skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>(Fred Wilson): I am also talking to my friend Mark Pincus who had an idea like this a few years ago.

Mark Pincus is better known as the founder of Zynga, unless this is another Mark Pincus.
All of them?

They may be wrong, but that is very, very, very far from malicious.
Happy to read this news.

I personally won't be able to apply for my edutech startup with them, but am sure it would encourage a lot of other hackers who give this space a pass due to all the challenges specific to this domain.

Another HN user covered them pretty very well in this comment - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1879171

--------

Education systems have huge budgets, but they are always run by such [REDACTED]
people that the money is never used as a lever to get what they need.

Education systems are quite happy to spend millions of dollars on consultancies
and studies, but because the focus is on risk avoidance they never actually
achieve anything.

(And yes, there are a few exceptions. Having destroyed myself trying to
achieve anything in that sector I applaud all the more for those
who have managed it.)

For anyone considering doing a company in this space, read all the
warnings you hear about doing enterprise software, and then take away the
fact the most enterprises are at least rational (if slow).

Then also remove the fact that enterprises pay people well,
so they are usually a few decent people who you can deal with.
Then add in politics, the election cycle, unions, teachers, lectures,
"duty of care" considerations. If you are still considering that sector,
then good luck!!

--------
The number of bits you need in a bloom filter varies as a function of the number of items you have (in addition to the desired error rate). Assuming a 100 items, a 1e-8 error rate only requires 480 bytes (= ~5 bytes per item).

You also don't need to do a lot of independent hashes. You can just take a linear combination of the results of two hashes and get basically no performance degradation (see: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~kirsch/pubs/bbbf/esa06.pdf).

Also, you probably don't actually need a 1e-8 false positive rate, since you're going to fall back to a canonical (but slow) lookup table for positives in most use cases. Bloom filters are most useful when your real dictionary is slow and you're expecting a lot of 'no match' results.
Gee, these places will sell you unprepared vegetables (mostly) cheaper than they'll sell you those same vegetables cut, washed, and available for you to shove in a container in whatever combination you want - who could have imagined such a thing?
Another approach is to go to Sizzler. Avoid the Carbs, and load up on the Baby-Greens, Spinach, Olives (two kinds), Jalapenos, Radish, guacamole, red onion, mushrooms, broccoli - $8.99 (and they throw in a reasonably well cooked 6 oz (tri-tip) steak to boot - Just say no to the Baked Potato/Fries).

And, if you really want to go to town, for an extra $2.00 you can turn that into unlimited trips to the Salad Bar.

It's amazing how much Salad a guy with his iPad, and a free afternoon can put away. :-)

I used to go to Fresh Choice - until they started charging more for the "Premium" salad bar choices, and I realized 90% of the food beyond the salad bar was low (empty?) nutrition carbs.
Is it known if any of streamed sessions will be available online after the conference is finished? I am trying to determine if I need to be the guy at work watching video or if I can watch them when I get home.
"The old show_ads did lots of work: loading additional scripts, gathering information about the web page it was running on, and building the ad request to send back to Google."

Tracking users and crushing privacy. Sucking down clock cycles all over the world. You didn't think you got that for free, did you?
I vowed to never surf again without Flashblock after some ads started automatically yelling at me with sound and video.
Type study: Typographic hierarchy
"How to Beat the Supermarket"

I just got home from the supermarket after spending:

$1.49 for one cucumber
$2.99 for one pound (about 2) of tomatoes
$2.49 for one head of lettuce

This is about right for one large salad.

A restaurant up the street has an all-you-can-eat salad bar for $7.29 which includes bread, chili, soup, and dessert.

Looks like it's going to be salad bar for lunch and cooked dinner (without salad) at home here.
It's even faster if you just block the ads.

Plus, as soon as everyone starts blocking ads, we can start building products that are user-oriented instead of advertiser-oriented. (Why yes, I do pay for content that I want to read.)
It suffers a bit from public perception as being "old" but of course it's up there with all the modern features, it's exceptionally easy to learn and use, there are no surprises or special cases. Probably because Tcl/Tk attracts the sort of programmer who happily uses it for real work and doesn't spend much time on advocacy forums...
Banner blindess strikes again. I didn't even see the yellow box until I read this.
I don't think that's true at all. While I'm not going to diminish the importance of believing in oneself, one of the greatest loves you can show toward someone else is demonstrating that you believe in them, too.

Hmm... maybe one of us misunderstood the other, but I don't see what you just said as being mutually exclusive from what I said. I certainly am not advocating against showing your belief in others, nor do I want to diminish the importance of having support from others.

Actually, on a second reading, I think I see the issue. He wrote "Believe in yourself, because no one else will" and I mentally paraphrased that as "Believe in yourself, even when no one else does." That, I think, gets closer to the gist of what I believe about this sort of thing.
Great points. As a funny side point, for a time my parents didn't have a microwave after moving once when I was a kid. The killer use of microwaves that got us to get one? Reheating baby food. There's just no efficient way to do it on a stove, other than putting it in a small jar in a pot of boiling water :)
Pretty sure that is the best part.
I would expect that lots of publishers have many domains, which doesn't change that it sounds low, but perhaps explains why.
Ask HN: Online tool for tracking time and managing solo projects
Hello Fellow HNers,

I am working on multiple offices with multiple machines and need to keep track of how much time I spend on each project. I am sure there are a ton of online tools that will do such thing and I would like to know if people here have any kind of recommendation. Since, I am looking for a tool to help me better organize my work and "get things done", if people could recommend a tool that has some minimal project management and time tracking would be great. This is just for my use, there is not a real need for teams and multiple users or whatsoever.

Thanks for any recommendation or comment in advance
Andre
Chevy Volt: The Car From Atlas Shrugged Motors
DabbleDB shutting down
Odd that he doesn't explicitly mention the legal basis for Google's claim that this stuff is non-copyrightable. Which is this:

Copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. So, the courts have held, if you don't have any choice over how to express something, it isn't subject to copyright protection. In particular, if a particular mapping from names to magic numbers is necessary in order for standard-conformant programs to operate at all (as in the mappings specified by <errno.h> and <signal.h>, which came up in the SCO litigation), that stuff isn't copyrightable.

So, Google's saying, they've written tooling to explicitly drop all the expressive elements, leaving the bare, functional, non-copyrightable bones --- which they don't need legal permission to use, from Linus or anyone else.

This is, I guess, why Mueller thinks it's a big deal that the processed files still include inline functions --- if there's another way to write the function which does the same thing, then there is an expressive choice in writing it, which would be subject to copyright protection.

But if userland code has no reason to want to run particular inline functions in kernel header files, then Google has an easy remedy: just ditch 'em --- or rewrite the few that matter, and ditch the rest.

So, this really doesn't look like a big deal...
"Are these not groups according to you?"

No, of course not. I have no reason to believe that, say, subjects who report having contact with 'entities' after receiving cranial electromagnetic stimulation in controlled laboratory settings are malicious:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN3ggRgY7Ac

Nor does it make any sense to claim that anyone who wants an intellectually honest investigation into 9/11 is a deceiver. That's just ridiculous 1984-style propaganda.

These 'groups' are just a loose collection of people who have little or nothing in common. Are some of these folks malicious or deceivers? Of course. But putting them all in the same box is just willful intellectual dishonesty.
I use it for everything these days. I've written numerous web apps and we publishing apps as well as a few prototype game servers. It's a joy to program in.
Burstly Co-Founder Discusses Future Of App Marketing
You also could adjust your focus... instead of telling us all how you are being blown off, figure out WHY. Even if they are all wrong, something is giving that incorrect impression. And you will have a hard time recruiting others to your cause unless you figure out what that is.
Conan the Bacterium: the world's most radiation-resistant organism
Lots of nice tactics in this, but a key assumption of the article: you have the knowledge of your market and the product that demonstrates your knowledge of the market so that you have a sense of confidence in your pitch and in your company's future.

The above probably sounds silly... until you've been in or seen pitches in which the folks pitching it don't have that confidence. The classic trap is building the pitch on good ideas and being smart about them. You can just about smell that pitch and it doesn't smell nice. Great pitches are ones where the audience starts thinking about how to accelerate a great product/market (introductions, additional markets, tactics, etc), not about how to validate it (search for comps, call around to colleagues, etc).

But YouTube wasn't making any $$$ when they got acquired! Those kids definitely had it: obviously growing and inevitable market in which they had huge adoption, huge growth, dominance. Questions after the pitch: How much do you need to crank this thing up? What kinds of introductions can we make? When would you like to start discussing acquirers? And, most importantly, where do we sign?
Eh wha? No-one has tried to do an alternative glibc? Wrong:

http://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/

http://www.uclibc.org/

http://sourceware.org/newlib/
Article cleary states which Android phone was used in the test but doesnt state which iPhone was used. It just says iphone 4.2 and iphone 4.3. Does that mean a iphone 3g on 4.2 and a 3gs on ios 4.3?
Will they prevent multiple people from sharing the same account?
I doubt "nature" and humans utilize the same repair processes. There are also a wide variety of reproduction strategies that minimize the requirement for long lasting information integrity in any single individual.

It'd be incredibly interesting to look for changes in the repair mechanisms of these organisms--especially the promoters. I bet they're being expressed at ridiculously high levels.
Oddly enough, the microwave is the least used appliance in our kitchen. If it weren't for the fact that they are so cheap now as to be virtually free we probably wouldn't have one.

When the iPad gets to that same price point we'll probably get one as well.
Now they generally recommend not using a microwave for baby food, because people too often would forget to stir it before feeding the baby.
From the beginning you should know what skills your team lack. Sometimes you need the A persons. However, if you don't have that amount of money, search for those who can do the job. For the first days that's more valuable.
A C player with the right attitude can go places. An A player with bad attitude will go nowhere
haha awesome.
I asked my friend, a native German, about that last summer when I was in Germany.

She said a lot of times that money does not even go to the person cleaning the toilets.

I did pay 1 euro to use a bathroom in a train station. It seemed to be similar to US truck stop bathroom/showers. As soon as I left they cleaned the bathroom.
> Wrong; the GPL requires any derivative works to be under a compatible license. If I copy GPL-licensed code into my BSD-licensed library, none of my code has to be relicensed.

Wrong. You can copy BSD-licensed code into your GPL-licensed library with no problem, but GPL-licensed code copied to a BSD-licensed library will have problems. GPL-licensed code into a BSD-licensed library prohibits redistributing the resulting work under BSD.

> Completely and egregiously wrong. Unless these programs are actually copying parts of the kernel into their source, they are not derived works.

You've missed the point. If the Google de-copyrightizanator (WTF! Apple's spell check did not flag de-copyrightizanator!) has failed, and the header files Google shipped for third parties to use do in fact contain copyrighted code under GPL, then there may indeed be a problem for third parties. Headers files often contain more than just the specification of an interface (which is probably not copyrightable). They often contain actual code, which is copyrightable. That code could end up in applications, in which case they would in fact have a serious GPL problem.
There is a difference between selling someone something that they need but don't realize it yet vs. selling someone something that they don't need. The term "sell ice to eskimos" means you're so good at selling that you can sell someone something they don't need. You don't need that skill in a startup. Sure, good at sales, and sure, good at communicating benefits, but you don't need someone so good at sales that they can sell someone something they don't need.
It's horrible for usability. If you don't have JavaScript on, you lose the ability to submit comments entirely. Not that Facebook was very usable with JS off to begin with, but still.
The things you have mentioned are rather trivial in the overall picture and really not a good enough reason to support IE7 but not IE6. The JavaScript engines are nearly identical and the broad set of technologies are the same.

For example, I consider not supporting SVG 10 years after standarization a major probleam. And only IE9 addressed that issue.
Angry Birds of database performance tuning
Yesterday I was testing something in ruby. Basically the return value was a constant * rand. Yeah, 0.6360787621690106 and 0.6360787023690106 were the two results. I was like what's going on? until I noticed the middle of the answer was different. Felt like nearly winning the lottery.
Somewhat agree. However, magic will happen almost anywhere with an open bar. ;)
Crowdfunding for Edu? | Hack Education
depending of the facts (read money) that you make them save ;)
That's how it's really written. Take a look at the source of A+ sometime.
Hackers Reading CNN: Cybercriminals and Disaster Scam Sites
I'm going to just tell myself that this is someone either doing a sociological study on cyber-bullying or else demonstrating an uncannily sophisticated natural language generator built upon the extensive corpus of previous Ask HN posts.

It's probably not true, but somehow helps...
Panic (Transmit, Coda) is donating today's sales to Japan
GroupMe Won Mindshare Wars at SXSW
The most verifiable and useful definitions have to do with quantifiable results.

- Can they get things done?
- Can they act on their own initiative?
- Can they think 2 steps or more ahead?
- Can they code? Can they code well?
- Can they think and think well? Can they think *independently*?

These aren't quantifiable like temperature or width, but they are tangible and to some extent measurable.

The last two are the trickiest. For one thing, it's going to be very difficult for someone who doesn't code to be able to tell reliably if they can code. One can, however, watch someone code and observe their results. Likewise, it's sometimes going to be hard for someone who doesn't yet know how to code well to judge good code.

One can also listen to another's thoughts. However, someone who doesn't yet know how to think independently won't necessarily know what good independent thinking is. They'll only know what someone else tells them is good independent thinking.
Ouch; that's one thing you should definitely never forget. But I guess you'd burn the food if you didn't stir it on a stove :)
My Startup Success -- 4 years later
This better include full access to their crossword puzzle app.
I have heard something slightly different with regard to classes of players: "A players hire A players, B players hire C players, and C players hire losers."

Here is a discussion from long ago about the phrase's origins:
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.50837.1...
Almost. It's non-copyrightable because it is required for interoperability, and is therefore fair-use under US law.
That's roughly 50% of what the nyt wants to charge, and for, arguably, more valuable information. While I understand and mostly accept the idea of a paywall, the price is too high.

They want to support a cost structure that's archaic, and centered around their print product. They need to charge 50-60% less, and cut costs accordingly. That's probably what will happen in the long run.
I love open source approach of Android. Also I love IPhone design.
Exactly. There are a lot of niches that could use a specific startup accelerator. (One ideal example is anything where you have to manufacture "stuff"... thinking about the trials and travails of Wakemate.)

While I'm sure PG would argue that YC partners have the capability and expertise to succeed if any of these kinds of companies came to YC, they would likely be better served by an accelerator focused on these markets and issues.
New York Times to start charging $15 for iPhone, iPad subscriptions by June
"A young man worries what people think about him. A mature man doesn't care what others think of him. An old man realizes that people didn't really think of him that much." (or something like that, can't remember the exact quote)
A note of caution: Police agencies often exaggerate the number of children they rescue. Did they detain 230 children? Probably. Are these children all victims of sexual abuse? Probably not -- there are many people who access child pornography who do not personally abuse children.

I see nothing wrong with placing the children of accused child-pornography-possessors into foster care as a temporary preventative measure, but we shouldn't assume that they have all been abused, nor should we use the word "rescued" indiscriminately.
AdSense Goes Asynchronous
I've used it as a lightweight web server in several projects.
I just hope that nobody takes this seriously...
Ask HN: learning Ruby/Rails
What advice would you give for someone with a Non-CS background (economics, to be precise) wanting to learn Ruby & Rails?
So is this Chrome sucking at PNGs or my calibration?

http://yfrog.com/hsrnnnp
Drizzle GA released
IPAD 2 Fail GLITCH
Very encouraging to see that AirBnB struggled to prove market size. I know the pain.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is how B and C players start startups.

Note, the Dunning-Kruger effect isn't an absolute law like the Laws of Thermodynamics.

Also, if someone has certain attributes like an "A Player" but is debilitated by self confidence, are they really an "A Player?"
Who’s NAPping on Your Network? (Part Two)
Confreaks is recording the conference, as well as helping us stream it. I'm working hard to ensure that we get the videos posted as soon as we can. Should be a couple weeks and not a couple months.
I've just started using Dotcloud for some Django projects, and I just want to say I absolutely LOVE how easy it is to set up apps, databases, etc, despite the beta state and the limited documentation at the moment. Highly recommended.
I love the command line because I started at a unix hosting company. It is important to be able to work effectively on remote systems. I can't think of very many production servers that have the option of plugging a monitor and keyboard into (or remote desktop).

I consider command line skills to be a bare minimum for programmer competency.
You use both ad hominem ("this guy again? For those unaware, Florian Mueller...") and a strawman argument ("all built on the incorrect assumption that running proprietary software on a Free kernel/libc is illegal.")

The claim is not that running proprietary software on a free kernel is illegal. The claim is that by linking to Bionic, which may violate the GPL, the proprietary software might become "derived works" of the kernel.
For many years I would bounce my ideas off of people, and they would look at me like I was delusional. This made me think I was delusional. After working on my MVP for the past 3 years, I have finally figured out that the best ideas are the ones that people say can't be done. With enough time and dedication anything is possible. Disregard the naysayers and keep on truckin'.
A couple quick points about copyright and header files.

1. It is well established in US copyright law that elements necessary to interoperate with something aren't copyrightable. So, for instance, the function signatures and probably function names (if names are necessary in order to make the call) of an interface would not be copyrightable. Same for structures used in the interface.

This has been fairly extensively litigated. It arises when you have, for instance, someone trying to make an unauthorized third party game for a video game system, or someone trying to write a plug-in for someone else's closed program.

2. Header files often contain more than just the bare elements necessary to interface to something. They often contain macros that expand to code, comments, maybe even implementations of small inline functions. There is plenty in header files that can be copyrighted.

So, depending exactly on how Google produced its header files, they may be in the clear or they may have made a big mistake.
Okay - as a dev you should know that hosting is not cheap. Does it cost Twitter nothing to 'delivery' its content?

As someone who can peak behind the curtain, I assure you that its not free. Maybe cheaper than physical home-delivery of thew newspaper, but its not cheap.
> If there is a proven theorem that something is impossible, either the theorem is wrong or it's impossible.

It can get a lot more subtle than that. I do not want to elaborate, but there are classes of problems for which we can only guarantee SOME hard problems (or undecidable ones) but MOST of which are easy. There are other classes of problems where MOST problems are hard.

> Your two sentences "the halting problem is solved routinely" (assuming you mean the latter case, as above) and "this does not invalidate the Halting Theorem" do not logically work.

I agree it sounds illogical, but my phrasing was poor. I meant, if problem instances that arise in real life are easy to solve, yet there is a theorem that states that NOT ALL problems are easy, these two are not mutually exclusive. I agree "routinely solving the halting problem" is an exaggeration on my part.
Wow, thanks PG (and Fred and AirBnB team). This is an awesome insight into angel/VC investment decisions. It's hugely valuable.