skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: (Order of Magnitude)^(Orders of Magnitude)?
I see it so often it has lost meaning. But the real problem is that there is no meaning attached anyway, because the term usually employed without a defined ratio. Used imprecisely like so, you might as well say "probably multiplied by something like 10 or maybe 10,000". Treat your beloved nerd vernacular like a valuable object, not a generic item!

order
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I08g4IHuso
I second this. I've used it through Thunderbird to Mail.app and now with Sparrow and haven't had any problems. Even during the web outage a year (or two?) ago, IMAP was still up while the web version was down.

I've also been using gmail since it was invite-only beta and haven't experienced any major problems through the 7 years I've used it, not sure what everyone is complaining about.

Worth noting: I think the original complaint/idea (I think from Gruber or someone similar, I don't remember exactly) was more along the lines of having Twitter offer premium accounts that would never failwhale, and similar equivalents for other web services these days that seem to be falling apart under load. That idea I could understand, just not with Gmail.
Michael Robertson (mp3.com) discusses Entrepreneurship and the Music Industry.
Not to be too much of a smartass, but I'd be tempted to say "1" for the "minimum number of guesses" question. After all, you could be correct right off the bat and 1 is a technically correct answer to the ? as stated.
Data ownership was only one point. Address ownership was the other.
"tax avoidance" is a synonym for "tax compliance".

Do you take your allowed deductions on your tax return? or use tax-deferred investment vehicles like IRAs or 401Ks? Do you report your investment losses?

If so, why is your tax avoidance acceptable and GE's not?
I really like the variation offered by IraCooper on that page,

1. Write down the problem
2. Become convinced it's very important, then think about it
3. Write down the answer

My own problem solving attempts are often thwarted by me working for 20 minutes and then getting discouraged and convincing myself that what I'm working on isn't really that important. After which I, of course, waste the next hour watching hour tv or something.

If I've heard anything about Feinman it's that he was always deeply interested in everything he did, and his accomplishments reflect it.
This is an either/or fallacy. To be excellent, you need a mix of both. Formal schooling isn't required, but you generally need to have been exposed to other smart people, many more experienced, because otherwise it's impossible to tell what self-study will be fruitful and what not. So some form of instruction, whether it comes from school or from a lucky landing in the work world, is required. That said, if you're not autodidactic to some extent, you're going to be unable to grow.

By the way, I've learned a lot of those "skills that self-taught people lack" on my own. Lambda calculus and type theory I hadn't even studied till I was 24. I'm not an expert on either, but I know as much as a well-educated non-expert (i.e. I know what the typed lambda calculus is and why it's interesting, I know about System F as the basis for ML, et cetera).
Remember Ed Curry: A real test of "Be Good"
This is incorrect. The company I work for has a legal department that reports to upper management.
Fitango Teaches You How To Get Stuff Done
Show HN: Ultimate DJ RPG + social Music app
Over past few months, me and my business partner, made a music application where you can search and listen to music from youtube with your friends while you play a DJ based RPG and try to become the Ultimate DJ. We thought that this was a good way to combine music applications like Grooveshark, Pandora etc with X Games and add a game element to make finding music fun. We have reached MVP and would love to receive some feedback.
By no means I meant that every Chinese developer is incapable of solving problems. I'm talking about my average experience at work.

ACM competitions are in no way indicative of the overall picture. I went to a few of these competitions myself and got my ass kicked by some younger Asian kids. ACM finals represent the top of the top fastest thinking developers you can find. When you have a billion people, you will produce some brilliant ones regardless of how broken the education system is. Plus I bet that

1) Almost none of the finalists went to average schools.

2) All of the finalists practiced solving ACM Archive Problemset day and night (unlike the rest of the students), and probably skipped a lot of the regular classes.
AboutOne: Revolutionizing worklife for moms
"... Ed Curry used to. He was the man who got NT 3.5 (Service pack 3 IIRC) through the C3 certification process. After Microsoft moved the GUI into ring 0 in NT 4.0 he told them flat out that they would not get 4.0 to pass, they told him to lie, he refused. That archive does not document it, but they destroyed his life. He died November of last year from a stress-induced stroke. ..." ~ http://www.perlmonks.org/?node=tilly

I found this article chatting to http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=btilly on this thread ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696#score_2404454 Given the position Ed was in, how would you react?
I agree with the article that good writing is concise and clear, but don't conflate clear and concise with simplistic and short, thinking the only good sentence is a short sentence, as if we should all write like Hemingway in a hurry.

"Vigorous writing is concise...this requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."
- Strunk and White "The Elements of Style"
Headline says twitter is down and all I get linked to is a landing page for something called 'hiredfor'.

Spam.
Freaking amazing speaker
Seems quite interesting, and could turn into an excellent resource.

Could do with an 'About' page explaining a little perhaps?
no seatbelts?
"Act Like an Investor. At the end of each week, ask yourself the following question: Did our actions this past week increase value? What was the ROI on your time spent this past week? If you go 2 weeks in a row or 2 weeks in a month without a positive ROI on your time spent, you’re clearly doing the wrong things."

I feel like this is just good advice for life in general.
Weebly [W07] hiring a System Administrator - Top 100 Quantcast network
The big bang theory season 4 episode 20
Epic's Tim Sweeney on Mobile Gaming
A lot of what pg says is accurate, but this line left me scratching my head, "No one likes the transmission of power between generations—not the left or the right."

This is one of the core tenants of the right, which is to maintain the status quo with respect to power. The easiest way to do this is to end entitlements, get rid of taxes, most importantly the estate tax.
Which you can also have with Google Apps.
So what is this guy's story? I always have to question young success stories like this, because so often they seem to be the result not so much of some kid in high school striking out on his own as a kid with the benefit and resources of either a wealthy family footing the initial bill to get things rolling or a connected family. The problem with some "show" about this stuff is that it would probably overlook the fact that a lot of the success stories you've heard of came not from single parent families where mom is a fry-cook and you live in a tiny apartment in the ghetto, but where mom is a successful business woman and dad works at some big technology firm that gives you all the advice and assistance you need and offers plenty of resources and connections to use for your project and get it off the ground.

I would find a story about a kid who did it all on his own against plenty of odds fascinating. A story of a kid who had an idea and went to his dad who said "let me call Jim at the office and he'll walk you through the VC process and get you off the ground"...? Not so much.
SF Approves Twitter Tax Break Deal
Most of these aren't all that ridiculous.

The worst type of interview question is the "you either know it or you don't" type. There's some special trick to solving it, and it's so overused that half the people being interviewed have heard it before. The "blender" one here is an example -- I've heard it a couple of times before, but I've never thought of a good solution... I guess I'm not sufficiently familiar with blender design. Is it a good move just to wrap myself around the blade shaft?

"Using a scale of 1 to 10, rate yourself on how weird you are.": You could tell a lot about a person (especially a person straight out of college) by their answer to this one. Not sure what I'd give myself. Maybe a 2 pi.

"Explain to me what has happened in this country during the last 10 years." -- sounds like a silly question, but wow you're going to be able to find out a lot about a person's world view by the way they answer that.

"If you could be any superhero, which one would you be?" -- this I don't like. It makes me feel like I'm being interviewed by a nine-year-old. Also, is it too obvious to say Batman? Probably.

"What is your fastball?" -- What? Is this a baseball thing?
…which you also get with Google Apps.

There's no way to set it up without owning a domain!
I wasn't saying it was a bad thing. I was curious how this would have led to people getting money that they should not have gotten.
> The problem here isn't the blame, it's the fact that the maximum possible damage the defendant inflicted (price of song x no of downloads) is still much lower then the prescribed penalty - probably order of magnitudes lower.

I'll concede you that point if you'll let me impose mandatory monitoring of all Internet use sufficient that everyone else who subsequently shared the file can also be caught and fairly prosecuted.

Otherwise, the viral nature of infringement does matter, and trying to cap the damage in absolute terms as you have done here is no more realistic than trying to claim the astronomical sums based on a loss of hypothetical sales that Big Media keep arguing.
Would totally add that! Real problems never get solved in isolation.
Your best bet: Write every single day for at least 15 minutes. Writing isn't a talent, it's a skill.
This guy is a freaking genius.
R. Branson launches Virgin Oceanic, will dive to the deepest points on Earth
I'm not sure that I would brag about running statistical methods on data before I looked at a plot of the data; especially not multiple ones.

Aside from the tree-murdering, your cow-orkers (nice reference) are doing the right thing, at least initially. You should always eyeball things before going to statistical tests.
He's telling the story of how he got MP3.com. Love it.

"Back in those days all the files were on ftp servers not web servers. Well I saw people searching for "mp3" cause it appeared on the bottom of the top 100 list that we would print out. My biz instinct said "if people are searching for it there must be opportunity."
But the barrier to entry to having a presence on Facebook, vs their own website, is so much lower.
telling the story of acquiring mp3.com ... sweet.
Even if they did invest money, would you want to take it? The minimum it's probably worth raising is say, $50K, when you figure that the legal fees alone might run $3-5K. To make the investor a good return on that, you probably need to create a business worth $250K minimum (for a 5X return.) A single-writer blog just isn't going to be worth that much, especially when you consider that you have to subtract your own comp from the profits before calculating the value of the franchise.

If you're going to build a small lifestyle business that has relatively moderate growth trajectory, you need to do it without raising money that expects a big growth rate. If all you need is say 15-20K, just borrow it on a personal basis from a microlending club like LendingClub.

If you're not willing to take that kind of risk? Don't expect anyone else to, either.
Sadly in the real world 90% of IT jobs can be winged by googling snippets and reworking them. Even worse people judge what's on the outside. I worked with a web dev that didn't even know js and didn't have highschool degree, he got the job because he "looked nerdy".

Think about how many times you've worked on a unique and perfect piece of code, only to realize someone's already made it. Usually with clever optimisations you never thought of. So it might be in a different language or framework, but porting it would have been easier than understanding the issue and reworking it.

A good code monkey understands the problem, a good businessman doesn't bother and repackages other people's stuff at a price.

I myself have a compsci degree and upvoted you, but the people in charge often don't get this.
It depends on what you mean by tax evasion. If you are referring to the legal charge that can be brought against someone, then no, it is not. If, however, you used the phrase as a general description, then sure, it may very well be, but there's nothing wrong with it.
clear and concise does not imply perfect grammar :).
It's kind of a vague description, too. I'd be curious to know what is so unique about kiip. It sounds like just another advertising service that is essentially taking the mechanics of Farmville (which are all about advertising Farmville to your friends and leveraging them into playing the game with you) and using that to advertise an entire ad-network worth of content, rather than just gather more Farmville players.

I hope that people are becoming more sensitive to being advertised to, though. I block ads online, so I never see them. Haven't for a decade. I don't watch live television, so I haven't seen ads there for a decade, either. I don't get print magazines, so I don't get ads there. I don't listen to terrestrial radio, so I don't get ads there, either. The only ads I come in contact with other than out in the physical world outside my home are the one or two ads in every hour of certain podcasts that I consume.

As a result, I am kind of taken back by almost any ad that makes it through and gets time in front of my eyes. That's not necessarily a good thing, though, because any ad that I'm confronted with tends to irritate me rather than pique my interest.

I know that the Facebook crowd that is going to play the games in question here is very different, but it's only a matter of time before the shine of the internet wears off and they become sophisticated enough to start questioning things like privacy or advertising.
Impressed with the amount of items moving on the screen at once with very little lag. :) Reminds me of the RType SEGA games!
I am sure that technically it is not a security issue. But when a large scale system is interleaving peoples data and the "don't worry move along" tagline from the BigCo is "This is not a security issue" to downplay the incident is used - it strikes me as funny.

We should all go "OK Cool. Your streams are all cross-farking, but not a security issue. Got it." -- I find that amusing.

I think twitter has an amazing position in the world, but the incessant barrage of technical glitches that appear to plague it make me really curious about what is going on there. Now, I did interview recently there - and while I did not get the job there was a slight bit of behind the kimono and my take-away was that the environment is chaotic. Sure, it could be organized chaos, manageable chaos, good-growth chaos, but chaos none-the-less.

I regret I was not selected to participate.
interesting that people think that apple without steve jobs will still work
really? i whould never buy a iphone again - love my desire
> Hacking a system to create artificial value is not the answer, especially when producing music is becoming cheaper and cheaper.

Copyright isn't useful because it creates artificial value, it's useful because it lets a work with a high production cost be distributed for a low per-copy cost, amortising the initial costs over many consumers. Without some sort of model that allows this, we would be back in the dark ages where magnificent works were produced only by artists with rich patrons.
I just launched an app to make that just a little easier: http://gethirely.com :)

Mostly, it tends to be people you've worked with before. Approaching VC's to build a team is fine, although they will (understandably) question your ability to build a team since you haven't gotten anyone on board yet. Building a team is part of building a startup, and it's not easy. Good luck!
Man, I'd love to contribute to Khan Academy, especially since they've given me so much already. I can't count the number of times Sal's videos have helped me in my AP Physics and Calculus classes this year. It's too bad I'm still in high school.

I actually had an idea, a couple of weeks ago, that it would be really cool to implement some kind of functionality that brought together real time chat and a "blackboard" capabilities (Canvas and node.js?) to the site, so people could discuss certain topics and simultaneously draw out diagrams/problems/etc. I feel like Q.A. for homework/learning could be done a lot better then what we have currently right now (WikiAnswers, Yahoo Answers, etc). Good luck, I'm sure tons of awesome developers will jump at this opportunity.
Microsoft explains how to make PowerPoint decks less crummy
Note, Joseph M. Williams now has 3 different 'Style' books:

Style: Toward Clarity and Grace

Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace

Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace

I can't speak to the first 2, but I purchased the 3rd and found it to be excellent.
To me the headline feature of ZMQ is that I don't need to run an independent server to pass messages around. It's basically a socket with queuing. That reduces my administrative complexity, which is a clear win.
Money quote: "Charts are supposed to illustrate data, not your skills as an artist."
If we're going to be a smartass about it, the question never specifies that we're only looking at integers, so I'm forced to assume we're looking at reals.

Thus the probability of you correctly guessing the correct number within any finite number of guesses is zero.
Ask HN: Did Twitter just revert to #oldTwitter?
I seem to not be the only one, has Twitter reverted?
Or as we say in Pittsburgh, j'eet yet?
MP3.com for $1,500 in 1997 from a guy who's initials were M.P and had no idea what an MP3 was! Classic.
The Surprisingly Normal Demographics Of Biking
There was a tweet that said #newTwitter was revealing the timelines of other users so they shut it down and reverted back to #oldTwitter.
A Salon des Refusés, if you will? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_des_Refus%C3%A9s
Camera+ Developer Provides Inside Look at App Store Success
He said "I don't have a degree"
In response to a post about raising smart kids on Slashdot a long time ago, someone posted this:

"Uh-oh, the ground is trembling, (Score:4, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 29, @08:06AM
Small mammals are scurrying for cover,
All the birds have taken wing.

The hordes of self-proclaimed geniuses who wander the halls of Slashdot approach."

This is possibly the Hacker News equivalent of that topic. It appears impossible to have these discussions without the whole thing degenerating into thinly-concealed self-praise.

'Self-taught' vs 'CS-educated' covers such a wide range as to make the question almost meaningless, in any case. Even among CS-educated people, most of us have progressively forgotten and relearned so much as to have way more in common with 'self-taught' than we'd care to admit. For example, I took computer architecture courses in both undergrad and grad school, but pretty much forgot it all and relearned almost everything that I know about it now in a very different context (high-end x86 that didn't exist back when I took comp arch). Much of what I 'knew' then isn't even true anymore...

And 'self-taught' could mean "ploughed though Cormen, Leiserson and Rivest + TAOCP + SICP + Hennesy&Patterson" while CS-educated can equally mean "took a bunch of Java courses and dodged all the hard stuff I could".
I think this statement is funnily self-negating: "I already understand grammatical structure, the relationships between subject/object/verb and the uses of prepositions." This guy must be learning Romance languages (e.g. surprise! he's learning Portugese) since languages outside of this family differ in a lot of ways. E.g. all the things here can and do differ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_language#Linguistic_fea...

This sort of euro-centric natural language egalitarianism seems to bleed over into his thoughts about programming languages as well, e.g. those expressed in this statement:

"Learning a new language simply teaches me to communicate the same thoughts and feelings but in a different way."

This is wholly false. Languages differ with respect to their requirements for self-description. These requirements, when propagated into code through the actions of a large community, shape the types of programs that are written and how those programs can be expected to interact.

For instance, part of the reason that Haskell programs can be very short, is that the type system on which Haskell is based is extremely deeply thought out and based on a rich mathematical framework. This framework allows the programs to be self-describing in a consistent and meaningful way and for that self-description to be used to express ideas more clearly.

Ruby is self-reflecting through a sort of imperative set of meta-programming techniques. This allows "conventions" to exist in ruby code which enables a framework like rails.

Etc. etc.

When will people realize that not all languages are created the same? Language shapes culture and culture shapes language. Once you put a stick in the ground and decide where features will be located and how they will be inter-related you are planting the seed for all sorts of complicated emergent behavior.

It's true for natural languages and for programming languages. This guy just seems to have missed the ticket.
Blog.

Please?
If you don't feel rested after 7 hours you probably should make an effort to sleep an extra hours. You will be more productive and happy in 16 hours after a good sleep, than in 17 sleep-deprived hours.
I really like this post. A lot. The idea that just throwing money at something will in some way keep it alive is kind-of silly.

The closest you'll come to this if you have ONLY a paid option, which would eliminate the free users, and make the system far smaller and more manageable, in which case there WOULD be more up-time because people were paying.

But I agree, to to think a small subset of paying users will have any affect on the up-time of a major site is just a pipe dream.
Evercookie isn't evil, it's just a tool; it's how you use it that matters. Using it to keep track of users for spam or troll purposes is perfectly fine to me.
I'm glad I finally have some statistics to show my Apple fanboy friends. For far too long have I heard that Android apps suck. You have to be discerning, but the good apps are really good.
Why Social Media Will improve the Profitability of Your company in 2011
I don't think theres any justification for piracy.

That being said, there is no way to own music. A musician owns a copyright. He has to choose if it's worth the effort to enforce that copyright or think of a way to thrive despite piracy.
A humble, semi-off-topic suggestion: develop the knowledge maps for all the (planned in the near future) courses first, then let anyone submit both video lectures and evaluation questions and answers.
Of course. I agree 100%. But this is different than the question I am asking. I'm not asking about what the legal consequences of music piracy should be, but how music piracy can be ethically justified.