skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why not? The comparison is considered fair whenever it favors Northern Europe, so why is it unfair when NE doesn't do as well?

US is a single country with a common language and culture. It's much easier to share academical results and knowledge in that environment. I hate to use a buzzword, but "synergy" is probably a good description of that effect.

> So, why is their GDP so much lower? We keep hearing how much better they are, so why doesn't it show up in output?

In my opinion it's not a good comparison. If we look at the GDP per capita, you will find lots of states with lower rates than many European countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP_per_...

When you hear "how much better the countries are", it is based on other factors than GDP. If there was something special about the US political system that generates wealth, you would expect the results to be more evenly distributed. Northern Europe consists of countries that are far more diverse than US states with larger differences in political systems, language, culture and history.

It seems that some US states are better at generating wealth than others. But it is my guess that they still have huge advantages of a single market with a common language and relatively similar culture. You also see more mobility in the workforce than in European countries.
I read reddit regularly but news.yc now fills the role that programming.reddit used to fill a few years ago. Reddit is almost purely for entertainment now.
I didn't say anything like that. In fact, I'm arguing the same point: we can't say his folksy style had any effect on the bottom line, good or bad. I'm just saying that it's clearly not required for good management.
This story reminds me of an experience I had on a Virgin Atlantic flight between London and LA in 1999. I was flying economy class and was one of the few passengers on the flight who was awake at 4am.

Richard Branson, the owner of Virgin, walked up from the front of the plane and surprised me by asking if he could sit in the empty seat next to me and chat for a few minutes about my experience with Virgin Atlantic and how it could be improved.

I got the impression that he was genuinely interested in listening to my feedback and that he cared passionately about his airline. It made a huge impression on me and set the standard by which I have judged senior executives ever since.
...or "his crew."
Ok, I kinda piled on Fred Yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2262682

He is softening his position it seems, but he is still seeing marketing as something other than it is.

Marketing is the act of identifying a market's demand, and optimizing your offering to capitalize on that demand. It is what drives revenues in business more than anything else.

The problem is that advertising agencies and other firms that offer other promotional or consulting services have co-opted the term 'marketing' for themselves.

Promotion is a tactic that can strengthen your marketing efforts. Fred's point seems to be that paying for promotion is unwise for a startup. I generally agree.

He might also be saying that paying a costly consultancy firm to advise on your offering's market fit as a startup is unwise. I would agree with this also.

It looks like Fred has seen the term 'Marketing' on the wrong side of the balance sheet one too many times.

He is downplaying the importance of marketing for startups. I think that this is very damaging to the young entrepreneurs that are listening without understanding the context.
Yep. For this exact reason. I trust facebook about as much as I trust any other massive, sinister advertising company.

I am already subject to lockin purely because of the social networking aspect - all my friends use it. Why would I want to lock myself in further voluntarily?

And before anyone points out that google is also a massive sinister advertising company, they have shown their commitment to data portability in a way that I presently find satisfactory. FB go to lengths to prevent data portability.
They were there. Trust me, I wouldn't have been able to figure out the process on my own.
Skyscanner.com has been doing this for a few years for european flights. It looks like they've expanded into the US and have also de-centralized this feature of their website:
http://www.skyscanner.com/news/articles/2010/06/006690-searc...

When I lived in Germany, I used to plug in a month, see the cheapest flights, and just go somewhere for the weekend.
I waste enough time on HN already, thanks.
By accident when Google reader leads me there by way of typically a 'Perl' connection...
I see the logic of wiring different sides of rooms on different fuses but I think this would probably be against wiring regulations in the UK - and possibly against common sense too.
I have. It's creepy, and about as useful as any line that begins with "SUP DAWG, I HEARD YOU LIKE..."
I remember someone wanting to very educatively document the whole process of creating an emulator, and as an example chose a NES as guest hardware and a browser + Javascript VM as a host. Can't find it back though.

Here's a HTML5 canvas + JS one anyway: http://benfirshman.com/projects/jsnes/
Decreased over time. I only added a few subreddits which don't move too quickly. Removed most the major ones such as r/pics & r/technology(the comments there are 100x worse than most techblogs)
If you re-read my comment you will notice that I haven't said that wars are only way to induce progress.

However I did say that I would like to see an example of a phenomena that produced at least 50% of technological advances that warfare has.

Low cost genome sequencing is all nice and dandy - but thus far worthless. I'm not saying it ain't got potential, but thus far it hasn't really impacted us in any meaningful way. And I'd be willing to bet that any future impacts on this field are going to be financed through military complex.

Even the renewable energy sources will probably come from military and not from enlightened corporations.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to pass judgment here. It's just an observation.
Don't forget the "Abort" button.
An Outstanding Artist’s “One Wish to Change the World”
Back in October, talented French street artist “JR” was awarded the 2011 TED Prize. For those unfamiliar with it, the TED Prize offers one winner $100,000 for a charity of their choice and, more importantly, “One Wish to Change the World.” The “One Wish” is designed to leverage the TED community’s resources and talent to create projects with far-reaching impact.
I don't think it's healthy for the mind to read that much hate.
Not another blog with text-shadow. :-( I had to highlight all the text to be able to read it.
>I am so very confused as to how this is scaling. Isn't the rule of thumb for scalability and performance to move client state and UI processing onto the client?

Then, for say, casual gamers, you have excess client capacity (capital) sitting idle more than 95% of the time.
Free Kindle This November
Double plus agree...

I can't imagine what service that require FB Connect are thinking...
In Japan I believe it is called "Corporate Rehabilitation", but it is very similar to U.S.'s chapter 11 status.
The geomodel stuff is what I'm referring to here; it's efficient enough that you can actually execute the queries, but it's not necessarily fast (or cheap) to do so.
Sell them both ways, apart and in a bundle. Keep the price of the bundle lower than the sum of all parts and somehow link to the parts from the bundle. This will show the user that hes getting a good deal.
> basically no reason

Basically no reason? Am I the only one who thinks that there is an elephant in the room here?

Let's face it, the breakup notifier was creepy and had privacy implications. Facebook gets slammed a lot for privacy (or the lack of it, or the difficult of the controls, etc). How would an average girl feel about using Facebook while in a stable relationship if she knew that people were using breakup notifier on her? How would this go down in the press? Could this dissuade people from publishing their relationship status on Facebook, thus removing valuable demographic information for advertisers? Is this even ethical? If you were running Facebook and were worried about this, what would you do?

Not everything is black and white. Lawyering in the TOS is fine, but if you don't find anything in there, that doesn't mean that it's automatically OK. Facebook might not have specifically provided a reason, but it doesn't take a genius to figure it out. It doesn't matter if the raw information was available already; it's what people can do with it that makes the difference.

On the other hand, a crush notifier is "opt-in"; nothing happens without reciprocation. I can see why they may be less bothered about that.
Leaving aside the efficacy of AngelList as a service, it appears he simply doesn't want to be an angel, he wants to be a VC. Hands-on, with a large(r) degree of control and direction.
Are they using the same methods for GDP in both time periods? I doubt it.
The project he's working on, http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~harmony/, is one I've been half-paying-attention to for a while.

In particular something like this will (I think) be a perfect substrate for refactoring parsers, semantic diff tools, and other neat stuff...
The modders bending tech to their will
FB connect is a single point of failure for if you use for multiple things.

And the simple answer is don't use it for anything...

I think only junkies for the latest and greatest actually do...
I can't give any current numbers, but last year we did a blog post about Gigya who had an app that peaked at 1600QPS: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/02/scalability-mean...
Those questions have been answered many times over the years. Do a bit of searching and I bet you find some answers that are better than my take. But here's my take anyway. :D

>If god is almighty and sees the future, how come he didn't think of that on damn tree in the middle of paradise?

He made that tree. So, I'd say He thought of it. He made it for the precise purpose of giving mankind the ability to choose. If we didn't have the ability ability to choose God, then our serving Him would be pointless, since we'd essentially be mindless drones. God wanted people to have the ability to love Him of their own free will.

>If god is perfect, how come he failed at making man perfect too?

Adam and Eve were perfect. Then they chose not to be perfect.

>If god is almighty and the enemy of Satan, how come he doesn't just kill Satan?

Because Satan still serves a purpose. I'm not entirely sure of all of it, but the main purpose seems to be to provide an obvious choice for us. God or Satan, who do you want to serve?

>If god is good and almighty how come there are so much innocents suffering in the world? Probable answer: because he tests people. But if he sees the future it's needless.

Testing is part of it. But testing is for our benefit, not His. Like you said, He knows the future, so He already knows what we will do.

The larger part is that humans can make choices, see my first answer. And thus, humans make choices that hurt others. The airplane mechanic who missed the problem that cause random flight to crash made the choice not to be thorough. The criminal chose to rob that bank and shoot the teller.

So, bad things happen to good people because good and bad people make bad choices.

As for natural disasters, they happen because humanities choices effect more than just humanity. The entire world was perfect before Adam sinned. When he sinned, the entire world broke.
Warren Buffet does the exact same thing PG does: invests in great people. The Berkshire newsletters are very much on-topic for this very reason, especially for the grains of wisdom that have been quoted in the comments here.
I wish I lived another 2000 years to see future humanity finding the remnants of our rules of AD&D and having whole new religions growing out of it.
Sorry to hear that. It should be obvious that 100% of the articles/sites/documents posted won't appeal to 100% of the HN community.

That said, I encourage you to actually read this letter, or at least skim it. At the end of the day, Warren's letters aren't so much about investing and returns as they are about good customer relations and transparency - two things everyone from startup hackers to billionaire executives should find interesting and refreshing.
Is Airport Express the best option for music? I don't like the idea of tying myself to Apple and iTunes. Nor do I have any use for the Wifi/USB connectivity that seems to make up the bulk of the Airport's functionality.
As @shervin said on Twitter: "Saying you don't like @AngelList is like saying you don't like Email. It's a communication tool. Not an investment philosophy."
Show HN: Crimsonti.de
A weekend project I hacked together.
Physical access should not mean getting close with a wire, it should mean opening the case and messing with the internals.

Your personal preferences are irrelevant to a concept that has been proven over centuries. Physical access is physical access, and I can get root while sitting at most unix-like OSes (including yours) without touching a nutdriver.
From Bessemer Venture Partners site:

> Cowan’s college friend rented her garage to Sergey and Larry for their first year. In 1999 and 2000 she tried to introduce Cowan to “these two really smart Stanford students writing a search engine”. Students? A new search engine? In the most important moment ever for Bessemer’s anti-portfolio, Cowan asked her, “How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?” <

http://www.bvp.com/portfolio/antiportfolio.aspx
semi off-topic: Prof. Pierce's research group created the Unison bi-directional file synchronizer and open-sourced it. It's a really useful tool that I use literally every single day to keep my files synchronized. Think of it as a predecessor to dropbox, without the UI polish ;)

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
Or that fossil fuels are incredible...
Where does this leave you?
Dawkins nails it, as usual. http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism...
Incidentally, printing's rapid adoption was surely in part due to its usefulness not just for intellectuals, but also for the ever-present propaganda efforts of government officials.

Not to mention the ability to print bibles, which was pretty important at the time.
There's a big difference between "Reddit, the frontpage" and "Reddit, the subreddits" though…
The answers to those questions are actually quite simple. Christians believe that there's an epic battle for mankind going on between God and Lucifer which started when God created Men, because God loves Men more than the angels (and Lucifer).

The tree was a test for mankind which Satan made Adam and Eve fail. God had to stick to his rules and the consequences ensued. The tree was neccessary because Men are to have free will. God wants them to love him and that's not possible when there's no alternative.

There's a whole set of rules, that's why he won't kill Satan just now. Christians believe mankind isn't innocent per definition since they were cast out of Eden. All the bad we see in this world is because of that and because Men has free will and Satan keeps pulling strings to keep them away from God. In this sense, Satan tempts People and makes them sin which in turn can't make them come to God.

God's final answer is Jesus who presents Men with a solution to escape Satan's grip and position themself with God.

That's what christians who want to make sense of it all believe anyway ;-)

The only real contradiction I see is that God says he's perfect but still created mankind and wants people to love him.
I neither have a Facebook account nor do I use Google search for more than hard-to-query searches.

I don't need Google Mail, and I do blog elsewhere than my (rottingly neglected) Blogspot account.

I appreciate that the author has tied himself to those services, and how problematic that becomes when a centralized service goes down for a user.

That is - partly - why I do not do that, preferring the somewhat rougher road of managing my own usernames and passwords, ensuring that my services are split across multiple providers and are not subject to the whims, failures, and vagaries of a single company.
What rootkit? This is OS X, not Windows. You can't hide processes here the same way, or even to the same extent, you can under ntoskrnl.
The other possibility is a 99 or 59 dollar kindle the comes with a 99 or 59 dollar amazon credit. I'm hoping for that one, since amazon prime isn't available in Canada :(
WordPress disable the new admin bar
Can anyone explain what info comes in an inquiry letter other than the social proof? I've always though that YC's app did a pretty good job of distilling who the people are behind a start-up; that's more of what I'd be interested in.
I used it daily for three years but several weeks ago I quit in favour of Hacker News. So far I've only gone back to view one subreddit. Reading the comments just makes me appreciate HN even more.
You might be thinking of Imran Nazarm, who documented the process of making a GameBoy emulator in Javascript: http://imrannazar.com/GameBoy-Emulation-in-JavaScript:-The-C...
Ask HN: What do you use Firebug or Chrome developer tools?
Just curious on what the HN community prefers and why.
For context: in contrast to other early stage investment groups and many superangels, his firm (http://www.oatv.com) invests in a very small/selective handful of deals per year.
That's right, thank you.
I use it now and then to find stories, but I stay away from the comments.
I used to be Regularly, then went to Never for six months (taking too much time, decline in quality of links, annoying comments) but lately I check it for an hour on the weekend, which is long enough to get a vibe for the good links and trends
So the difference is merely in career security, I guess.

Now I understand why CEO pay got so high so quickly: corporate job security plumneting. It corresponded with the rise of CEOs bouncing from one company to another and being executives for hire.

If you know you're set for life as an executive of a company, who needs a huge amount of personal wealth? But if you could be cut loose from your comfortable SVP gig due to circumstances beyond your control, you have a much greater need to be personally really comfortable. The company's not going to pay your country club dues for the rest of your life, after all.

I can't believe I didn't understand this before, but then I suppose I don't think about the realities of being a senior executive at a huge company.

The unfortunate part about this is that replacing cultural security with individual economic security almost always introduces inefficiencies. In this case, giving big company execs the incentives of a founder or entrepreneur doesn't give them the attitude of one.
Reddit is a cult (from the perspective of an outsider). Memes, inside jokes, and things of that kind are the reasons I stay away.
reddit.com/r/minecraft, that's pretty much it for me.
Reengineering jMockups for Optimal Performance
IE6,7,8 ignoring CSS selectors 4096
Good designer shops (in India)?
I have been working on a couple of product ideas and I know my web/UI design skills suck. I am looking for recommendations for a good design team that would translate my wireframes into good looking web pages and would actually give me HTML/CSS/JS. Please recommend if you have worked with any.
I would still prefer not to be in a company that ran economic motivation in this way even if it did encourage my employees. It seems like a bad company culture to be in.
No Joe Job protection?
So... isn't war a form of competition that was there and then, previous to the global competitive market of today?
In California, at least, most cities have 1-2 that sell boxes, packing material, a drop off point for shipping UPS, and notary services. Perhaps that would be cheaper than hiring a lawyer?
Humor HN: Site footer: Best viewed with Open Eyes :)
Something suddenly reminded of what I had seen displayed in a (random) site footer long ago.

It said:
Best viewed with open eyes

The subtle humour - the abrupt violation of expectation - hit me so hard, I remember staying amused by it for many days.

What is the funniest thing you have found/put on a web site? Please share your treasures.
1) Spend as much time apart as possible. Don't hang out on the weekends.

2) Let arguments (even vicious ones) roll off you like water off a duck's back. Don't even require an apology. Just chalk it up to expected stress, forget it, and move on.
The scarier question is, if you are resurrected from cryonics, whether they will preserve enough of your neurons to protect you from similar impairment.
Comment in a CSS file: "If you're reading this, you probably need to get laid"
Infrequently
Warren Buffet invests in huge railroads and insurance companies. Not the same as tech startups.
> Christians believe that there's an epic battle for mankind going on between God and Lucifer which started when God created Men, because God loves Men more than the angels (and Lucifer).

Here is another plot hole, if god is indeed almighty he could simple strike down all foes instantly. And what are the other angels doing? don't they have free will are they just robots? If Satan is indeed a fallen angel than God, really screwed up, which is again a problem because he is almighty and all knowing.

> The tree was a test for mankind which Satan made Adam and Eve fail.

If god is almighty and all knowing and have created man, and even sees the future, he would have known the outcome in advance, so basically there would have been no reason to do it.

> There's a whole set of rules, that's why he won't kill Satan just now.

Then God is probably not that almighty if he has to stick to rules, instead of hurling a lighting bolt or a ball of fire at Satan.

I am not saying that God can't exist, I am saying that the Christian definition is impossible, a god can't be all of these at once:

- almighty

- all knowing(could see even the future)

- be good/nice whatever

- be perfect

- have free will

And I don't even want to get into Jesus, that would be a huge topic by itself.
I find the content to be better curated and moderated by the community than in the past (digg). Comments have fallen off the norm with more puns and innuendos than actual helpful comments.
In America, the invention of the cotton gin increased, not decreased, the demand for slavery. This is an instance of the Jevons paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Why bryce is a really leaving Angel List 
Breaking: tiny VC who can't compete with big VCs or price-insensitive angels leaves playground with ball.
I read it before I posted. It's interesting, but not technical or appropriate.

Off I go to delete my HN account. I think that's it for me.

EDIT: If I could figure out how to delete my account.
Do we want languages where a PhD is required to understand the library documentation?

two PhDs for Haskell

This presentation is so lighthearted... I realy like it.
The irony though would be that they would probably use either Photoshop or Fireworks to do the app.
Errrm, I'm going to bitch about this. This is a great article to stumble across in google. But front page material?
A different way of looking at it is that AngelList is also the collection of people who use the communication tool to invest, so I think it's very reasonable to talk about "AngelList's investment philosophy".