skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm working on a new-car research site that's intended to make researching new-model-year vehicles suck less. Right now, it sucks. Sifting through MFR sites looking for info / styles / colors that set vehicles apart is time consuming and boring.

The site is http://autoswatch.com
TOP 10 Best Free Online Virus Scanners
My cocktail title at 37signals is "Product Manager," so whatever experiments are going on with management aren't completely past tense. I do UI design, work with the programmers, help design and dev work together and contribute strategy ideas to the partners.

Despite the cocktail title, there still isn't a clear "path of authority" or anything like that. The buck stops at the partners, and the rest of us function like a meritocracy. The ones with a track record or expertise on a given topic have a respected voice, and there is always opportunity for expertise to shift or widen over time. It's that fuzzy-edged quality to the role that makes it feel experimental for me.
I'm the first one to be skeptical about the universal feasibility of 37signals bootstrapping principles (that's an easy philosophy to espouse when your product was bootstrapped by leveraging early success in client work and community mindshare in what was a nascent market at the time), but your dripping cynicism is quite offputting. The fact that Jason's ideals serve his interests is not necessarily an indication of of any machiavellian scheme. In fact if you think about it, this is a necessary byproduct of the marketing of ideas by anyone with integrity.
Totally Agree! Matter of fact building something right now to do just that... Hopefully will have something to show by end of this month!
Ask PG: Any update on releasing founding docs?
There was talk about it over a year ago- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=579872. Did they ever get released? I haven't found them by searching.

I understand if they won't be released, but it can't hurt to ask.

Thanks!
Completely quixotic. Twitter wants to own the client experience and as owner of the platform, they have the power to do so.

Twitter's now-infamous developer group post also listed a number of areas Twitter doesn't want to own. Reading between the lines, they're giving client companies the opportunity to transition to another line of business. If the client companies don't take the hint, Twitter's going to eventually play hardball.
i'm wondering about the main design principle of the reactor cores - by default they are "hot", ie. producing heat/energy, so one needs to make effort to keep them "cold", ie. non-producing heat/energy. This hot-by-default principle was the main reason of Chernobyl catastrophe and here as well.

Why not reverse the principle and design the cold-by-default core? For example, instead of inserting graphite rods into the core to calm it down, one would need to insert additional uranium rods (or pump molten uranium salt, or move the 6-8-12 pieces of core close enough, etc...) for the reactor to activate and become "hot".
Thought experiment: "How much more difficult is it to build a startup with someone else than just by yourself?"
This is just confirmation bias. Page credits "part of that training of not following rules and orders, and being self-motivated, questioning what’s going on in the world, doing things a little bit differently." As a Montessori kid myself, I could see myself having differing opinions depending on how the future turned out.

Successful: go back and credit Montessori for making me a rebellious, curious nonconformist.

Unsuccessful: go back and partially blame Montessori for those same values, that make navigating this world of rules and structures difficult.

PG's writings would make me think that he leans more towards the Montessori side of things, and probably a lot of HNers are the same. I'm glad jsavimbi spoke about his need for strong discipline.
Of course he had lots of flaws. But he does deserve a pedestal, actually. (All those folks on pedestals have flaws; some of them don't deserve their pedestal at all; Feynmann does.)

Also, I don't think he was a very "normal person". Being that brilliant tends to make you not very normal -- although he could impersonate a particularly sharp "normal person" if it seemed advantageous.

Read some anecdotes about his career and life -- for instance, the time he had a concussion and acted weird for about three weeks before anyone thought something was really the matter. That's not a "normal person".

It seems to me that you're letting your desire to not idolize him, get in the way of recognizing the reality of his genius and what he accomplished. That's not fair to reality.
Ah, whoops - that's the one, you're right.
You called what a while ago? I don't see anything in there about TweetDeck making a Web version.
10,000-core Linux supercomputer built in Amazon cloud
HPC vendor Cycle Computing recently built a 10,000-core Linux cluster on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, in what might have been the largest HPC deployment to date on the Amazon service.
I'm under the impression they fitted only the most basic operations, and the surprise was that the bigger picture followed too, as if the program and the human brain were following the same steps.
Replied back to your email. Will talk more. Be back around 7:00 EST (I am in Michigan). Definitely interested.
A Ph.D in most biological sciences would only teach you enough to get through the first year of medical school (although in far more detail than you need for medicine). The last 2 years of medical school are a practical application of your coursework as you work with residents and more senior doctors to diagnose and treat patients. Medical school still follows the old guild model where you do some initial learning and then a long period of apprenticeship before you are allowed to go off on your own.

That's why combined PhD/MD programs still take about 7 years - and that's not including residency and fellowships if you decide to actually practice medicine instead of becoming a scientist.

disclaimer - not a doctor, but did a biological PhD and have several family members who just completed their MDs.
I'm kind of surprised at how most of my former co-workers will not put the common name of the company (which is not offensive or profane) on their resumes and put the legal name instead (the legal name is pretty generic-sounding). Some have even requested that I change the name on my LinkedIn profile or mark it as "I worked with so-and-so at different companies" so they won't be directly associated with it.

Maybe it's just a scarcity mentality thing; they're worried about turning off potential employers, but when you're constantly getting contacted by recruiters I guess it's hard to feel like it's a disadvantage.
PG describes that the emotional lows of a startup are dulled with the support of a cofounder. Having very supportive and interested friends helps this as well, although probably not as much.
I really enjoy using Rapportive. The only thing I feel it lacks is the ability to join my personal address book in Gmail and my contacts in Google Apps (without merging the libraries, but just searching in both for data and notes).
Ha, in one of my physics classes the professor actually set pi = 1 :)
That’s the future lawmakers, inventors, and designers need to start thinking about, because it’s coming. They need to envision a not-too-far-off future where 3D printers are as common as inkjet printers and users trade 3D designs as fluidly as they exchange URLs. And they need to think about how to use the law to vindicate IP rights without stifling innovation.

Perhaps when scarcity has been vanquished to this degree it might be time to start thinking about growing out of all of this "IP ownership" rent-seeking as a society.
The Midas List
What to write what your target market likes
Writing efficient CSS
Good cofounders are better than no cofounders is better than bad cofounders.
Tevatron data suggests new, unknown particle—but not the Higgs
Also, sometimes the cheese is Gouda. When the cheese is Gouda, it is the cheese of customer service, and the job of the person standing above the maze it to identify if there is Gouda and where it is. But sometimes the cheese is Emmenthaler, and when the cheese is Emmenthaler, then there is a rule† that the Gouda manager and the Emmenthaler manager must share the cheese or else by finding maze paths that don't connect directly to each other immediately but eventually do connect get more Gouda than Emmenthaler or vice versa, in which case they take all the cheese, and you can see now that this might possibly be the most least helpful analogy ever constructed to make a point on a message board ever.

I promise it is all love with me and this comment.

Without employing any additional analogies, I believe I can respond to your underlying point by suggesting that in a well-managed organization, one President or CEO can structure roles such that everyone is clear about the business value they provide and can manage their effort accordingly. This requires that you be careful about who you hire, what roles you create, and how you scale the company.

It does not however require that you not scale your company past 20 people.

That strategy, however, will not work in the (bad) kind of Silicon Valley startup that grows by buying Pasteurized Processed Product Managers. Your CS reps need to know what "service" means and how your specific customers perceive and value it. That can be hard to do. Thus, some companies probably do need management structures.

† Though only in the US edition that Rio Grande publishes, not the original German game
Good point. I'd still like to see them bring something new to the table. Their embeddable widgets are literal copies of Facebook's widgets, for example. I wonder what additional value they could create by being original and not simply reacting to competition.
Java has generics too.

Yeah, unfortunately they're implemented via type erasure, unlike in C#, where they're actually part of the type system (for example, since C# 4.0 generics can be covariant and/or contravariant on the type parameters).
This is great - I've been using Rapportive, and I also use Google Contacts as my main address book.

The problem with Google Contacts, for me, has been that it takes a long time to load --- sometimes as long as 20 seconds. I've always found this odd, and expected it to speed up eventually, because Google is supposed to be obsessed by speed...
Ask HN: Recommended resources for Small Business Owners and Entrepreneurs?
Think back to when you were getting started as an entrepreneur: What information or resources do you wish you had known about?

I'm building a resource library for Small Business Owners and Entrepreneurs who are writing their business plans.

Here's a few examples of the types of resources I'm looking for:

* Fred Wilson's MBA Mondays - A primer on business and business school.

* A Smart Bear's Startup Lessons - Advice on pitching your business plan for an audience and the mistakes to avoid.

* 5 Minute Guide to Cheap Startup Advertising - Primer on startup advertising resources

What resources do you wish you had been recommended as you got started as an entrepreneur?
Indeed. That is the case in many places throughout the Twin Cities and I doubt it is unique to this region.
The only problem I see with this is in cases where you sign in from multiple devices. How would each device know which x (for h^x(p)) you are on? Is that something the server sends to each device at login time? Would that be a security risk? I don't know a lot about this so these may be stupid questions.
If you're a high profile established player in a competitive space I can see it making sense, especially if you need the element of surprise for a launch. An example of this would be Nintendo making a phone.

However if you're a startup and nobody knows who you are it seems a bit foolish. By the way I would assume that anyone who isn't well know who is in stealth mode doesn't quite know what they're doing yet.
s/rapper/$475 million businessman
This guy sounds like every microelectronics prof ever. :) I took that to heart when doing the exams and it make the impossible possible.
In-N-Out - New Yorkers
Neat. It makes sense that you'd have a fast-path for deflecting objects that are suddenly in your face.

Lots of interesting stuff here on factors affecting reaction time: http://biae.clemson.edu/bpc/bp/Lab/110/reaction.htm#Type%20o...

Your experiment must have been set up differently though - the fastest time they mention is 180msec for teenagers.
I live on 20 acres in Oregon with fiber to the house, my quality of life here is MUCH higher.

I also live in a state that hasn't yet tried to turn me into a criminal because I owned an object that was purchased legally.

The fact that the bay area also lives at the expense of the valley (stealing water). That and the general regulatory environment pisses me off (I consider myself an Anarcho-capitalist).

I've spent approximately 5 years of my life in the bay area, and grew up in California. I've been gone for 10 years now and I refuse to move back until property values drop to 1999 levels (adjusted for inflation), the state has the ability to live with in its means, and also a complete 180 on certain laws.
I'm the type of person who would work at 37signals. If I were to leave 37signals, any job that I would be applying to would have heard of 37signals and presumably my work there would speak for itself. If I got nixed because of detailed line-wise consideration of my CV I would take that as a sign that I was better off far away from that company.
Better add rel="nofollow" too. Or do you want to vouch for all these pages? If your PR rises, expect people to create plain-text systems just to get a dofollow link.

Also, do you check each and every service you put up? Or do you trust the random internet visitor to always do the right thing? Are you ready for and ok with any collateral damage?
If you're interested in hearing more about it, she was on Dan Benjamin's Daily Edition in February:

http://5by5.tv/dailyedition/25
Your comment presupposes that there aren't any proven models of self-management.
> the parents of people who care enough about their education to enroll them in a montessori school...

Really? You think it's just a matter of caring enough to make it so? I think I'd phrase this differently -- that the parents of people who have the means to send them to a montessori school probably would have the means to give them other advantages in life as well, so their kids are probably going to do pretty well regardless.
IMHO, turn the colors down a bit :) I would look deeper at the site, but the bright colors against the black background made me feel a bit headache. On the positive note, it seems full of energy and enthusiasm & cool content.
That's true, although the average age for a scientist to land a tenure track position is in their late 30s, after several postdocs (where you are barely paid more than a graduate student). Ican't find the citation at the moment, but I believe it came from the NIH.
Until we have robots that are creative enough to create the actual item (not copy), we still have scarcity: not everyone has the skills to make the song, movie, or anything else that can be copied.

Currency is just paper and ink that has a perceived value, why should IP be any different?
AT&T's iPhone 4 drops 2.5 times as many calls as Verizon's
Bloomberg gives startups the keys to NYC data
I'm building a SaaS offering to develop test data and validation tools for the ediscovery market. There are no mechanisms in place at present to show that an ediscovery process worked as expected. Courts require testing of all sorts of other processes that produce evidence, but not so ediscovery. We think we've got this solved.
No. E-mail is an unencrypted, unauthenticated protocol; how could sending out plain text passwords over a plain text protocol ever be a good idea?
Yocto Project turns 1.0 brings common embedded Linux tools
I've always thought soda is the ultimate example. Tons of players, big and small, even though Coke "owns it" by practically every metric. 100% market share is extremely rare.
My CS professor used to joke that they used foot pedals for open / close paren.
LinkedIn Announces Facebook-Like Tentacles for the Web
In France there is a related system, "les Compagnons du devoir". However, it exists for carpenters, masons, sculptors, bakers, etc. Almost all hand crafts, in fact. They must travel around the country to learn their craft, and present a "masterpiece" as a proof they master it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnons_du_Tour_de_France
The premise of this article is flawed at best. Once it's established that one firm in an industry has a clear advantage, it doesn't make sense to say "Competition doesn't matter. Look at X" because that's selection bias. Of course at that point that firm X has succeeded, but not because there was no competition, but because, for some reason, X beat its competition either on the product, marketing/positioning, or otherwise.
Why don't you just split into two little 37signalses when the time comes?

In all the proposals / solutions mentioned here for dealing with growth while maintaining a flat culture, this is one approach I haven't seen yet. It worked well for a Dutch consultancy firm called BSO, which reached over 6000 people in the 90's, all organised into near-independent little companies of 50-ish people each, all targeting a different market, but each with the same culture and values. The firm itself was a flat company of these little companies (called "cells"), so effectively there were just 2 to 3 layers of management.

(http://www.extent.nl/articles/entry/origins-original/ if you care about the details)
Using HTML5 sensibly and Multimedia on the web
Also, more progressive, experimental parents are more likely to send their kids to Montessori schools, but kids raised by such parents are likely to be more progressive and experimental anyway.
My work is very fulfilling - that's why I want to do both.
Looks good! Simple app that'll get users.. not too sure how much though. What're your plans to grow it?
Google tests game-mechanics strategies with Recyclebank
Poll: What type of preschool did you attend?
The Montessori Mafia article had me wondering about HNers and preschool. My wife always talks about the first five years being the most important; since HN readers are generally considered both intelligent and creative, I wondered what the numbers look like (using a completely unscientific poll).
Montessori
Reggio Emilia
Steiner-Waldorf
Head Start Program
Forest Kindergarten
High/Scope Approach
Religious Preschool
Other Preschool
No Preschool
A possibly more precise way of expressing this thought is: "Competition from big players doesn't necessarily equate to a death sentence to small players".

Had a similar thought yesterday: "Google Code and Launchpad are run by big players, yet Github is the real leader. Yet another argument against "XYZ big corp might smash us"." - http://twitter.com/clemesha/status/55400961652441088
Managers can be useful to say "no" to business. Otherwise you have business asking for a new feature every other day. Even if the engineer says no, it's still an unnecessary distraction and time killer to listen to everyone's proposals.
I should explain further. I started out with Dropbox and am almost at the limit. I don't have disposable income (startup founder). So I started looking for alternatives - that's when I discovered Skydrive.

PS. Have you tried Zumodrive - it's almost exactly like Dropbox.
What? I'm lost.
Doctorow's Printcrime: http://craphound.com/?p=573
I agree. This premise is really based on specific markets/niches/products.
Every russian professor I had loved gaussian units.

I learned to love them too. Everything is simpler when you don't have 3-5 constants staring you in the face.
Timeglider jQuery Plugin/Widget
There are a whole host of intangibles that will probably break down by individual employee. An employee may have to move to a different location for personal reasons where the only option is a job that hires via HR drone.

A large part of management structure in the first place is to try to insulate the organization against changes at any level. Want to replace the entire C suite and the board? No problem... business goes on as usual. With this structure, the company becomes highly dependent on the people at the very top. Any changes there might have the effect of blowing up the whole organization, because there are only a few people who are unquestionably in charge. I think there are lots of benefits from trying to reshape the corporate org chart, as I mentioned in another post, but it is also dangerous to be overly idealistic in terms of how your employees regard this structure and the risk they place on working under it. If most of them feel its appropriate, then I suppose there is no problem. However, I wouldn't automatically assume that's the case, just because they have chosen to work without a title. Also, a large part of their continued work at the firm may have to do with their relationship with you personally, which may put the long term viability of the business at risk.
Would have to disagree with competition being bad, its not the cure all, thats for sure, but its not pointless by any means. AT&T proved this quite well when they had a monopoly of the telephone system. Innovation was on its door step, but it had no motivation to let it in, because they were the only gig in town. Competition in the business world also keeps you on your toes. The initial idea, the building of the business, might motivate to start, but a threat of competition keeps you trying to improve for the long haul. Perhaps there is a distinction in there, competition is great for the end users, it gives them better products, for business it makes a sporting event out of it, where you can win or loose. Competition is good of course when, the people competing play nice, and strive to be the best at what they do, and actually make a better product. Instead of doing what ever it takes, no matter how dirty to win. Where then its not about a competition of skill in the chosen market, its about cutting down the competition so you look better. Sort of like patent squatters, nothing to do with the skill of creating a great product, and everything to do with profiting off someone else taking it from idea to product.
Hmm, whilst it's true physicists often simplify equations to really understand the problem, I can't think of a variable in quantum mechanics we "don't know to within 2 orders of magnitude". Especially one called alpha, which usually denotes the fine structure constant, which we know to better than 1 in a billion...

Anyone have some thoughts on what it could be, if true?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant
Kern, Baby, Kern: A Relationship in Typographical Terms
This is an amazing guest post: a short story by Alexa Lash – a writer, editor, and on-the-spot poet. Former Floridian and resident Bostonian, she has written for the Seminole Chronicle, Momslikeme, and the Central Florida Future, and is currently studying Publishing at Emerson College. Illustration by Dave Mott.
Homeschooling parent here. I need to get more personal experiences up on my personal website.

http://learninfreedom.org/

I've launched one child into adulthood (he is deeply interested in the start-up culture, which is one reason I hang out here on Hacker News) and have three more coming up. Interaction with other curious young people is crucial while growing up. Any school experience that encourages that is worthwhile at least in part, while any school experience that ends up discouraging curiosity (as a remarkable variety of schools do) is to be avoided.

P.S. I finally had a chance to tour Exeter this year while high school shopping. Exeter does have an interesting approach with the Harkness table for all classes and the problem-solving-based curriculum.
"Wanderschaft" is the German noun used especially for the carpenters journey.