skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
ah the idealism of youth...

Possibly. The odds are pretty bad for retirement at 40 though. Seems to be those who are successful / lucky enough to exit (making an assumption about your retirement plan), are also the kind of people that tend to just start another company or be an involved smart-money investor.

I used to think I would retire. I have enough mostly-passive income to live on, but here I am doing another startup.

YMMV
I found it very amusing that after the long post demonstrating that the "social proof" line was cutting his sign-ups in half, there was a box asking me to sign up which included the social proof.
For all the new designers out there, please don't add a CSS text shadow to the main body of your text content. By highlighting everything, you make everything less readable.
I have lots of code all over the internet "rotting". Some of it was written because I actually needed it. Some because I was learning. Some to prove a point. Some to just play. There's lots of reason to write code, and lots of reasons to let it go. Now here's the thing, putting code on the internet and typing "here it is, BSD or MIT or whatever licensed" is a trivial marginal effort. Since that effort is effectively $0 for me, I do it, thinking like this:

Maybe someone will get some value of it. I don't want it, I don't care to put effort in, but hey, if someone else does: cool!

Basically, putting stuff out there is not that different from the freecycle mentality.

The place you seem to come from is that "Oh they want to make an open source project, that means they must want to be $0 vendor for my company!". Honestly, I hate that mentality. Instead of coming in and demanding I give you more effort for free, take or leave the free work I choose to do and let it be. That's not to say I am not open to suggestions or maybe even explaining or fixing things, but you have no right to expect it of me.
Desktime focuses on offices spaces, showcase & what offices are available
I think that article is wayy off and the title of this thread is teetering in the same direction. Nothing about that article explicitly says anything about women being "unwilling" to contribute to Wikipedia.

I used to spend a lot of time editing and contributing to certain articles, but notice what I said, "spend a lot of time." Sure, you can quickly fix spelling and grammatical errors, but to really do anything useful on the site takes more time. I'd easily spend a few hours a week (depending on what else I had to do) during college editing articles.

But, for every woman that has time to do that, there are plenty that don't (think of women who still operate according to traditional gender expectations--taking care of family, etc.). This is not to say that men don't have other demands on their time, however. The author misses the mark entirely when it comes to that aspect, though. You'd only know that if at some point you've spent any time contributing at all. I'd have to wonder if the author ever has...

Plus, I don't think we should be so quick to throw gender on top of everything as a reason why something has or hasn't happened. I could be wrong, but I really don't believe that the average Wikipedia visitor even really pays attention to who wrote any given article, much less going so far as to find out whether they were a male, female, or any variant.
raises hand

E-mail me if you'd like an alpha invite.
I will be shocked if Google buys out this cesspool. Unless they need a project to assign to engineers who've misbehaved.
I'm 25 and I just upvoted everyone who had negative scores because they listed their age. :-)
good article... I have just launched a site (http://www.promepi.com) which uses R to recommend news articles to users. My co-founder used a lot when getting his masters degree, but I was new to it. It has been great to quickly develop our algorithm.

Anyone have experience with Revolution Analytics? My cofounder looked at these guys as we try to scale the site... he definitely agrees with one of the comments that "big" datasets are good in R and hopefully our site gets to a big dataset, so we are looking at scaling options.
It hasn't been done well. The one company that has been dong this is myregistry.com. If you've ever used that service you know it's just begging for a better-designed competitor.

I was really going to implement this when I got married a few months ago but couldn't find an elegant way to confirm when a guest had purchased a gift. Sending an e-mail is OK but it's not 100% accurate. This can lead to duplicate gifts which are a big pain.
Grading systems are obviously broken.  Why isn't anyone fixing them?
I am working on a series of educational apps for iOS and other mobile platforms. Part of this is coming-up with a grading system that makes sense. The objective isn't to simply provide a grade that corresponds to how a student tested. That would simply reflect how someone did on that particular test. The goal is to grade knowledge, not test results.

Having lived and studied in three different cultures in different parts of the world I can say that, from my experience, grading in the US and abroad is pretty much the same. Other parts of the world might use a 0 to 10 scale while US schools like the A through F symbols. In the end the result is the same: You are grading test-taking performance, not knowledge.

Any entrepreneur knows full-well that test performance does not matter. How many times have you failed before succeeding? Failure is a part of learning. Some might argue that failure is the start of learning.

Yet another example is that of a skilled athlete, say, a gymnast. It might take weeks or months of failure to master one particular move that lasts barely past one second. After hundreds of failures the gymnast gets it right and it is part of their skill set. Countless other examples abound.

The problem with test-style grading is that it does not encode acquired knowledge. It encodes isolated and aggregate test scores. And, to add further insult to injury, you get to average test scores at the end of the year, semester or quarter to get your grade. The resulting number is meaningless.

Imagine that we applied this to the aforementioned gymnast. They would get grades below 5 or 6 most of the time due to constant failures while learning. Then, once they figure it out they start getting 10's. Well, if you average hundreds of scores at 5 or below with a few dozen 10's you'll get an average score that does not represent what this person can now actually do. And therein lies the problem.

So, I've been looking at grading systems that allow one to place greater weight on success when compared to failure in order to encode acquired knowledge rather than average test scores.

I'd be interested to learn from others who may have traveled this road and what they may have learned in the process.

An even greater topic is how to go about changing the way schools grade for the benefit of all involved.

Thank you,

-Martin

PM: x@y.z
where x = martin
y = algoshift
z = com
But... answering the poll would not give you karma, right? That would happen only if one upvotes the poll itself. I really hope it works this way. I didn't upvote that "how old are you" pool, I believe I just voted.

Don't forget you can be downvoted too. Right now your karma is 944 and this (not really usefull) pool has no upvotes. Let's see where it goes...
Hey, I’m the guy who made the jsPerf website.

The product token for Windows Server 2008R2 and Windows 7 is the same (6.1) so there’s technically no way to tell the difference. jsPerf is supposed to show you it could be both, not one of them. Is this bugged?
how to know your side project is ready to be a startup:

* you have employees
* you have investors

edit: note that this is a tongue-in-cheek response to the article that implies that you might somehow be considering something a "side project" when having employees and investors to answer to.
My last straw was the fight with Engadget. Mashable will do.
Thank you, that's extremely helpful. Congrats again on the site, it looks awesome.
Just make sure something like this does not happen:

"9 – BabyCalc.com – If you were about to have a baby you could go on this site and punch in some numbers then it would email you as your baby was growing and let you know what was going on… “like 10 days until you should be able to tell the sex of your baby!” or “Babys heart beat starts today” ect.. stuff like that.. I paid to have the backend developed and the site was about 95% completed (about a 1500$ investment).
Then a very close friend of the family had a miscarriage about 15 weeks into her pregnancy and told us about how she had signed up for all these baby websites and now they keep emailing her stuff and she breaks down and cries every time…. I just wanted no part of that…"

http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/09/04/my-top-10-worst-ideas-to...
Market the crap out of this. This is a great idea, and you can easily extend it to weddings, etc.

You need to get those stores on board in some way as well... big risk if they decide that you aren't "needed".

Well done!
Hacker News Tips
> The name does, and it's great.

People will go to babylist.com. They will probably copy the concept if it takes off.

Bad idea.
Here are some additional details regarding this breaking story from VentureBeat: http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/03/hipmunk-funding-2/ 'Confirmed: Hipmunk raises $4.2M to 'de-agonize' flight search'
It looks to me as though they should try the original headline without the social proof. Since the Control beat Variation 1, but Variation 2 beat both, that would seem to be a logical next step.
16-year old builds Snow Day Calculator to predict snow days
You might want to think about a "size" field for clothing, maybe even a drop-down, or allow people to ask for 1 of each size or something. This is a general complaint I have about wishlists. In my fantasy world of wishlists there would be a number field for each size so you could ask for 1 nb and 1 6mo or something.
Which printer are you using?
Doubtful. The internet is chock full of these cuckoo quote sites. If Google doesn't yield a primary source, it's almost certainly fake. This is one area where absence of evidence really is evidence of absence.

Edit: not a criticism of the quote itself. These things wouldn't get misattributed if they weren't worth repeating. But they wouldn't get repeated if they weren't misattributed, either; it's a kind of cultural appeal to authority.
You just wonder whether they had hired somebody as an admin and they deleted everything... Once bitten, twice shy?
I agree. That's on my agenda :-D
Ask HN:  How to Make Twitter & HN Less like Crack Cocaine?
I find it difficult to find time to code because I frequently check out Twitter or HN many times throughout the day.

What apps or tricks do you guys use to make HN & Twitter seem less like crack cocaine?
Because they did not prove Bing specifically targets results from Google.
Link to the actual Snow Day Calculator:
http://david.sukhin.com/Weather/Snowday/Auto-Snowday.htm
Great article. We're currently looking for developers in the Ottawa/Montreal area in python if anyone wants to drop me a line!
That's because I haven't split-tested that form yet. I'm currently preparing to run that one right now.
Demo your startup to win a $100k convertible note.  Bring It. Kill It. Get Paid.
The inherent flaw is that most people who actually pay for porn are not geeks, they are generally people who dont know the internet well enough to find porn for free.

my .2 at least
Sorry to hear you're unhappy with the service! Have you been in touch with support about your downtime issues? Perhaps it's something that can be remedied. We'd love to hear some feedback and be in touch about any issues you're having. Please feel free to open a support request, give us a call, or message us on Twitter (@mediatemple). We are available 24/7.
Awesome article. This article is a must read for any person staring at the entrepreneurship cliff and contemplating jumping into it.
Is getting rich a bad incentive?

Is advancing the technology of a civilization a worthy goal?

If yes, then getting rich only accidentally contributes to advancing knowledge and technology.

It could accidentally (because the goal is to get rich, not anything else) make a huge contribution. It could also contribute almost nothing. Plenty of people have gotten rich by finding a slightly cheaper way to either make or distribute (or both) a commodity. We can look at webapps as a kind of commodity.

The general public almost never wants the early or even medium term benefits or a world changing technology. So if you only ever advance by what the public wants today, you would not get very far.

This is why R&D has always been a long bet.

Over time fewer large corporations have decided to make this kind of long bet (you can even think of it a long trading position) and more R&D has moved to public institutions like universities and government labs.

Government is just plain terrible at most of the things it does, but when it pours a ton of $ on R&D there are results.

It may not be the most efficient use use of $. I am certain startups quickly iterating over business plans can do A LOT more with a lot less. But I am also equally certain there are a lot of high tech things which require far more $ over farm more time then startups usually have.

But then again how much $ constitutes a startup is changing.

The recent Y combinator deal where you simply throw $150K at everybody is fascinating. This could be a way for Y combinator to fund biotech startups.
I prefer interviewing with koans. Setup a workstation with the tests and get the interviewee to make them pass.

Have the interviewee check them into git / SCM on their own branch. It tests so much day to day knowledge and the ability to actually code / read code / and find / fix bugs.

As well as all the various issues with your particular stack. Plus you can hide bugs all over the place, maybe the bug is in the database, etc. Maybe it's a real world task like 'speed up this page by 200%' type thing. There is a lot of flexibility and provides opportunity to for insight into how the developer actually solves real world problems. Maybe the increase the logic speed by 200%, maybe they just throw varnish on top of it.
Some Israeli VCs I know, actually have in-house recruitment agency.
If you sit down and thing about it from the perspective of a service
provider building and maintaining a network with limited wireless
spectrum, you'd see how a limiting the "Top X%" of users would work very
poorly. Overall usage continually increases, and typically increases
faster than network capacity can be added.

In the specific case of Verizon Wireless "broadband" data plans (e.g.
the plans based on EVDO rather than 1xRTT), back in 2004-6 Verizon
(mistakenly) sold the plans as "unlimited" only to start terminating
customers who actually used it as unlimited and creating new cap-limited
plus paid-overage plans. This resulted in a lawsuit where the old
"unlimited" customers were allowed to keep their "unlimited" contracts
(without being terminated or paying overages), but if excessive use was
detected, the connection would be throttled back until the end of the
current monthly billing cycle.

This arrangement with old customers actually worked out surprisingly
well for both Verizon and its customers. The customers don't need to
worry about surprise bills for "overages" and Verizon can still manage
their network resources and investments reasonably.

The new Verizon iPhone4 "unlimited" plans are essentially the same deal
offered to the old "granfathered-in" customers. If you exceed the 5GB
cap, the bandwidth is throttled down to 200Kbit/s for the remainder of
the monthly billing cycle (and potentially the next billing cycle).
Assuming full-time/full-capacity usage, the 200Kbit/s throttle means
you're reduced to roughly 1GByte/mo.

The problem is, many people mistakenly believe a cellular-based wireless
data network is only used with phones. This isn't true. It's
understandably tough to imagine someone using a phone to transfer many
GB of data each month, but since the wireless network is used for a lot
more than phones, particularly backhauls and personal computers,
bandwidth varies a great deal between customers depending on their
needs/situation. The result is, the "Top X%" metric is entirely
misleading due to the variance in use-cases.

Pulling "X%" numbers out of thin air is misleading at best. Worse yet,
LET has a theoretical maximum speed 1Gbit/s, so 5.4 TERABYTES is
possible per month. Of course, neither Verizon nor any other commercial
LTE network is currently running near theoretical max, but that's beside
the point.
8-Bit vs. Reality - For the nerd in you
Clearly there has to be some point at which the CEO calls it quits. Having a death-warrant placed on your funding seems like it might be one of those times - again, I'd love to hear from someone who has been there.
Interesting and it will very helpful, now I am ready to contact person who will help me, I already get him email.
Very nice tool.
It's a good meme/idea generator as well.

Suggestion: make a "random" mode (ie, random participle and location for each of the 5 suggestions) and default it.

My take on the .com vs. not: do both (ie, shoely.com and shoe.ly)... not like it's a significant cost. The .com is essential because some browsers still auto-default that extension.
Actually not quite. An ISP can ignore DMCA notices. This waives the DMCA safe harbors protection, and allows the alleged copyright owner to sue the ISP. Then the destiny of the content in question is then decided by the court, but the ISP becomes potentially liable for damages. An ISP cannot be liable for damages, if it complies with a DMCA notice, even if the content is actually infringing.
Matt Cutts (Google) vs Harry Shum (Bing) [video]
Not really.

If you have a bunch of counters, you don't want a hot counter to require a transaction every time you want to increment a page view. I'm sure there's a solution in high end DBs, but in mysql/postgres UPDATE somecounter SET value = value + 1 typically ends up being very painful for any significant write load. With Redis and Mongo, there are "atomic" increment operations that do a +X on a given field of a list or hash that is very fast.
Here's £150, because you only told me how to do it on one server :P

Curiosity: does that work for subdomains with different favicons?
I like this article, but the title is deceiving.
I read it expecting to find project milestones that hint to it's readiness to take off. I think a more appropriate title would be "How To Know You Are Ready To Make Your Side Project A Startup"
All in all thanks for your advice.
I read some of this stuff a while ago after an HN suggestion. I half-think it gave me the wrong idea in some ways. As the girl started pulling away from me, I tried to amp up my game and it just made things worse. Lol. I think the smarter play would have been to size things up, see that she was a ballbuster, and move on if there was no response.
Looks great. One point of feedback: when I first looked at the logo, I didn't know what it was. I had to sit and think about if for a bit. Granted I'm not your target market (male, mid 20s, married but no kids).
The Most Effective Weight Lifting Routines & Powerful
Agreed, and I think they will destroy Kayak.
Most spectacular photography... ever?
I understand the sentiment. Speaking as a relatively new employee however (< 6mo) I can say Wealthfront practices what they preach. Communication here has been really incredible, discussions are frank and I haven't seen a single passive-aggressive act since joining. I do think the culture is important, it changes the way we work as a team for the better. If that's a day-to-day issue I don't know what is.

I understand this might just come off as another guy at Wealthfront drinking the kool-aid but I mean it sincerely. The people here are as adept at teamwork and communication as they are software. That's why I upvoted the post, not to tow the company line but because I think Pascal's article is relevant and legitimately devoid of bullshit. Of course, YMMV!
There wasnt an unsubscribe?

I understand how that can make one feel - but I dont think that focusing on miscarriage or SIDS is the right perspective.
Bingo.

And there's no mention of the half dozen favicons the designer had to come up with in order to get one through all the layers of approval involved.
Wired or Wireless: Which Is More Secure?
I've written about it briefly before on HN, and it's very beneficial but not proprietary tech. Basically we create a "shim" database containing our app's sprocs, views and functions, and additionally views to the transactional database tables in another database.

That means that release N can be pointed at the "real" database, while release N+1 can be pointed at the shim DB and they're both using the same transactional data. You can run both in parallel until you commit to N+1, whereupon you shutdown all N app servers, update the sprocs, views and functions in the main DB, and (optionally) point your web servers back at the main DB. There are a few other details to take care of, but that's the gist of it, and the details are minor, or at least we found them to be.

Disclaimer: the above is my experience on MS-SQL at a pretty good sized eCommerce site. Other RDBMSs may not work quite as well, or your app may use heavily features that don't work in "shim mode".
You are of course, correct (as ry0ohki states), but this one FOIA request could lead the way to more competitive favicon quotes from contractors in the future, leaving a net saving for HMG.

Sounds facetious, but it's this transparency that enables public scrutiny (and outrage). The expenses debacle being one such example.
Royalty Financing: The New, New Thing in Venture Capital
You can also do this with Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...
I'll be 17 in a couple of weeks.
>>most of the failed sites in bubble 1.0 didn't actually have good products - they didn't actually sell a basic X to Y customer.<<

Some counterpoints to ponder:

1. Y (i.e. Internet user base) then was much smaller, as compared to what it is today

2. wombs of the WWW were barely pregnant with eCommerce (if it was known by that name) then

>>I think the same thing is happening now.<<

IMHO, there are major differences involved: in addition to 1. and 2. above,

3. means to monetise eyeballs (traffic) were scarce then (random, untargeted, ROS banner ads - $15/20/25 CPM, anybody?). Heck, (m)AdSense wasn't even around!

I could go on, but let me conclude by saying that (even) non-monetised or barely monetised eyeballs/userbase/traffic has much more commercial/valuation potential today as compared to bubble 1.0 days.

What do you think?
The New Bulletproof Font-Face Syntax
It looks like downward momentum on that graph has already been mostly stopped by the x axis.