skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How many colors can you use on a whiteboard?

Uhh... the classroom I work in has at least 16 (bolds and pastels). I can't imagine even if chalk afforded more colors that they would be distinguishable enough to be useful in technical contexts.
we did the same thing and have been extremely happy with the result.
2 minutes into his first "office hour" and all of my doubts are out the window. pg really does know what he's doing. He asks questions that seem blatantly obvious, yet nobody else seems to be asking them.

Yeah, that video does make it clear how good pg is at pointing out important stuff and asking pertinent questions. The only thing that struck me as a little dodgy, was his tendency to ask a question, then cut the other person off before they had barely started answering. I mean, I understand that he wants to cut to the chase in the interest of time, and that some people will ramble if you don't cut them off... but a couple of times that I found myself thinking that the conversation would have flowed more smoothly if he'd let the other person continue an existing train of thought a little further.

But his methods seem to work, so who am I to quibble? :-)
Re the TV app: at first I was thinking that is incredibly impressive video recognition technology, but then I realized that just the variation of overall brightness over time would be enough information to select from the channels that are playing at that moment.
Good to know. I have only used the chalkboard paint for residential projects. However, I have also found using a cheap roller, with any type of paint, will leave a rough surface. Wool (mohair too) rollers are more expensive, but provide a rather smooth surface (also Purdy brushes make a difference too). Plain drywall is fairly smooth.

There was a cool video from one of the first Kinect previews on Xbox Live and the family's living room had an area covered in black chalkboard paint with chalked designs all over it. Of course, I am sure this was not a real family, nor their real home.
Pope Urban VIII's beef with Cassini wasn't over his assertion that Copernicus was right, but rather because Cassini was asserting that which he could not prove. He was basically saying that he was right and everyone else was wrong and they should just believe him because he was right.

The pope said (rightly so) that unless Cassini could offer proof as to the cause of planets allegedly circling the sun, he should present both the Copernicus and Ptolemy model and leave it up to the reader to make up his mind. (He couldn't prove it because the theory of gravitation was not known at the time)

Instead, Galileo tricked a priest into printing his book without a papal seal of approval, after he had promised the pope that he would present the Copernicus model as a hypothesis and not as proven fact.

So, in this case, the church was on the side of the scientific method. You don't just assert something extraordinary without some extraordinary evidence to back it up.
That's more about patents.

Patent is a technique to convert A => B

Copyright is work done such as a single tool A => B. Copyright does not apply to all instances of tools A => B as long as none of those tools copied anything from the original copyrighted tool.

If you take the copyrighted tool and you transform it to something else using something you made or got, the work is not yours since you created a tool A => B completely based on the original copyrighted tool. The law is flimsy here and you would probably have to just go to court to settle it, this is not black and white.
I'd much prefer the paint on chalkboard stuff (http://www.rustoleum.com/cbgproduct.asp?pid=103) you can get. I HATE dry erase markers.
This is a clean, well written demonstration of how convenient it is to create new types with overloaded math operators in Python. Devotees of C++, in particular, really need to see how nice it can be when operators and inheritance Just Work.

But I got a twinge of irritation near the beginning of the article. Call it a pet peeve if you want, but it's ridiculous to say that Python is "untyped". On the contrary, Python's typing can be quite unforgiving, never letting you weasel out of a type error with arbitrary conversions (a la C or C++).

It is true that implicit, dynamic, duck-by-default typing (like Python) looks at first glance quite similar to no typing at all (like ANSI Forth). This is particularly true if one is used to languages like C or (as he mentions) Pascal.

But this is only true at first glance. What is really going on here is that, since Pascal came out, the language-design community has figured out how to put together type systems that mostly stay out of the programmer's way, while still being strong enough to provide useful safety guarantees. (See also Haskell, etc.)

And this, I think, is a terribly nifty thing that should not be glossed over.
Spolsky had an "architecture astronaut" critique in part about how Ozzie keeps blowing years rewriting Notes: http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html
Yeah, it's described as something more akin to Usenet than anything else from what I remember.
Remember though, Ballmer is the single largest shareholder of MSFT that is still actively involved with the company. He's pretty secure, and has a tremendous amount of skin in the game. He's also not an idiot.
Edward Tufte, Information Sage
I'd say enabling e-comm in GA is extremely important. Then you'll have valuable data on conversion rates.
Triunfo del amor capitulo 154 - triunfo del amor tv
Oil pastels are usually available in 24s,48s, and 72s but yes, I do think humans could distinguish between more than 16 colors.

Personally, I have never seen more than 8 colors of dry-erase marker that are legible on a whiteboard.
I call BS on premise of that link, and on the original essay (which is now online: http://peachfront.diaryland.com/enderhitlte.html)

Claims like this fail the Occam's Razor test:

I've seen Elaine's notes and heard Card on the phone, and there is no doubt in my mind that the Hitler Hypothesis is correct; it is simply impossible that Ender's Game and Speaker were written by someone who did not have a very detailed knowledge of Adolph Hitler's life. There are very exact parallels in there that you wouldn't even notice unless you read the footnotes to the most detailed Hitler biographies. I also tend to believe that Card does not have that level of knowledge about Hitler.

It would be simpler to assume that a story where a person causes the extinction of a species would have some similarities with a war in which genocide occurred.

I've read Card's books and I have reasonable knowledge of Hitler and I didn't notice any particular parallel. I suspect that the claim that he doesn't know his own books comes more from a reluctance to engage in a telephone debate rather than the idea that he didn't write them

I say that as someone who really liked Ender's Game, but thought Speaker for the Dead was crap. I had always assumed that Speaker for the Dead had some kind of Mormon message, but I think these accusations go way too far and are unsupported by the evidence.
A bunch of Portuguese words seems to follow a pattern with a big rise on 2008 and a huge drop following. Looks like something was wrong with the data.
http://correlate.googlelabs.com/search?e=suporte&t=weekl...

I searched: suporte, cadeira, filho, barata, coelho, figueira, orkut.
Very classy. Plus gives a little insight into how a writer approaches it as a craft. Love to read things like this.
Forth is metaprogrammable machine language in the way that Lisp is metaprogrammable expressions. Each is a local optimum of programming languages, meaning that any other language that tries to do the same thing ends up being either isomorphic to it or not as powerful. In other words, a version of PG's thesis about Lisp holds equally for Forth in its neighborhood.

But Forth has one major advantage over all other such languages: it's a generalization of the hardware.

Every metaprogrammable language other than Forth is a generalization of some abstract primitive (s-exprs for Lisp, objects for Smalltalk), which leaves a gap at the bottom that must be bridged before anything can be executed. These languages all struggle to get to the machine. Consider the decades it took to make Lisp fast. In Forth, the primitive is the machine. This is so extraordinary a position to occupy -- full metaprogramming all the way up from binary -- that I wonder why we don't see more amazing things done with Forth. Of course, majority practice is not correlated with computing greatness.

I think this extraordinary quality of Forth is connected to how Forth grew out of a working programmer's projects. Lisp came from math, Smalltalk from language research. It's worth remembering that Moore learned Lisp from McCarthy before he invented Forth. Forth is a Lisp hacker's attempt to make something he could use in commercial projects on mid-60s hardware.
Perhaps he should focus on making products that convince his children to switch from Google/Apple products instead of banning them outright. They might be a good barometer.
If any these ever go out of business, would there be any way to easily switch your customer base over to another provider?

This is why I hesitate to use startups for reoccurring billing. I know that something like authorize.net will most likely not go out of business.
I doubt that there is any correlation between search engine and decision quality; the more logical (at least to me) conclusion from that sentence is that he is actively avoiding understanding competing products.
"I'm always curious about what people who are members of the 'long term unemployed' are doing while unemployed."

School. School, school, school...

First I had to learn to program, but that wouldn't be enough. Companies want university degrees -- no one hires a relatively smart kid and trains them anymore -- and I lacked the money for university, so I would have to get into IT or a specialized field.

The web was getting big but the early 2000s bubble had burst by the time I had a solid understanding of the LAMP stack, so with no experience I was competing with people who had been doing professional web dev for years. That meant no work, so back to school.

Jobs were opening up in IT, so I studied network administration. Potential offers went sour because I didn't know Office, so I kept at school for that. Around that time HP laid off 2,000 engineers, many of whom were experienced IT people. After that, it was difficult to find any ads for IT work in the area.

I secured a 3-year unpaid internship where I worked with GIS, but every GIS job requires a university Geography degree or more prior experience than I have.

There were usually a few jobs open for Autocad users, so I took Autocad courses. By the time I had completed the courses, the job offers required prior work experience.

In all that time I managed to get one job that got me enough money to get a 4-year CS degree. I couldn't find any work in the next six months, so I went back to school to refresh my IT skills and finish up a 2-year math degree. With that done, the job market looks worse than it did last year, so I'll probably be going back to school in the fall.
I.e., don't you think it's possible that his individualist, pro-free thinker views inform both his libertarian political views and also his views that our rigid college-based gatekeeping system is unnecessary?

Probably not since one doesn't naturally flow from the other. Especially since he creates and participates in a several other gatekeeping systems.

Peter Thiel as a libertarian is depressed simply because, despte being white and rich, he can't find a way to deprive other groups of some basic civil rights. What freedom do you have if you can't deprive others of theirs? Indeed Mr. Thiel.
it's also got pretty poor unicode support, which bugs me just a little
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I think doctor numbers are limited. They certainly are in Australia.

But ... the limit is sane. And a retired doctor can come back to work if they see a big shortage (which gives the system time to train more grads).
> My answer is firmly standing on "maybe."

What does it mean to be firmly on "maybe"?
hahahah! ok. let the Feds find you with high quality satellite photos of their military facilities.
don't bent over for the soap when you eighty.
Better than "Facebook integrates with Spotify". I thought this was Hacker News, not Slacker News!
After about 10 minutes of diagramming, I'm a bit high on the fumes (not in a good way).

Chalk feels better.
How would you like it to base what you like on besides your past/current interests (e.g. related artists to the ones you listen to)? Just curious.
The only one with a clear market need was Vidappy, the retail employment one. That addresses a task that people are already trying to get done, but in a better way.

pg's question for finding a market need: "What is the worst problem in my life?"
I think we agree, although I don't find your point about authors needing more scrutiny convincing. I think any public person creates an example for their society, and that can be just as damaging.

However, my feelings regarding Card are more nuanced than just "respect/disrespect". For example, he has a blog where he gives information to aspiring writers. If I was an author should I ignore that useful information because I don't respect his moral views?

My current feeling is that information on it's own doesn't have a moral stance, and so I can respect his advice in one area but not in others. Yes, I agree this is a slippery slope, but I don't know what the solution is. Should I reject Fischer's advice on chess? Card's on writing? PG's on startups (because I don't agree that Lisp is a silver bullet? :))

particularly when they start using their talent to spread their hate, and start letting it seep into their other 'manstream' [sic] work.

I don't think Ender's Game showed any particular homophobia. There is some moral ambiguity in the book (which is kind of the point), but I didn't see anything very hateful in it.
Yes but why is it "Advanced Google Analytics for Startups" and not "Advanced Google Analytics" or "Advanced Google Analytics for Websites"?
That wouldn't work because then you could lock the same resource twice.
I'm not sure if Ballmer is actively removing talent, but I'm willing to believe that he's simply created an environment so hostile to aggressive fast-moving types of people (the exact sort you need to work fast and catch up from behind in the consumer space), that they'll flee of their own accord.

IMO the loss of Allard (and consequently now, Pioneer Studios) is the worst mistake MS has made in the field of consumer products.
How to Not Waste Your Life: Summary of The Startup Lessons Learned Conference
What did you have to do to get certified?
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you made no attempt to actually draw a connection between this program and his purported political agenda

Unfortunately you missed the complete premise of my position. His act, the creation of his fund, is inherently conservative. And furthermore, it's something I had long predicted as part of the conservative movement (with ample help from those in the movement saying they were planning on doing such a thing).

I didn't work from Thiel's ideologoy forward. I heard about the act and my first thought, before even originally knowing who did it was that it would be a prominent conservative. I was not shocked to see it was Mr. Thiel. At that point the rest of the pieces fit together perfectly.

You can attempt to downplay Thiel's ideological motivation, but only the most diehard conservatives (of which there are plenty on HN) will disagree.
Thanks for confirming this, I installed some of those and oh my they were ugly. I'll stick with Verdana for now :(
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I was really impressed watching the video. He's really into and has clearly spent a lot of time thinking deeply about what makes startup ideas work.

At one point in a previous life, I had a chance to get coaching from one of the very top screenwriters in Hollywood on pitching a particular movie idea. That conversation was very much like these office hours, down to the guy's demeanor. But what the writer kept asking us over and over, in several different ways was this "Yeah, but what is it about your idea that's cool enough that people will want to see it?" He kept poking and poking at it. Reminded me of pg in this video a lot.
The title is slightly misleading, I thought this guy or his hedge fund owned a major piece of MSFT but the article makes no such mention.
Bitcoin could be to quantum computing what Sputnik was to NASA.
This is plainly a opinion piece written to support the Mormon's role in defeating proposition 8 (gay marriage) in California in 2008 (note the date of the article). That role was controversial, see [1], and Card is supporting it here.

We don't need to stoop to the level of playing dirty politics by taking things out of context in HN.

Card's attitudes to homosexuality is enough without accusing him of things it's pretty clear he's not trying to say.

[1] http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/06/18/prop-8-documentary/
> Anyone have any stories or examples of ... large co-founder groups?

From my personal experience, it is very common to see startups founded with many co-founders. I've seen it a lot in college groups, where one individual is very motivated to bring in their friends with specialized skills.

Unfortunately, the high speed stage of startups where anything goes, and any one founder's ideas can define the product does not last for long. This often leads to a smaller, more refined group of founders.
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Based on my experience of law school, it means that you have excellent potential as a lawyer.
Because Alan (the author) learned and implemented this advanced GA strategy in our startup. It's something specifically that should be done in startups that will help increase profitability. Basically, it's all about using GA in startups. I think that qualifies for adding "startup" to the title ;)
That happens with short stories that become novels. If the short story was good enough to be worth converting to a novel, it already has everything it needs to be great. What more can you add?
Exactly!

It took us two office hours to get this! In the beginning of our second, he asked us straight out -- "wait, stop selling me. What's the problem you're trying to solve here?"

Going with six ears helped too -- we'd always debrief after the office hours, and talk about what he said, and none of us had the full picture. The dude talks fast and covers a lot of ground!

--
Devoted PG fan
Why is it so hard to define what it means to be a 'product guy'?
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my wild prediction (that will get me downvoted big time) is that if a professor at university can get high-quality infrareds of entire country from a "simple" satellite, then a new military satellite that was shoot month ago (secret one) can probably scan an earth surface and take high quality photos of people brains' tumors... in real time!
N can't be 1 because you can't fit the entire set of locks into memory, that's stated in the problem specification.

The alternatives have a much higher locking overhead/contention rate than this approach.
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To me, Bitcoin just seems like a form of electronic gold. Limited supply; no significant intrinsic value; no backing government or other body. Conversion to real currency is commonplace but not exactly convenient.

Is this way of looking at it a poor predictor for the way it will behave in the market?
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Certainly. But let's not forget that there are some people who prefer not to be found.

As far as I'm concerned, HN can include whatever messaging system anyone wants, as long as it is OPT-IN.
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Hu?

Mr. Einhorn, a long-time Microsoft shareholder, said at the Ira Sohn Conference that the company had floundered under Mr. Ballmer’s stewardship, missing major opportunities in establishing tablet products to compete with Apple and wasting money on ill-conceived mergers and acquisitions.

Second paragraph. Emphasis added
Nobody doubts his motivation.

People doubt his talent and his cluefulness level.
If that kind of thing is possible, then I wonder what other things could be replaced. I'm thinking along the lines of a distributed SSL authentication service.
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I can't stand Ballmer but I don't think he's going anywhere soon. Some quick math says that Ballmer and Gates own about a third of Microsoft combined. It'd be very hard to push either of them out against their combined will.

And while I'm sympathetic to the notion that anyone would be better than Ballmer, it really is hard to find a good CEO.
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My experience with conference papers (albeit limited) is that it doesn't actually take that much effort to make it through the peer review process, so long as you've got something novel and interesting, and you've taken the time to find the correct context for it (correct conference, correct related work, etc).
Which shows what the demand for it was.
Some questions:

* Who would you replace him with?

* How much money do they make from enterprise vs consumer stuff?

* If they make most of their cash from enterprise, is it reasonable to criticise him for missing the phone/tablet revolution? I mean, we don't criticise jobs for missing the enterprise software market.

Just some thoughts. Maybe they're simply drifting into becoming another IBM: all enterprise stuff, nothing interesting but certainly money to be made.
I prefer Menlo.
Pydbattach - attach to running Python process (proof of concept)
A real pain. And the phenomenon has spread far and wide. Even though not everyone has such litigious systems the costs relating to defensive medicine are spreading.
I've found Polymaps (polymaps.org) to also be great for making realtime geo-dashboards. Combined with CloudMade for map tiles, you can customize the look and feel very easily.
You could use the TTF version of Terminus with anti-aliasing.
I think he meant unable to distinguish many shades against the black chalkboard surface.
Not sure that the new world is any better. All those specified areas have direct new world examples. Can everyone be going backwards? We are where I am...
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