skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Those are all pretty abstract. Agreeing on a concrete solution, other than e.g. "less political infighting ... achieved by giving my faction what it wants and telling those other idiots to shut up!", is a lot harder.

The various points advanced in minimsft comments and elsewhere tend to be mutually contradictory if you actually think about them. e.g. stop depending too much on Windows/Office and focus on making totally new products even if it's risky? or stop wasting time and money on anything not immediately profitable and focus only on core strengths? I've seen both advocated on minimsft quite a few times.
Create *nix daemons in Javascript with node.js
I agree with you completely, and I've even said it before here on HN: Facebook (as it is now) inhibits active social behaviour. (At least among those that aren't your close friends.) Why chase down or call up "random friend X from college" to see how they are and what they've been up to when you can get the digest version on Facebook?
Good article, though it kinda violates rule #1 of Cocoa memory management: don't try to summarize the rules, because you'll probably miss a subtlety. Link to the Apple docs instead.
Do you have some sort of timing measure?
My Twitter follower trends didn't change when I started tweeting every article (I did keep an eye on it). Also, the overall trend seems pretty good: http://twittercounter.com/compare/swombat/3month/followers - I will of course continue to keep an eye on it.
Of course you can set N to 1. That's not the same as making the hash table size equal to the number of resources.
it also help when you understand how the dot-notation works in objective-c... it's not like other languages where you are just accessing a member of an object.

foo = object.bar;
is syntactic sugar for
foo = [object bar]; //where 'bar' is a method call

and

object.foo = bar;
is syntactic sugar for:
[object setFoo:bar];

I dealt with a lot of goofy memory errors trying to figure out why using 'self.foo' and just 'foo' inside of a class acted differently. Now it makes much more sense.
Yep... previous discussion (484 days ago):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1080700
See my other comment about how browser UI is bad and hides this stuff. making more user friendly UIs would keep this in the realm of the technical and free market, and out of the hands of lawmakers, and I'd be fine with that.
RabbitMQ has gotten much better about memory management as of version 2.0.
Of course it's an oversimplification but it seems clear to me that if one or the other is theft, it has to be nationalization. If I steal 1M$ from a bank (nationalization) and give it back in 10 years with interest (privatization), I'm pretty sure I'd still be considered a thief.
Have all the full-time people split the equity evenly. Have vesting to protect you if people don't contribute - four years with a cliff at one year is good. Founding a startup is so stressful, if people are doing it part-time it probably will not be very helpful, so try to get everyone either full-time or just an "advisor" role where they get < 1% of the company.
CSS is not a programming language either.
This is one of my favorite sayings, so I feel compelled to minorly correct it here. The full saying is "When you hear hoofbeats in Texas, think horses not zebras." The "in Texas" is a key piece of context, as there are some places where zebras might well be more common than horses. The point being that one should suspect and rule out the most common differential diagnoses first.
I don't think FF is much better.

IIRC every new point version I'd get seemed to have moved things like cache info and cookie settings to different tabs, and renamed how things were labelled.

In FF5, "tell sites I don't want to be tracked" is a single checkbox under "privacy", but "advanced->network" has "tell me when a site wants to store offline data". Huh? I understand the tech differences, but it's just confusing, and again, hidden. Two or three minor additions to the nav bar allowing you to block or allow cookies would go a long way towards making users feel in control of this type of data.
ابن خلدون
Free-speech was largely won in the 60s.
The cleanest version IMO is

- (void) setFoo:(NSString*)bar {
[bar retain];
[foo release];
foo = bar;
}

which harmlessly increments and decrements for self-assignment.
Using Data Analysis to Discover Top Stories
Of note, the Wave API is getting tossed out. Final nail in the coffin, I suppose.
I worked for ViVOtech (one of the biggest PayPass Point of Sale vendors) back in 2003; it is always surprising to me how widely deployed the readers seem to be, and how little actual use there is, even today.

Something like this could go a long way toward adoption, but I'd be a bit concerned that RFID/NFC might be bypassed by cheap CCD/CMOS.
Finally, we're starting to see through the mess that Facebook is causing. It seems so innocuous and fun at first, but it takes years until we look back and realize exactly what you're saying now. I remember having hours of conversation with friends prior to Facebook via the phone. Now, it's like it's expected that I'll "just know" what my friends are doing (after all, they took the time to post it, so they almost take it as a form of offense if I don't know what they're up to. "What? You didn't see my post about my gardening project?").

I really hope our generation figures out how to get out of this quagmire somehow. I fear, however, that just as innocently as we started this project now known and accepted as "social media", we will be too far down the rabbit hole to reverse course, let alone even recognize what we've done to our true relationships with internet communication.
Developer
http://www.richardcastera.com
http://niceemails.com
http://shiftingideas.com
We'd still need surgeons until the robots are good enough. We'd need radiologists until they can add decent computer vision. Ditto for pathologists and other vision-intensive specialties. Orthopods are very hands-on and collect information through channels other than words. So there's a suite spot in the spectrum of doctors for something like Watson. I'd wonder about the ability to ask questions and ferret out socially-obvious problems like broken arms from abuse if Watson were a first provider.

Presumably you'd couple something like Watson with a world-savvy human physician assistant that acts as its eyes, ears, and touch.
Who do some startups fail?
Is it possible to have a Suica card built into the phone instead of being a separate card?
It is an interesting variation on what I think of as 'crapitalism.' The increase in profitability at the expense of quality.

As Ebert points out, crapitalism works because consumers let it work. If there are enough people willing to pay to have the lower quality product, then the motivation to supply the higher quality product is removed.

What is missing is a good feedback mechanism for 'fixing' the problem.

Let's accept that Ebert is correct in that the cost of the projectionist and their training is the dominant factor in the quality of the projection. Now take what it would cost to hire a projectionist that did quality projections, and raise ticket prices to cover that cost.

As the theatre which charges a higher ticket price than any other theatre in the area, you will find you get fewer patrons, that will reduce the number of tickets sold so you will need an even higher price to cover the lower volume. But the higher price will reduce the size of your market. Once you cross the price where the per-person ticket cost exceeds the expected BluRay release cost, your attendance will drop to nearly zero.

It is mentioned in the article that people already feel that the 'home' experience with bluray is better than their theatre experience (for some number fraction of people).

The message here is that movie theatres are essentially already dead, but like some species of shark they haven't realized it yet. It's only a question of 'when' they will cease to exist.

Interestingly this will be blamed on "piracy."

But the actual issue will be that the industry has moved into a place where the cost of presenting the information (the 'movie') is exceeding the marginal value of that information to the consumer. That has occurred because not only do people have more choices on how to consume the information, the relative costs of those choices are shifting. A 55" 1080p LCD television is now under $1000. That is a 'durable good' (3 - 5yr lifetime) so represents less than $30/month at 3 yrs or $20/month at 5 yrs of cash flow. It costs $20 for two people to go to the movies, it costs < $10 to rent a movie/stream it. So the value equation on 'cost to consume' is increasingly leaning toward the living room and the marginal value of seeing something in the theatre has to compete with that.

I was thinking that digital projection would actually help theatres by reducing their labor costs but having seen a digital projection setup and the complexity and cost that are layered into the system to prevent copies from being made, the cost equation made things actually worse (you need more skill projectionists).
Great post. Are you available to do a similar analysis with my business? We are www.dodocase.com, based in SF. Thanks for sharing your results.
Great idea Mike. A few years back when i gamed online more I would've been all over a service like this.

Have you ever used webex, gotomeeting, etc? It'd be slick if you could make the startup experience a bit like those so you can start your server and get the connection details into your friends hands in one step.
Definitely discuss this earlier rather than later.

How much equity to give is very different for every situation.

The fact that the idea was yours isn't worth a whole lot in terms of equity. Maybe it gives you a 5% premium.

More importantly is how much work your friends are putting in. And if they are leaving their jobs to work on this project.

To protect yourself you will want them to have "vesting" meaning their equity accrues over time.

A really easy way to apply vesting is to just promise them 0.25% - 3% equity for each month they work on the project and then have a cap of 20%, 30%, 40%, 50% or w/e you decide. Typically vesting periods can last 3-5 years.
Sounds like he needs a wiki and a blog.
Looks like JotNot had a trial Android version that expired in 2009. :-\
Rosetta Code is awesome. One of my good friends (http://rosettacode.org/wiki/User:Mwn3d) has helped maintain it for a while, and the main guy behind it (shortcircuit: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/User:Short_Circuit) is a great, helpful gent.

I actually hosted the site off my SliceHost account for a bit, and tried to write a new skin for it that didn't look like MediaWiki. Looks like this is inaccurate, but it's funny to see the languages bit from 3 years ago for me: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/User:Qrush
I find it amusing that Google, that started out (and still is) as a search engine, now has so much power as to influence the content in the web via the almost-necessary SEO gimmicks.

May be, just may be, it's time to go to user-generated user-moderated directory of web links. Yes? or No?
Couldnt you do this in one line by taking the output from ffmpeg [specify the output file as '-'] and piping into curl? iirc:

1) ffmpeg supports outfile - to mean stdout

2) curl can post data from stdin

No need for temporary file, and I believe it is not necessary to wait for the entire file to finish.
They are good for creating jobs and selling expensive enterprisey software packages to PHBs.
And sometimes they make corrupt decisions. For instance, the example given in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2589559 seems like an obvious example of corruption. There should absolutely be recourse for actions like this on both ends of the trade rather than just kicking the old guys out and having to buy it back for almost 10x what it was sold for.

If you buy stolen property, you're pretty much screwed. If you get sweet deals from corrupt officials, you should get screwed too.
I wrote him also, and I hope everyone who has a few minutes will take that time to thank Senator Wyden for his efforts to protect our freedoms from overreaching legislature.
Of course, but incarceration is supposed to be the punishment itself, not extra abuse from the guards. The article does note "the inmates were kept playing until they could barely see things and missing the daily quota would result in physical punishment and abuse."
Steve Ballmer: Should He Stay, or Should He Go?
For diagnosis maybe not, but we will still need surgeons, unless IBM comes up with a really good autonomous robot that can perform surgery.
I wonder who the email providers were for the concerned correspondence.
They're shutting down the translate API? I hope they're releasing a replacement - it's incredibly powerful, though I can't see how it commercially benefits them.
I'm curious to see what effect this has on companies like Square, who seem to have been leapfrogged a bit. But I guess since square's main offering is as a point-of-sale credit-card swiper, I suppose there is a way they can change their product offering to something that can read phones as well as take cards.
Watson may be able to recommend you get surgery, but he won't be able to perform the surgery himself. He's only moving in on one aspect of medicine. Matching symptoms to diagnoses is the thing that machines are most clearly suited for in the entire medical profession, because of the vast volume of possible measurements and diagnoses, and because humans' various cognitive biases don't work well with the probabilistic nature of the work. That's still a rather narrow range of work. Humans will remain superior at performing medical work for quite a while. And until true Strong AI, humans will also remain superior for quite a large amount of gathering information that Watson requires, especially psychological measurements, and for making decisions that involve quality-of-life and other ethical considerations beyond just probability of success.

tl;dr Watson can, and will, exceed doctor's capability for a certain, somewhat narrow, range of their function. Doctors will still be necessary for the other things that they do.
Well then who is going to do the clinical observation, coding, and data entry? That work doesn't get done for free and in most cases it would actually take the healthcare providers more time to do.
I bet my little cousin would turn himself in! :)
This article gives bad advice. If you use his examples your program will crash; see tylerc230's comment. Also, it does not follow generally accepted style practices, such as the lack of a space after a closing bracket [[like]this].
I read your statement to assume that entering data into Watson is going to take longer than "entering" that same data into your GP. How did data entry for Jeopardy work?

This would mean that the main issue in adoption of Dr Watson (Hmmm, haven't I heard that name before?) would be the data entry - obviously a pain point in many digital services. If an effective answer is found, and I would suspect that this should soon happen, then the argument becomes more a matter of whether you prefer a subjective opinion from your GP (based on his/her current thought processes / focus) or an objective one from a digital process.

I think I'd prefer the digital process, once the main issues are ironed out.
I like Ebert not for his science, but for his understanding of the art of movies. Most other movie critics appear to me to try to show off how intelligent they are, or how refined their taste is. From Ebert, I always got the impression that here was a man that loved a good movie, and wants others to know about them. That's exactly what I see reflected in this article - a man who loves good movies, and hates the fact that the experience is being degraded.
A wiki doesn't seem right either. When's the last time you've ever sat and browsed through a wiki looking for awesome stuff you didn't know about?

Wikis, imho, are a bit like search engines. They're great for collecting stuff that you want to find again, and they're great for finding stuff you're looking for. Blogs have something more - they point you to stuff which you never knew you could care about, they expand your interests. Wikis are a very clumsy substitute.

I think what's needed is perhaps an evolution of the blog format.
Unsolicited commercial email (UCE) is the definition I think of.
Also read this.

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/wrong-answer-5050-calculating-c...
To the extent that abuse is a medical diagnosis, it would be trivial for a computer to make that presumptive diagnosis. In fact, if Watson is truly performing at the level of an M2, it probably already can.
If you shut down all unsolicited email, you've removed a lot of the value of email in the eyes of most people. Prospective employers can't contact you, relatives can't reconnect, and so on. Focusing on the bulk aspect makes a lot more sense.

(Besides, if you don't want any unsolicited emails, it's pretty trivial to blacklist everyone and then manually add exceptions after you've agreed in advance to allow someone to email you. ISPs and such don't need to get involved in that, so they don't need to worry about it.)
Iirc, Watson used voice input.
Here's a link to Michael's post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588718
Collectives don't always behave meritocratically, even when composed of people who value meritocracy. I think they probably should, and it's frustrating when they don't, but it's hard to do.
This is why bloggers add table of contents or getting started pages.
Thanks for the idea. Unfortunately it doesn't improve things:

pCurEvalStack = TestAdd(pCurEvalStack);
0040BFFA mov eax,dword ptr [pCurEvalStack]
0040BFFD mov dword ptr [ebp-694h],eax
0040C003 mov ecx,dword ptr [ebp-694h]
0040C009 sub ecx,8
0040C00C mov dword ptr [ebp-690h],ecx
0040C012 mov edx,dword ptr [ebp-694h]
0040C018 sub edx,4
0040C01B mov dword ptr [ebp-694h],edx
0040C021 mov eax,dword ptr [ebp-690h]
0040C027 mov ecx,dword ptr [eax]
0040C029 mov edx,dword ptr [ebp-694h]
0040C02F add ecx,dword ptr [edx]
0040C031 mov eax,dword ptr [ebp-690h]
0040C037 mov dword ptr [eax],ecx
0040C039 mov ecx,dword ptr [ebp-694h]
0040C03F mov dword ptr [pCurEvalStack],ecx

And also the nice thing about the BINARY_OP() macro is that it can take types and the operator as arguments (e.g. BINARY_OP(I32, I32, I32, +), BINARY_OP(I64, I64, I32, <<) ) meaning it can be used for many operations on many types. I would have to write seperate functions for each case if using in inline function.

And pCurEvalStack is initialised in the LOAD_METHOD_STATE macro, referenced first on line 590, before interpretation begins.
One of the reasons I'm starting to love Go more than Python.

In Go something like super() is superfluous.
completely missing the point. map reduce didn't come to replace databases. it takes on tasks that databases are incapable of doing. google's search operation would be impossible to serve sanely with rdbms.
I disagree with this because it opens the door to endless argument over what 'commercial' means.

Besides, I just want a clean inbox. I don't care whether a given piece of trash came from a commercial or non-commercial source.
There's almost a whole formal exchange with cash in Japan, even the way the cashier counts your change is very deliberate (didn't notice this until I saw a Japanese person do this in the US).

I've heard China also has some issues with credit cards, but has more to do with trust issues.
A message queue is like a database except people can open a socket and say "notify me when there is a new value for this key" -- and you can chose to let multiple people get in line for such updates and then wether you want to let everyone know or just the first person or so-on. you can implement all of this on any db with polling and locks, but that is not an efficient way to do things.
That doesn't even begin to solve the problem. It helps new user onboarding, not old content discovery. "Getting started" can fit, what, at a stretch, a dozen posts. A reasonably old, quality blog will have many dozen posts which are worth bringing forward. And a blog with links, like swombat.com or daringfireball.net, will have many more.
Re: Warby Parker

$120 for well styled glasses was a no-brainer for me (even just to try out).

What they got right were: 1) Making a really well-designed website (aesthetics are obviously key in fashion) 2) Getting well-styled frames in their inventory 3) An amazing price point that is consistent across the board.

As a designer, I have a lot of designer friends, especially in NY. They aren't really into knowing about startups at all. But they all know Warby Parker (through GQ, word-of-mouth) and don't approach it as a startup but a hip 'small business.' Kudos to them.
The best way to go would be to use a wiki
Citaton needed. If this is true, rather than a made-up anecdote, it's a much rarer case than that of businesses which aren't hiring because their sales are stagnant.
There's (going to be) an app for that! Input data -> output diagnoses!
"it uses direct connections between peers" -- this is kind of true.. the guide suggests that ultimately you will want a broker (what it calls "devices") to intermediate producer-consumer interactions.
Microsoft Launching Web Based Win Phone Marketplace
BackType — Small Team. Hard Problems. Massive Opportunity.
LGPL means you can link it into your program, so what's the worry?
Even worse is that others can retroactively opt out on another's behalf. If someone owned the domain with no exclusion, then their content seemingly disappeared in 2003 because they lost ownership/stopped caring about the domain, and the new owner puts up a robots.txt, the original owner's content will not be publicly accessible.

At least that was the case a few years ago. I know the Wayback Machine has seen some changes in the last year.
Previous HN love for Wyden: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1922405

(the links posted by mschwar99 below displayed as 'visited' in my browser, so I had to check it out on searchyc.com!)
The author makes a great point. I for one constantly find new blogs that I love, but only take the time to go back a few pages. I think a great model to encourage deeper reading is setting up the home page as an index (see: spencerfry.com + paulgraham.com).
incorrect, watson was fed a text of the question over ethernet right after Trebek finished reading the question.
Nuances And Communities, A New Review Series
Dizigot - Wikipedia for you and me. 
Dizigot allows you to create a Wikipedia style profile page for you which is open to all and helps them find you. Pool-in all your social networks links strewn all over the web to create your Virtual Business Card.
Stop treating your posts chronologically, then. Call them essays and make a categorical listing.
lol. At a previous job, I used ActiveMQ. It was definitely a flaky piece of junk.
Pants Sagging Off the charts.
Finite Compactness?
Godin is Seth Godin, who writes about online marketing and product development here:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/

Many of his articles are immediately applicable to your start up, and in my opinion, are extraordinarily valuable.

Eric Ries writes about agile development and small start up culture/strategy here:

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/

I have not read many of his articles, but my understanding is that he is making quite a name for himself as a start up guru.

Trout escapes me as well, I have not heard of him.
Haha, the author is one of the main contributors to python, not some high-schooler.

kwds.pop('shapename', None)

Will get you what you're looking for.