skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The paper is unconvincing. Sure, there's some mathematical similarity between Pagerank and the Schroedinger equation (they're both just eigenvector problems anyway, as I understand it) but they haven't really demonstrated that bringing in the QM formalism actually assists with calculating anything.

The "X could revolutionize Y" headline is even less convincing.
You mean like the iPods? Over time I've been conditioned to be dubious of some words such as "free", especially in capitals.
Net address bug worse than feared
At my last startup, I spent about a year in sales. It was out of necessity: after having conceived, designed and built the new product it needed to be sold. And the stuff that made it really shine was different and subtle. Which meant the story kept having to change to figure out what mattered and resonated.

The time on the road w/ the sales team was invaluable. I learned more in that year then I had in the past five at the company: creating a story, telling it well, listening to the customer and their pain points, deciding how to approach a new client, working up a quote, determining the relative value of a customer and more.

It has paid off handsomely in my current work. And I have much more appreciation for how sales work and how sales guys think.
I think the game was Majestic by EA.
That occurred to me as well. A more rigorous analysis would have performance numbers with only different combinations of optimizations turned on, including the new hardware. If you have a single experiment but change multiple variables, you have no way of knowing which variable or combination of variables is what makes the difference.
My insurance agent who is a top producer told me that the only way to learn sales is by doing it for at least 6 months. She said that initial half-year will suck (e.g. make sure you have 6 month living savings to support yourself) but the experience with rejection and learning the difference between productivity and activity is worth it. It really doesn't matter what you try to sell either.
Why Jakob's Wrong About Always Setting a "Visited Link" Color
Sorry but to say Amsterdam isn't a startup hub, is just silly. There are many startups here and although not all are massive there are some pretty big ones: Soocial, E-buddy and TomTom just to name a few. I think Amsterdam's ambition (in the PG sense) is 'be more creative' - which fits perfectly with creating a value added service.

I think if you find the right people to network with you'll find there are quite a few cool startups and conversations to be had - that I think will rival SV conversations.
Chefs don't have lackeys to sharpen their knives every night. $100 knives are vanity items. Working chefs all buy $20-$30 knives. Celebrity chefs have $200 knives because they get them for free.
I think this is a good antithesis to some the hype that you read about growing a big business on the "next big thing", people taking millions from venture capitalists before selling to Google and the like. Rather it focuses on doing something you love, making a small business out of it through organic growth and not seeing selling your company, community or soul.

I think this is underrated - you don't hear much about this approach which should be painfully obvious.
Twitkit FTW
Why Did GlobalGrind Drop The Tech Category?
How to Write an Ebook Without Writing a Single Word Yourself
Okay folks, Cory here with another great post on ebook publishing that I think most you who want to write an ebook but don’t have the time will enjoy. You see, you don’t have to do everything anymore these days. And what I mean by that is you can get somebody else to do it for you.
You're right. I haven't completely settled on this yet, but I may want to take just the founder->CTO route, rather than founder->CEO. A CTO would have to deal with a lot less in sales/customer-service/etc. (I find a small dose of these fun, but couldn't tolerate them as >50% of my job.)

The extreme example of this is Steve Wozniak I think, who didn't even want to be top technical guy in his company; he just wanted to be an engineer.
(Edited, 6:06 pm)

Good point, and it's probably reasonable to make statements like "most integers are not prime" or "perfect numbers are very rare among the integers". However, I'd still disagree with the use of percentages. For example, "0% of integers" are prime, in the sense that primes become arbitrarily sparse as N -> infinity, but primes clearly exist, which doesn't conform with our concept of "0%".

The set of even numbers intuitively seems to be "50%" the size of the integers, but they're actually sets of the same "size", because there is a bijection between them. So I'm not fully comfortable with saying "50% of integers are even" even though it's intuitively true. A lot of intuitively true things are false with infinite sets. For example, we generally assume commutativity of addition to the point that we might believe:

1/1 - 1/2 + 1/3 - 1/4 + 1/5 - 1/6 + ... =
1/1 + 1/3 - 1/2 + 1/5 + 1/7 - 1/4 + ...,

because both sums contain the same terms, only in different order, and in finite sums we can rearrange terms in any way we wish. However, the sums converge to different values, and terms of such a sum (conditionally but not absolutely convergent) can be rearranged so as to converge to any real value.

However, we can both agree that the probability of choosing an even integer from {1..n} (or {-n..n}) -> 0.5 as n -> infinity.
Okay, folks, you drove me to the books -- or rather to the Cooks Illustrated website, which no self respecting geek who cooks should fail to subscribe to. They ran lots of knives through tests and recommended the Forschner Victorinox Fibrox Chef's Knife, which cost $25.33 in 2005.

So, I lied. You might not want to use a $20 knife. You shouldn't spend a penny less than $26. ;)

Note that this is a brand-name product. Wouldn't be surprised to see the no-brand version at a supply store for $19.

Note also that knives are a personal thing. If the cheap one doesn't fit your hand you'll want a more expensive one. C'est la vie.

It's true that keeping your knife sharp is really important. Unfortunately, you can dull an expensive knife as easily as a $25 knife. You should get a steel and try to figure out how to use it. You should get your knife sharpened when you sense it's getting dull, or you'll injure yourself. You should use the right cutting board. You should have a knife that's all your own and hide it from other people, lest they smash the edge into a solid metal object. You should watch Alton Brown's show about knives to learn these things.

Mr. Brown recommends pro sharpening because he thinks all the homegrown solutions suck by comparison. Cook's Illustrated, OTOH, recommends the $80 Chef's Choice 110 electric home sharpener, which you can afford with the money you saved on that $110 chef's knife.

Pro chefs carry more than one knife, in a case. You also need more than one, but not many more. In his book, Anthony Bourdain (famous pro chef) recommended a chef's knife, a flexible boning knife, a paring knife, and an offset serrated knife. Alton Brown (famous geek pro chef) also suggests kitchen shears and a 4 to 5 inch utility knife. Cook's Illustrated suggests that you might want a slicing knife if you carve a lot of roasts (alas, I don't; I married a vegetarian), or a cleaver if you often make homemade chicken stock (see above).

You'll also need some steak knives if you're not married to a vegetarian like I am. ;)
Federal regulations already set that constraint no matter what the hiring manager says.
I suspect the absence of quantities in the book is more a product of the book publishing process than of any intent to deceive. Recall that Stephen Hawking was told that 'every equation will drop sales by half.' But a lack of presented evidence doesn't imply that the thesis is wrong.

Once you look, you find that the theory corresponds much more nicely to reality than the theory of genius commonly held: namely, that early success is a good predictor of later, great works. From what I know of history, in mathematics, art, architecture, music, physics, leadership, hacking, dance, there truly are distinct examples of prodigies and late bloomers. And it's enlightening to hear how he describes the difference in creative approach. For example, when I was a kid, the production of my work was only a hindrance. I had a concept or idea or visualization that I wanted to communicate, and I would tell people, literally, that I wish only that I had 'a projector in my head'.

But many people, who's work I've come to respect deeply, rely instead on the resistance of their medium, the feedback of an audience, the taste of what they create, rely upon pursuing little accidents they stumble upon along the way as clues to help them find the form they seek. And I can tell just how different it is from a conceptual approach, and how patient and observant and diligent one must be to achieve its mastery.
A CTO would have to deal with a lot less in sales/customer-service/etc.

Not really. In fact in many cases it's the opposite.

CTO's of highly technical startups are sometimes the company's best salesman, since no one understands the technology better than them, and they are out evangelizing their product, meeting a lot of prospects.

There are quite a few companies where CTO's are glorified sales reps, but this typically happens in larger companies and not startups.
Three words: design by committee.
Inside(ish) scoop on MobileMe Problems
You are wrong. This may be the case if it is directly from a bank account, but not from a credit card.

Regardless, the way that the Apple store tricked his muscle memory by not having a confirmation page borders on fraudulent. If they would not reverse this honest mistake when you present the situation to them, then I would have no problem perusing this by other means.
"I do however see his point about client-side Ruby for rails application and such being a selling point. If that applies to the current Ruby-community? We'll see how it turns out."

Right now you can do client-side Ruby for Rails|Ramaze|Merb|Whatever using JRuby.

It rules.

Except there seems to be a weird But It's Java! revulsion in some of the Ruby communities.
About RIM's security: if you run a BES, you alone control the keys used to encrypt data between the Blackberries and your BES. Even though the messages pass through RIM's servers, all they know is the routing information to get it to your BES.

I remember something recently where (I believe) the Indian government demanded RIM hand over the keys to the BESes run by private Indian corporations. RIM said they could not, because they did not have them.

Edit: Here's an article describing their security in more detail: http://seclists.org/isn/2008/May/0119.html (apparently, the encryption I'm talking about is an add-on feature -- news to me)
If it's evangelizing to other hackers/engineers, that would still be fun.
Oh, damn, it's too late to edit my post. I think I misremembered "Global" as a line of cheaper knives... they're a good brand, but I'm not sure they're cheap, so they're not the ones I was thinking of.
Ask YC: Need a bit of advice, fellow student is screwing me over on this website.
I confess to being a total moron for not getting anything in writing.

Anyway: I was offered $500 to write a database-backed web app and missed one deadline they gave me. There were a couple occasions where I said I hoped to have it done soon, but didn't. Anyway, they never specificed exactly what they wanted, so I pushed out a functional version that had the general aesthetic they wanted, figuring that I could add in other changes once they played around with it a bit. I also had to pay about $300 in hosting, since their hosting wasn't set up to serve anything more than static HTML.

Because they think I missed "several" deadlines and the site wasn't what they were imagining, they now want to pay me only $500, instead of $500 plus hosting. Effectively, only $200 for my work. My question: should I bargain or just take their new offer, or take down the site? I'm considering bargaining, because the guy's part of an organization, and I'd like the rest of the members to hear my side. What I was thinking was to cc the other person I know in their organization with a defense and a request for the full amount. Thoughts?

Edit: I can cancel the hosting within the next couple weeks and get that money back, so keeping the code and walking away doesn't hurt me financially.
I think part of the obsession is that it capitalizes on people's wish to express themselves. Not all of us have the talent to write coherent essays or draw click-worthy pictures, but all of us have the ability to create short soundbite-like comments, and most of us think we are delicate unique snowflakes with interesting lives.

Furthermore, tweets by its very form excludes the responsibility of having to explain one's thought. Welcome to the Brave New World of communication: No preamble, no annecdote, no characters, no setup-climax-resolution, no redaction of logic, no point and counter point, no analysis, no data, no citations needed. There is no "reason to be" -- there just is.
Hackers/engineers come in various flavors, some are super smart &fun, some are clueless, some suffer from NIH (not invented here), some would think its easy to build what you have, etc.

Ultimately, you have to evangelize to folks that will buy your product, that is the key :-)
No they don't. Ebay doesn't have one-click ordering that I'm aware of.
That's weird. I copied and pasted this URL directly from paulgraham.com, expecting it to take me to the previously-submitted post, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=254335 . (So I was using "submit" as a ghetto search mechanism.) But instead, a new post was created because my URL had no "www." in it. Ah well...

(I commented on this mainly for the benefit of the admins; I'm about to delete this post.)
Don't be so quick to embrace your own ignorance.
Gojko Adzic » Paying programmers: are bonuses bad and what to do about it?
"Online backups for the truly paranoid" is something I've been wanting for a while now. Good luck!
wow! can I run Photoshop CS3 on this?
Certainly, from what I've seen, you can easily get away with little work at grad school.
It would be good to change the title to "On Time Management". It shouldn't matter that Terry Tao wrote it, or that he won a Fields Medal.
It's what's interesting, not what's new.
When selling up becomes selling out
I do know. The mushrooms on my pizza, however, weren't grown by planting spores in a poor animal's head and growing and growing until its exoskeleton cracked.
The one piece I disagree with is that you should pick the knife that feels most comfortable to you, be it 19 or 99. My knife is a santoku that I bought for a little too much but as much as I use it, I can't complain one bit.
Elaborate Facebook Worm Spreading
I read about this probably 5 years ago and I did a bit of reading on it.

The fact this can happen is that dogs only have around 13 blood types, where as humans have 26. The reason humans have 26 blood types is likely this exact problem, humans are a highly sexually active and stupid species, I mean look at the propogation of sexual infections in the UK even with free cures and free condoms (I'm not joking, you can get condoms for free and people don't use them!).

The significant thing in canines is that up to 45% of dogs are universal recipients. Basically the cancer has a 50/50 chance of finding a perfect host. No wonder DFTD is so lethal, in most cases the host body will just let the infection in.

However, it's lucky there isn't a feline varient of this disease as IIRC upto 80% of cats in North America are blood type A.
* Of course I think I take a certain geeky pleasure from this knowledge, to be able to disabuse people of their quaint, deluded notions of life having mystical attributes*

1. Evolution does not disprove a vitalistic or "mystical" explanation for the origin and progress of life.

2. The "mystical" position has lost no ground to scientific advances, although rigid systems of belief (e.g. creationism) have. Atheism has existed for thousands of years; presumably, it's as old as theism. The partial retreat of Christianity from mainstream Euro-American life has to do with cultural forces, not science.
Get your App out of Facebook and to the World
Are you a developer? Do you want to develop your apps outside of social networks? Vysr’s RoamAbout is both a browser plug-in and Web application development platform that allows consumers to carry and use their favorite Web services and social networks wherever they go on the Web. We just launched our developer platform and featured in Business Week and PC World.

Benefits to App developers
Web service developers no longer need to have their services shackled to a few sites. They no longer have to develop their own toolbars or browser extensions to make their services available anywhere on the Web. With an extremely simple registration of their existing service, Web service developers can make their application available via the RoamAbout platform instantaneously.

Business model
RoamAbout is available as a free download to consumers. Registering the apps for use within the RoamAbout is free for app developers. Developers can use any business model they choose, including a subscription-based or adsupported models with no arrangement necessary with Vysr.
For more information contact Vysr at bernie.balla@vysr.com and visit www.vysr.com.
Its not a bad idea, but I think it misses the potential that YC was suggesting.

Read the book 'Making Things Talk' - think about the potential of measuring things in the analog world, temperature, weight, flow, force, sound, etc, and correlating these things with enterprise data.

Maybe you can start off by measuring things like heartrate, blood glucose levels, physical mobility, dietary intake, etc. For instance, if someone is stressed all day, this probably is going to correlate with productivity.
Tell them your fee is $800 ($500 for the work and $300 for hosting). If they don't pay you don't deliver the product.

Edit 1: Or tell them your fee is $500, not including $300 hosting.
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 50 - Dump my BIG-IP
I think this implementation would work at least as well as state of the art modern management techniques do. It's a decent idea.

I've daydreamed about something similar. Not sure whether it would be better or worse, but my implementation would limit the amount each person can give, per month. I also struggled with the idea of making it a token economy. Thoughts?
I'm not so sure about that. Most literature about time management is terrible, so, you tend to ignore it unless the one writing seems to have something to say. And Terry Tao is a great achiever, and also somebody who seems to be doing many useful things at once all the time. Certainly I do care that he's the one that wrote the article... otherwise probably I wouldn't have even read it.
Doggyspace.com has its day as social sites get more focused
I understand where you are coming from. Some of those calculations might be based on, for a lack of a better term, VC math, meaning if you are in the process of raising a series A, the VC might value your company (pre-money) at say 4 million, give you a A round of 2 million and own 50% of the company.

BTW: When are you launching?
Video Chat site TokBox gets Series B $10M
5 Books on Corporate Social Media
The Power of Understanding and Solving Problems
Shady? Looks like incompetent to me -- from the blog:

The site is back up. The server probably got overheated because it worked this morning when we booted it up. Turning it off for a night helped!
Could someone have said "that page starts off with a huge close up of an insect"? I freaked as soon as it popped up and had to close my eyes.
Hm, so adding you into the total, half are for just eating the cost, and half are for going after the original fee. Aah!

Thanks a lot for responding though.
Was the hosting expense approved by them? Rather than "bargaining" I think you'd get a lot more out of listening and really trying to understand what their expectations were. That way you'll know more with your next client.

One thing about consulting is that it really pays to over communicate, ask for lots of approvals, and capture as much of it in email as possible. Be direct:

"Even though we've talked numerous times, the requirements still seem too general for me to correctly implement the product. What I'd like to do is produce something that's in the general aesthetic so that we have something concrete to talk about. I will upload this version by 8/18. Do you approve?"
The federal regulations regarding overtime are very easy to work around. Regardless, it is always a better idea to agree to explicitly agree to terms up front instead of implicitly relying on what the law says; the law is a means of last resort.

Plus, for the right amount of money, a lot of people will be happy to ignore the federal regulations. I would take $10K a week for 80 hour weeks, for example.
This idea if implemented would measure niceness (political sleekness) but not productivity.
I think the "for dummies" is both humorous (as much so as a how-to book can be) and descriptive. It's good to embrace your ignorance, that's the only way to cure it.
Please, read the article, examine the photo, do something before you comment. It clearly says in the review referenced that the guy in this case forgot that the buy confirmation was disabled (this is a preference).

The app store has one more level of confirmation- this guy just "forgot" that he had it turned off.
What you don't have in writing, they also do not have in writing.

You owe them nothing except what you believe to be right. Likewise, they owe you nothing except what their conscience tells them is right.

It sounds like requirements and fees weren't discussed very much or very clearly, and that's asking for everyone to be disappointed. But, if you're in the hole due to their own inability to setup a webserver...they owe you for the webserver, too, if they want the site. It was nice of you to provide that additional service all this time.

Anyway, if it were me, I'd probably walk away, code in hand, and simply avoid working with this person in the future. But I don't need $500 to make rent or buy books or whatever and to pay off a $300 hosting bill...you do what you have to do and what you're dignity allows/demands.

All of that said, I've worked many times on a hand shake deal. In fact, I've almost never done contract work with an actual contract. When things go wrong, it's almost always wrong on both sides (or you possibly aren't a very good judge of character), and I usually accept my lumps and move on, avoiding working with the person again. The definition of "accept my lumps" depends on a lot of factors...and in this case could mean, "take the $500 and get away fast", "shut down the site, hold onto the code and discontinue working with/for this person", or "demand $800 even though confrontation makes you uncomfortable". Only you can decide that.

I think the key here is that you're more intimidated than you need to be.
Yes, the hosting expense was approved. After the client (fellow college student) saw the site, they submitted a checklist of things they wanted to change. Aside from adding search functionality, it was very minor stuff like adding a link back to the main page. The guy I've had to talk to is so dissatisfied with me at this point, though, that he's calling in a different programmer.

The other thing making this tough is that he's over in Ohio with a little group trying to capture absentee votes for Obama. That's one reason why it seemed easier to make something that worked and looked fine to normal users, even if the admins had to deal with a clunkier interface. So this is complicated because they 1) didn't specify exactly when they wanted this, and they've just let me know recently they wanted this a LONG time ago, and 2) they don't want any more code from me, which is really frustrating, because they only want minor changes and the main groundwork has been completed.