skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regardless of whether it's elitist[1] or not -- isn't the fact that the videos are available to the world wonderful? To me it seems like they want the world to be informed and hence inspired by all the great things people are doing in the world. They aren't necessarily fully shutting you out. If TED was available to anyone, even to go to in person, I think it would lose some of the intimacy that it has -- it would be much more difficult, if you attended, to spend time with those who inspire you.

[1] By Wikipedia's definition it sure sounds elitist: "Elitism is the belief or attitude that some individuals, who form an elite — a select group of people with intellect, wealth, specialized training or experience, or other distinctive attributes — are those whose views on a matter are to be taken the most seriously or carry the most weight or those who view their own views as so; whose views and/or actions are most likely to be constructive to society as a whole; or whose extraordinary skills, abilities or wisdom render them especially fit to govern."
I'm excited to see what happens when the RIAA sends their goons to the front lines in China.

If Walmart and other american retail brands that work hard to mold their business for the sensibilities of other cultures and still manage to have a difficult time, I'm truly excited how the old stubborn american movie industry will fare. The thing some of these people fail to realize, like it or not, piracy is [ironically] a very large and active space for innovation.
GNU/Linux systems do this too with GnomeVFS/GVFS and KIO. Unfortunately, they are only usable if all applications you use that are aware of them.

This is why filesystems should be connected to some central place (in GNU/Linux that's the kernel VFS switch).
From looking at the feeds, it seems it does a pretty good job of finding interesting projects:

http://twitter.com/#!/github_js
http://twitter.com/#!/github_rb

What I find really neat about it, though, is that rather than just solve the case of aggregating and posting github repos referenced on twitter, it's designed to support other sources and destinations, by writing just a little bit of custom glue code.
But the X-box wasn't "big" when it was released. Microsoft was sort of the under-dog in the console market.
It seems to be that you apply double standards here.

On the one hand, you say that the ugliness of a website doesn't matter, it should be taken seriously nevertheless.

On the other hand, you don't take an article seriously because it contains superficial statements.

I mean, ranting is just another kind of ugliness, on language level instead of the graphical level. It's a bad first impression, that's all. I find it strange to apply different standards to both kinds of ugliness.
I wonder if Google's smartphone Google Authenticator app and three factor auth will prove to be a competitive advantage for them in the payments space?

Given the choice between a Paypal and a Google Checkout option, I think I'd be significantly more likely to choose to use a 3 factor authorised Google service over an emailaddress/password authorised Paypal one (especially if I was using an untrusted network)

I'm not sure Apple would be able to ramp up a cross platform 3 factor auth system particularly quickly... (seeing iTunes on Windows makes me suspect market takeup of "iThirdPartyAuth on Android app(tm)" isn't going to be world-changingly rapid...)
I really enjoy HN commentary about Reddit. It's like an audit--a smaller, more focused group offering insight about all the stuff that goes on in the bigger group.
Wouldn't you have preferred to get your greencard in 2 or 3 years instead of 11? I know it would have made my life quite a bit easier as a co-founder. I would have started up 4 years earlier.

The argument is not (yet) about whether the U.S. is a better place to start a startup than India or China. It clearly is. The argument is about whether it is worth America's while to make it easier for immigrants to start startups. It's hard to argue that for the right definition of a startup (legal, with a real chance of making money, scalable) it wouldn't be in America's interests to make it easier. In the worst case there's an immigrant who is not competing for "scarce jobs", in the best case he/she is creating jobs.*

*O.K. I cheated - in the worst case fears of those against this idea, you have a non-productive individual immigrating here on the pretext of a startup and doing nothing/leeching off of society etc, but if you find a good enough 'qualifier' (e.g. Grad degree from the U.S. and/or V.C. investment a la startup visa) this kind of thing can be minimized to where it approaches zero.
Elite? not so much. Elitist? Definitely.
Coming from a background of bioinformatics, my experience of academia was quite different. Combining multiple sources of data and results from different prediction algorithms is quite common.

As for generic machine learning being a ridiculous idea, I don't see why he'd think this. Nearly all specialized systems use generic machine learning algorithms as a submodule. They can very much be commoditizable like EC2. Even google has an upcoming framework for this. Although I would agree that by themselves they are not sufficient.

edit: I also think you miss the point of academic papers. The goal is not to build a product, but rather to understand algorithms. Testing algorithms in isolation of other boosters is crucial for this. If you are testing a particular combining framework, only then does it make sense to include multiple approaches within the context if the proposed idea.

In bioinformatics, you additionally have the researchers who actually want an applied answer for their studies and work. Thus, in that area you do routinely get something more like a product being produced in an academic setting. The combined systems are often, but not always published.
Huh? This sounds totally wrong to me.

The UK and Germany, the two strongest EU startup countries, both already have founders visas and there's nothing special about a foreigner owning shares in a Ltd or GmbH, the respective equivalents of a US incorporation.

Also, in my experience, founding a UK Ltd is even easier than doing a US Inc if for no other reason than that you don't have to deal with both federal and state institutions as in the US. The stuff that the Companies House sends you is super straight-forward (impressively so, other countries should take note), and can be done mostly online. Germany is (surprise!) more bureaucratic and things take a bit longer, but it's still not rocket surgery.

On the whole immigration and getting permanent residence is much easier in both countries. The UK has a point system for highly skilled immigrants, and you can get permanent residence in both in 5 years without having had to stick around at a single employer.
Bag the rabbit you have the highest chance of catching.
It does require a small development cycle ~6 months and more than bootstrapping in terms of resources but I am willing to fund the development costs knowing the potential and having the inside knowledge of the industry and their hunger for a real solution.

My biggest concern is am I playing it safe, on one hand, I know we can make money with the niche product and we are already active in the industry so it might be foolish to pass up the opportunity, but I would say we are more passionate about the bigger possibilities for the consumer space.
TL;DR - the user interface paradigms that we current use are still pretty similar to the interfaces that were developed at Xerox PARC (bought by Apple). Not much has changed.

It doesn't have to be this way.

What are the principles of current interfaces / what could the future principles be (if we're not stuck with the constraints set by the current batch of WIMP interfaces)?

It's a 'what if' article.
IBM's Sam Palmisano: A super second act
Now if only I could import my downloaded facebook info into there...
I don't understand why he doesn't just ask for his money back, buy a laptop that does meet his needs, and get on with his life.
> Our system is pretty, damn fair, even though once in awhile it fails and an innocent person goes to prison.

From Wikipedia, in Illinois, 12 men had been executed since 1977. During that same period, 13 men were freed from death row i.e. greater than 50% of the convicts facing the maximum possible penalty were actually found innocent.

Also, from
http://deadlinethemovie.com/state/IL/index.php

Was anyone on Death Row ever found innocent in my state?
There have been a total 18 innocent people exonerated on Death Row in Illinois. Perry Cobb was released in 1987...

So, now you have an idea about the rigorous standards of evidence employed before handing out the death penalty. This should give you an idea about how many innocent people are convicted every day for lesser crimes.

And to see the mechanics of how so many innocent people get convicted, check this

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230402380457556...

A large percentage of convicts in prison are from drug related crimes. For information from Lancet - "Drug harms in the UK: a multicriteria decision analysis" regarding harmfulness of drugs

http://i.imgur.com/CkiiZ.png

> The US has to babysit the world. I wish it wasn't the case, but most countries do not have their shit together.

I don't want to even bother refuting this, but the US is an economic entity that seeks to maximize its economic advantage, not a baby-sitter. It pretends to baby-sit by force but that isn't how baby-sitting works, most baby-sitters don't have a fire-arms license.

> I need more evidence than what we have (which is based on falsified data) to prove that it's man-made.

There is enough evidence, even when after eliminating whatever falsified data that had crept in. We are interfering with the Carbon-cycle and it will lead to more CO2 which will have a warming effect. You can sit around waiting for more evidence and when warming happens you can blame it on Sun spots or whatever, Are you also waiting on more evidence for heisenberg's uncertainty principle?
Mashape Update #2
Maybe. But relationships with whom? Why would a large retailer want to use Square? Why would a competing point of sale vendor with an enormous installed base want to work with Square?

Netflix isn't a very good analogy. The retail payment space involves a three-sided market: consumers, merchants and POS vendors. Netflix didn't even have to struggle with the complexity of a two-sided market. Though it's done well for itself, it also hasn't completed rendered the previous standard useless. Plenty of people use DVD and Blu-Ray today.

I think your view is possible but I'm not sure I understand the details. In contrast, I can answer both of those questions given the model for my company's technology.
Ash HN: Jobs & Startups in Washington DC
Feel free to completely nuke this question: first time poster, and I don't want to offend anyone or turn HN into a job hunting site.

singleserving1 brings up moving from NYC to Seattle; I'll be doing almost the opposite. My wife's starting out her teaching career at Georgetown, so we'll be moving us plus our son from Seattle to DC in July or August. It's a one year position, but in academia, that's how it is.

Anyway, I'm a tools developer with about 4-5 years experience designing smaller apps for Operations teams mostly; I've got a lot of experience as a sysadmin at national level ISPs as well, so I've been doing the whole "devops" thing for a while now. I usually consider myself at an intermediate level of competence with Java, Perl and Python, have built internal tools/services with Django and Spring MVC, and am working on putting together my portfolio and strengthing it with Ruby and RoR. I'm pretty much chomping at the bit to get the chance to do full-time dev work.

Like singleserving1, I'd appreciate any info on:

- large/small companies that people would recommend
- any other startup groups, job boards or sites
- anything else

Feel free to completely nuke this posting or vote it down if it's annoying; I'm just casting the net as far as I can.

Thanks in advance.
His worldview isn't binary. He's merely providing some perspective by pointing out the system has been similarly broken for a while and apparently startups have still been starting up all the while.

As a non-American without Green Card, I still think the startup visa is dubious. People who really want to do software startups in the US have been doing it for a while (typical example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Kahn ). I strongly doubt the US government (or board of VCs etc) will be able to predict success when deciding who should get the startup visas and the employment argument isn't convincing. Reddit, YC's most successful company, employs about 4 people I think?
if banks could confirm electronic transfers within a few seconds

Banks do this millions of times each day on the global ATM network. I can swipe my bank card at most any ATM in the world and within seconds the funds are removed from my account and dispensed into my hand.

In that case, the card is indirectly linked to my bank account. It's only when you know the exact bank account and routing number from which you want to remove the funds that you're forced to use the archaic ACH system.

Clearly the technology for instantaneous confirmation of funds transfers already exists, but it has yet to be expanded beyond its original purpose.
I have a question, who decides who gets invited to TED? Is it just the organizers? Do they just sort through the entire applicant list and determine who is getting in based on what they've done'?
What about a way to loop back, so when you make that sweet iOS app, @brenda25056 can know about it?
Appears to be from 1996.
Everybody Codes
Example traits of an "anti-mac" computer:

- Users are "The Post-Nintendo Generation" (grown up with computers)
- Work, play, groupware, embedded, and ubiquitous
- Humongous computer (multi-gigabyte RAM, Cray-on-a-chip RISC processors)
- Rich communication (computer can see you, knows where you are, large high-res
screen, new I/O devices)
- Connected system subjected to constant change
- Language (instead of icons)
- Strong object-orientation (large number of small objects with rich attribute
sets)
- Personal information retrieval as unifying principle with atomic information
units as basic interaction object
- Information comes to you (rather than you browsing your hard drive)
- You won't always have to work that hard

Neilsen wrote this in 1996, but it seems to predict an emerging trend of pervasive social networking, cloud-storage, Google (omniscient agents with a natural language interface), and location APIs, embedded cameras, gesture-pads, etc. Of course I could be looking for evidence selectively, but I will leave that judgment to you.
"This does not change who can see the posts - private posts stay private."
Ask HN: Linux rig for data mining and machine learning
Here's the scenario: if you were asked to build out three Linux machines that would be used together in a cluster to perform data mining and machine learning tasks, with the occasional mapreduce job thrown in, how would you spec the machines out? What distro would you use? Any must have software installs?

With regards to the hardware, what is your preference for manufacturer? How much would you expect to pay per machine?

Your thoughts and suggestions are appreciated!
It is pretty strange that there are so many big names playing along. On the other hand, there's quite a long tradition of eminent, tenured, (and often aging) scientists going a little bit off the deep end, especially in areas outside of their actual expertise.

People say things for all kinds of weird reasons, which may range from pet theories to hawking books and getting speaking gigs.
Makes sense.

If we take anti-mac as the future principles, then many of them have in some ways become true...
Sorry, I dont get it. What am I looking at?
IPad's Rivals Can't Beat It on Price
C.rb, A Time Clocker For Your Next Project
Because it effectively killed UK exports.
An explanation for that might be that Go, being a Google Project, is hosted on Google Code, where Mercurial is the only supported DVCS.

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/04/mercurial-support-for...
http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/DVCSAnalysis
Then it seems you haven't used symlinks or hardlinks very much. I do it to organize my code, because it's useful to have more than one way to get to folder X (I have things organized by language, then they all go to a master code folder which reorganizes them in versioned/not, mine/downloaded, etc). It makes finding what I'm looking for very easy, it's easy to script changes / restrict searches / update everything in one go.

But using symlinks means I can't reorganize without great cost, because they don't follow movements around. It also means some of my folders look like shortcuts while some don't, stepping into one causes my path to change wildly (no backing up, usually), and in order to protect my data I have to make sure I never delete (or move) the originals, only the symlinks.

Or say you want to organize your images in two photo applications at the same time - hardlinks mean each can have full control over where they place their file, without interrupting the other, and without duplicating what could be an enormous amount of data.

OSX attempts to solve this with Aliases - essentially, "smart" symlinks that follow changes. If you alias a file and then move the original, the alias will still work. The downside is that essentially no command-line tools handle them in any way, because they're decidedly non-standard. Being able to hardlink folders would allow filesystem organizations not possible before, with safety, tool-compatibility, and efficiency.
I posted this because I was shocked by how facebook-like it is. The buzz tab is there if buzz is enabled it seems. You prob have to turn it off entirely to kill the tab.

I turned buzz off the day it launched. So I was more surprised that it now look exactly like a facebook wall.

Some nice differences. You don't have to choose between male and female. But the relationship field has the same choices. Sadly, there is still no "X is currently shagging | fucking | etc Y" option. That's more like what I want to say. Pick your own damn transitive verb.

It's got the lame and prudish "X is in a relationship with Y" as ever.
Sorry, it might be a bit confusing if you're not used to github.

Here is an interactive demo: http://rappdaniel.com/noisy/
I've previously built Facebook applications. I've had Facebook turn off my applications with no warning. It sucks. They've done this to us on a Friday evening and then headed home, so we've had our business shutdown until Monday or Tuesday when they got back to us and turned us back on.

If I was building my own web site outside of Facebook, I would not give them the power to shut me down. By all means, allow a user to link their accounts to their Facebook accounts, but you must own your own user.

Also, get the security right here - spend the 2 days to work out how to store passwords (note: don't store passwords!) correctly so that when your user database is stolen, your users aren't completely screwed.
Ah, OK. The original post made it sound like you had decided to not even bother applying.

Good luck on the application!

Are there Y Combinator like environments for high tech startups working in other spaces? (ediscovery, in our case.)

I don't know of any that specialize in ediscovery, but there are absolutely other "YC'ish" incubator type programs, of various types, around the country. Somebody was compiling a list a month or so ago, search the old posts a bit and you can probably turn up that post.
US and Israel were behind Stuxnet claims researcher
Here’s my discussion on the Buzz user experience, from a year ago. http://alanhogan.com/buzz-is-already-dead

(tl;dr: Too distracting, not very skimmable, awkward social aspects including too many non-friends showing up.)
You're entitled to your opinion. It works like this: certain of our friends are afraid that if we started another session, they'd never get another gig again or soundboard job again, which would be a significant chunk of their income.

Losing your current job is a lot less scary than losing your life.
Indeed .. I think that's a good point, but I'd also argue that I'm using a WIMP interface right now to write this message.

Maybe Chrome OS is more of an 'anti-mac' interface?

Nielsen's initial summary points out that the article forecast the coming of an 'Internet desktop', but I'm not sure what an 'Internet desktop' is ..
HN has jumped the shark / nuked the fridge. "Is TED elitist?". Seriously? $6k for an invite-only conference? Not elitist? facepalm
It's not you. I read that article 3x and it makes little sense.

Twitter. Ugh.
my company uses Google Apps. It absolutely astounds me that both Buzz and Wave weren't launched first as Enterprise Apps, only. They both would have been useful as enterprise collaboration and communication tools, and having it be entirely within an organization solves the "who can I talk to" problem -- much like Facebook did by targeting college campuses. As a average schmoe -- I have zero reason to use Buzz, for anything. Get everyone in my company on it, and I'd be using it every day. Everyone would. And it's actually a great tool for that, it would solve problems that aren't addressed well by either email or the various internal wikis.

I'm actually still a little pissed Buzz hasn't shown up...more than a year after Google said "Yes, Buzz is certainly coming to Apps."

It's just a little bit mind boggling to me -- it seems so obvious. From what I understand, Buzz was (is?) used inside of Google for internal communication/discussion. THAT is the use case for it. But they launched for something else, and ignored what would have been a great starting point for the product to gain some momentum and a community of users who would go out and sell it later on.
I think the 1990s were an interesting time for the Internet. Lots of crazy thinking about what it could become - large ideas, less fixation on profit and commerce. Lots of theory.
They all seem to be reminiscent of MySpace, er I mean Hi5, or maybe I mean Friendster. Point being, a "profile" page has a standard design, the same way a e-commerce catalog page has a general layout that nearly every shopping cart employs.
That's not a very nice thing to say about Apache.
Ask HN: How to cure a burnout?
I've been working non-stop for the last couple of months, trying to finish what's on my plate at the startup where I work. However, last few weeks, I've developed a negative affinity for work, especially when I have a lot of failures. Since my job isn't really straight-forward, I really don't know when a new failure will pop-up. Everytime this happens, my dead-lines get tossed around and I'm left with endless guilt. This has been a recurring pattern throughout my career.

Sometimes I feel I'm really bad at my job, but I know somewhere inside this ain't true. I regularly get great job offers from good places. Most recently, I completed the Greplin Challenge because I was so sick of getting delayed again and I needed a change. But I'm not applying there for a job. I really don't know where I stand, or what I like to do anymore. I started http://grep42.com last year with the thought of applying for YC but never did.

Now I'm left wondering how can I get the same passion and zeal for work I had when I started working at my current workplace. When I look back, the best memories of working I have are with a good colleague/friend in a pair. But my current job is work-from-home but I've the option of renting out a small space to use as a private office. I'd really like to get back on my dead-lines and complete my promised deliverable here before I think of anything else. I strongly believe that the worst thing a person can do, is leave their work-commitment unfulfilled. So leaving the job as things are is not an option. I would really like to find out what's my problem and deal with it. Dear hackers, please advise.