skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More of the same is not enough to get you to some other faraway place.

Making a better car will not result in an airplane.

That does not mean that making a car first is not an worthy endeavor for gaining experience to build an airplane - should you need e.g. machining, metalworking and general engineering experience. But it won't give you ANY aerospace background.

Or as Alan Mulally famously put it:
"An automobile has about 10,000 moving parts, right? An airplane has two million, and it has to stay up in the air." (on being asked "How are you going to tackle something as complex and unfamiliar as the auto business when we are in such tough financial shape?")
More than anything, tears frighten guys.
Fixing the doorknobs in software.
What are your thoughts?
which was a quoting mechanism that DirectEdge experimented with in 2009

Could you go into more detail about what you mean by that? Unless you're being pedantic about something specific, I don't get how you could say that. Flash trading (in several variations) is basically the only thing Direct Edge offers, and they currently carry roughly 12% of the market's daily trading volume.
> 28. (Ranger's Law) There ain't no such thing as a free launch.

Corollary to Heinlein's Law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain%27t_no_such_thing_as_...
"So, instead of an image-gallery app, why not make a survey software specifically targeted at, say, event attendees."

Shameless plug: check out our startup, http://yorn.com, which does exactly this.
My use of 'sensible' was there because young people tend to take more risks, think of the short term rather than the long term. etc
If you have a class of twenty children, and all twenty have mothers who are pushing them, not just to do well, but to be number one in the class, then nineteen of them have been set up for failure.
Myspace has been confined to the "special needs" area of the interned for quite a while, however it's a shame that this news article has come out as it's aparently in advance of an official notice that effects the lives of 600 people.

I don't see how the public interest in this trumps the lack of respect to the employees. Shame.
Beware the fatigue that sets in with these "boring" money makers. It can be very difficult to keep your motivation high when working on something like this, especially in the beginning where you're not making money and no one takes you seriously. With a funky web app, at least your friends and family might understand it and think it's cool.

Doing a startup already takes a lot of motivation. It's significantly harder if you're working on something that you're not passionate about.

(Note: I don't disagree at all with the author. I just want to point out that there are downsides to this approach as well.)
ZFS is fantastic; it was my file system when I ran Solarid on my Sun workstation (until I replaced it with Ubuntu).

I did get bitten once, wiping out a whole bunch of data very unexpectedly, which I thought was a great ZFS weakness - http://www.mail-archive.com/zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org/msg0...
I don't get this. So if I think torturing my children is good for them, it is OK? Maybe to punish them I hack off a finger (or to remind them that they have to be loyal to me), and it would be OK?

There used to be this concept called "human rights". I always thought it was quite laughable, as nobody would be able to enforce it anyway, but at least it could serve as a starting point for what is deemed acceptable treatment of human beings (kids are humans, too).
Solid advice.

Young people have to learn this the hard way. Today, it seems everyone wants to write a FaceBook type app and be hugely popular with mainstream folks (a household name). However, there are tons of devs (mostly people you seldom ever hear about and who hardly anyone knows) making a great living writing libraries, device drivers and other non-killer, yet useful software.
This isn't too surprising. The early versions of social networking (MySpace, Friendster, Hi5, etc.) didn't manage to adapt quickly enough to maintain relevance.

Facebook faces the same risk down the line. Sure, they've done much better at adapting and finding ways to hold the interest of users, but there's no guarantee that they will continue to do so.
> Saying "if your goal is to make money" is sort of strange to me anyways. Probably because my goal is not to make money, but to build new and interesting things that have an impact.

That's sort of the point Paras is making though. If your building a new and interesting things to have impact, but your expecting it to make money and calling it a startup, it's not OK.

> Why should the focus just be on making money?

He's not saying it should.

> Dismissing apps he doesn't think can make money as toys

He's not doing this either.
Yes. If they value process over logic that's an excellent basis for screening.
It's great, but certainly is pretty old - look at the source of the linked jQuery: "jQuery 1.2.6 - New Wave Javascript"! I don't think that tag line stuck ;)
I completely agree that it is a useless skill that can and will be replaced by a computer.

Why not teach the children horse riding, or knitting, or pottery?
I like to compare facebook with myspace:

MySpace: Like your parents basement. Bad behavior, language and lack of decorum-- no problem. This is where the "fun" parties were.

Facebook: Like your parents living room. Don't spill anything on the carpet because it will stain and be there forever. Only "nice" friends are allowed. The parents are monitoring everything.

RIP MySpace!
An Ambitious Animated Business Card
Yong Jeng Sheng (Jayson) is a Singapore-based motion graphics designer and animator.
He’s come up with a really fantastic business card design that helps to better convey what he does to those who might not be familiar with what motion graphics really are.
Site is down; cached here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ieO9WQc...
It's interesting to think of Android as "the tide that rises all boats", a platform that accelerates mobile development not just for smartphones, but also for tablets, media players, digital cameras, TVs, cars, appliances and much more.

Are we talking about Android or iOS?
Everything else you said was spot on, but this is wrong:

> And of course it goes into depth about the Flash Crash without once mentioning Waddell & Reed, a discretionary (non-quant) fund whose errant trade started the crash to begin with.

Waddell & Reed had nothing to do with the big flash crash, nor with the 10 slightly smaller crashes that has happened since -- at least, not any other non-HFT trader had that day. If you want something which isn't some ridiculous CYA, read Nanex's analysis, not the SEC.
Yadig
Social Networks, Business Networks
8-Circuit Model of Consciousness
Google Megastore: The Data Engine Behind GAE
That explains what I'm working on right now to a T. It's an industry that is currently being run on fax and lots of manual data entry. A big key for us was having connections with people inside, which made it easier to learn exactly what they were looking for and then ultimately set up sales meetings.
Low inequalities and no inequalities are very different.

Suppose that we start with equal wealth. And then I buy and consume a chocolate bar. Odds are that I'm now happier and poorer than you. Who would seriously argue that this wealth inequality is a bad thing?

I'm right there with people who complain about the amount of inequality that we have today. I don't think that it is healthy or productive. But if you believe in having private property and money, you have accepted that some level of inequality is acceptable.
Sorry, but you don't 'sign up for a future' without actively working towards it. Complaining that others haven't done what you wanted doesn't work.
That looks awesome. Thanks¡
While I see the logic behind this, I really think it is flawed. Just because Groupon is growing faster than Google did doesn't mean it has a chance to match Google's total growth. One important thing you left out is timing. When Google started, it was neigh impossible to get to where they have reached without some massive luck.

What does that have to do with Groupon and their growth? It seems like every new company that hits the scene, is deemed the next big thing and has a meteoric rise. They come faster, and get bigger, but does that mean they are going to eclipse the giants on the scene? Not without some spectacular luck and smart moves.

There are few companies that have planted themselves where Google is, and I don't know if Groupon has the potential or leadership to make it happen. I wouldn't be disappointed to see it happen, but it just seems like high expectations on an over valued company.
Show HN: The Vibes of Ireland: The Mood of Ireland derived from Twitter
Your site design completely rocks. It's fantastic.
OK, so Pyramid is the successor to Pylons. The article could have made that more obvious.
You mean, the WSJ chose to highlight that fraction of the book that reinforced a popular stereotype of Asians. Loverly.
Laszlo Polgar managed to raise three kids to be chess geniuses: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laszlo_Polgar

In "Bounce" Sofia is quoted as saying "We spent long hours on the chessboard, but it didn't seem like a chore because we loved it".

Seems there is an alternative to the chinese method.

Note that Laszlo's children didn't have a chess prodigy gene. He set out to prove that geniuses can be made, found a wife willing to do the experiment, and decided on trying chess beforehand (without sampling the children's talents).

I also like about the story that all three children lead happy lives with their chess talent.
It's nice to see that you can do stuff like this without plugins now thanks to Canvas and WebGL, even if the performance and stability aren't quite there yet.

One particularly strange bug: Setting smoothness 'too high' (how high you can set it seems to depend on the number of cubes) causes random parts of the model to vanish.

The responsiveness also leaves something to be desired, especially since it causes the browser/tab to freeze up - I thought it was supposed to be possible to use web workers to solve that problem, but I've yet to see a HTML5 app that actually uses them :(
> Different strokes, I guess. :)

Yep. :)

I used to access GMail through mutt, so I'm not totally opposed to doing something like this, but the OP was talking about not wanting to use GMail for privacy reasons, so using something like gnus to access your gmail account wasn't really on the table. And 'server side stuff' is all under 'do nothing' in my original post.
The Trillion Dollar Website (a story of quantitative easing)
Got a question about China? Don't ask Quora...
I Wish I'd Known That. [Digital Analytics Edition.]
How unusual. A JS framework that is what it says on the box.

As opposed to Prototype (not prototype based) or Closure (not particularly functional).
5 days before the end of win real money playing online slots at karamba.com
Perhaps one that you can take notes/leave reviews on without being connected to the internet. These will then sync when next connected to wifi (like evernote does)

Data romaing charges abroad are massive, and your target audience are travellers.
Apply External CSS to Customize the Query Builder Component 
Aspose.Report is a .NET query building and charting control allowing developers to quickly add ad hoc capabilities to their .NET applications as well as creating 21 popular chart types having some stylish effects like 3D rendering, transparency, gradients and anti-aliasing. Simply drag and drop the Aspose.Report component on Web or Win form, assign a DataTable object as data source & abstract a variety of outputs including SQL, Select, Where and Order By statements and many more.
wccrawford, bb
hi Simon)
I think we're saying somewhat similar things, in a different words.

Thanks for the great discussion!
What kind of visitor numbers/member numbers are you getting? Do you know where people are finding the site?
Next Jump Acquires FlightCaster, The Flight Delay Prediction Engine
Somebody tries making an alternate syntax every few years. Usually, it's an experienced Lisper who wants to increase the popularity of Lisp. These never catch on, and never will.

I think there are two problems. First, people who are prone to "get" Lisp are open-minded enough not to be put off by the syntax. People who can't get past the syntax won't grasp the other advantages.

Second, homoiconicity is Lisp's last remaining real advantage[0] over other dynamic languages. Most Lisps are faster than Python or Ruby, but not Lua, especially LuaJIT. An alternate syntax makes that advantage harder to access.

[0] I'm pretty sure CLOS and the condition system could be replicated in Lua, though I'm not sure anybody has.
Impressive! It seems to be 90% of an online 3D CAD app that I've envisioned and blogged about: http://hacking-shindyapin.tumblr.com/tagged/3dCAD. Any plans on making it open-source?
Thanks for the link! Just what I was looking for.
How does JS: TGP compare to JS: The Definitive Guide (Flanagan)? I have Flanagan but am curious as to whether TGP is worth buying also.

I also recently found the Crockford videos here: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/
I watched the first one yesterday. It was a nice intro to what I might call the philosophy of/behind JavaScript, and I'm hoping the others give me a few "aha!" moments about how to design my code.
I get your point. Unfortunately, I didn't understand the danger or being just a consumer, not a producer.

This is actually the best comment of the whole thread.

It's just as dangerous to sit on hacker news or read about other people all day as it is to sit infront of the TV or play xbox all day.
The Cover-Up Culture
FlightCaster (YC S09) Acquired
When you are acting like that, you are not sacrificing other people's rights, but your own. That is, you are opening yourself up for rightful retaliation from the victims, or whoever might want to champion their cause (friends, families etc). You may be able to physically defend yourself, but you won't have moral grounds to plead your case. In other words, if you act like an animal, you can be treated as such.
Does anyone know if iAd still has a $10,000 minimum buy-in for app advertisers or if they've lowered it?

If it's still at $10k, that would probably explain the drop in fill rate.
Amen, If I could I would upvote all day..

Hearing my uncle say 'This is less than a coffee, why not?' or 'For this price (10$), I get more fun and entertainment than going to the cinema' has no price.

Thanks Apple
It would appear to me that you're new to the world of advertising income.

Budgets typically peak over the Christmas holidays (both because of the holidays and end-of-year budget burning) and drop significantly in January.

Things will pick up around Valentines and will be more or less back to normal in the beginning of March.

Any form of advertising that I'm aware of is subject to this.

If you want to do an apples-to-apples comparison you should compare the situation end-of-year 2009-2010 to end of year 2010-2011, and I suspect you'll see a similar effect at work. It may be a bit more or a bit less but the drop is always there and depending on the medium and the target market it may be extreme.
Pretty much what you'd expect, since brand advertising is a lot more seasonal than performance-based advertising, and Q1 is always slow.
mrjob - Run MapReduce jobs on Hadoop or Amazon Web Services
I view shipping as putting it out the door. You can ship a blog post that connects with others, and not have an economic transaction. Again, shipping is hitting the post button.

You can ship on an e-mail you spent 12 hours researching to help x with their marketing efforts. Sending the e-mail was shipping.
Any thoughts on making these meetups a bit later? 6pm is a bit tight for me as I normally work until 6 and then have to commute into Arlington/DC, which isn't the easiest thing.
I wonder, does anyone believe that Myspace can recover with the right decisions, or are they destined for a slow death whatever they do?
I think discussion about IQ, genetics and co are mostly meaningless for various reasons: the issue is extremely loaded politically, which means it is difficult to discuss about it with people who has a different opinion, and the science around it is inconclusive at best (the nature or even the reality of flynn effect is still debated, for example).

This is not to say it is not interesting, but I would put it in the same camp as discussion around religion: it is possible to discuss about it, but almost impossible to do it in a reasonable manner with random people in the internet. That's why I refuse to discuss it as a matter of principle in most cases with people I don't know personally.
I sold it for roughly the amount of money I had put in it, so I had worked all those hours for free.

Also, and more important than the money, the product never became what it could/should have been. The idea had (has) potential, but we didn't get there. The users that signed up didn't get real value from the product in the end. It became more of an SEO play. So that's where it really failed, in my mind.
Http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/011011-rim-to-block-access-to.html
RE: BASIC (Or, The First Programming Book I Ever Read)
There are many stories of Asian kids snapping under their first generation parent's pressure (for a famous infamous case, see Asia Carrera, who had a German father and a Chinese mom, and started out as a very bright kid in Lehigh).

I had a close friend at college who lived through this experience, he said in junior high school year he totally flipped out, got all Cs, generally nosedived. Luckily he was able to make it back, but I wonder how many of these hyper-pressured kids never do.
Why We Need to Teach MBA's about Modern Entrepreneurship
"...And then how we can work together to create an open platform."
Your complaint seems off base.

This is the first of a 3 part series. The third one includes this paragraph:

At buddycloud we're working to create an ecosystem of servers and clients that will enable open federated social networking. We're trying to avoid as many of the problems mentioned here by quietly doing things the right way. We are building some nice mobile clients. If you would like to help us please join buddycloud's dev team.

So it seems that they are indeed actively working towards the future that they are talking about.
I thought interesting, then read the first sentence:

"The 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness is a theory in psychology, first proposed by Timothy Leary. It consists of several quantum psychological systems that unify the various interpretations of the main altered states of consciousness into one coherent meta-theory."

Hmm, sounded kinda mumbo-jumbo-ish, but I decided to read on. But when I hit "Timothy Leary greatly expanded upon the basic premise of eight brains, he had been inspired from sources such as the Hindu chakra system. However, the most direct transmission occurred when Leary received a document from a student of yoga." I hit the back button.
Flightcaster Gets Acquired. I Go on to Start Woven.
That depends on how much money you have. If you are well taken care of then yeah money is a poor motivator. If you are in real need then money becomes quite the motivator(If only as a proxy for those other needs.) Most of the crime around the world is solely driven by the need to acquire wealth by means easier, quicker than legally possible. Crime seems to be doing quite well for itself even with the serious consequences for breaking the law.
The poor don't eat too much compared to the middle class and the wealthy. The poor eat the wrong kinds of foods, because the wrong kinds of food are inexpensive.
I talked about it here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2062806

Im still looking for advice from HN really.
This is only a startup in the loosest sense, but after I left Naughty America the first thing I did while looking around for client work was build an iPhone app for managing Shopify stores.

It was the first one to hit the App Store, and I had some nice conversations with Tobias Lutke of Shopify. He hooked me up with a New York Times interview, promoted the app on the Shopify blog, and there was even talk of buying the app from me. It was very, very basic, so I held out with the intention of fleshing out the feature set before considering selling it.

Six months went by, and I always seemed to find things to work on besides the app. Tobias even gave me a heads up about a competitor hitting the App Store. A few months after that, I found out that Shopify bought the competitor app for a pretty decent sum of money and made it official and free.

Had I worked on updates for my Shopify app instead of taking on the (fairly low-paying) clients I did, I probably would have made much more in sales than I did with client work, not to mention whatever price I could possibly have gotten from selling the app.

From the whole experience, I learned to manage my time, money, priorities, and client base in a way that allows me to give a lot more time to my own projects.
Hosting company violating GPL?
The author founded http://buddycloud.com (an open, federated social network) - there was a lot of buzz around its Diaspora integration not so long ago; he already is working towards a (in his view, at least) better future.
No disrespect at all to the author, but when I see advice on how to do something I always ask. "What have you done that proves that your advice works?"

If this came from Paul Graham, I would probably sit up and take notice but here, meh.

Still the blog is well written and the advice is worth a try if you are wired that way.
Hey Peter, don't be so harsh on yourself. A failure is when you end up working for the bank to pay back the loan or when you end up losing it all, not selling it for what you put in.

The time you spent you spent both building something and learning a lot, that's worth more than several years of education, you are now better prepared, smarter and wiser and I'm sure that your next venture stands a much larger chance of significant success because of all this.

Trust me, nobody that ever 'scored' scored on their first project unless they got wildly lucky or aimed really low.
I use Rackspace Mail for my business email. If something goes wrong, I know I can easily get someone on the phone.
Collective Intelligence machine learning source code (Python)
Why are people still talking about this?

It's like complaining that a Lamborghini sucks because the cupholders are hard to reach. I'm sure it would bother some people, but it's not really worth discussing, is it?
That sounds like an excellent deal for both the team and users, awesome, don't see that often :-) Congratulations.
I'd be totally justified in trying to save my daughter and nobody would be justified in stopping me. This is not a case of ends justifying the means because my opponents are all unjust. I am not sacrificing innocents to get her back. However, if innocents happened to be in the way, I'd have to make a choice in either abandoning my rights or not; the innocents would be entitled to retaliate.

In the anti-terrorism case, if the presumed terrorists were in fact innocents, then they (or their champions) would have a right to retaliate against the aggressors or against their commanders.

In our minds and to ourselves, we are always justified, but we can't justify ourselves from a moral standpoint, nor plead our case if the innocents have decided to retaliate.
Don't worry. This is just the lube.
> These never catch on, and never will.

Though I'm no great fan of Mr. Wolfram, I would have to say Mathematica has caught on quite well. Mathematica isn't a Lisp (its semantics are based on term rewriting) but it freely intermixes S-expressions and M-expressions. For example, the M-expression a + b parses into the S-expression Plus[a, b].
What he's saying is that you can make custom hardware that's fast enough so you don't need any buffering.
Are We Making the Web A Bit Bland?