Direct link to abstract: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1530-0277.2010....

I posted this to HN a few months ago...
But people would waste money and the entire time it takes to go to a conference, just for the sake of dry humor?
Thanks for adding this option.