skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Any interest in a telecommuting communal office space/incubator?
As a telecommuting startup my team can't take advantage of some of the great communal workspaces that entrepreneurs use. However, virtual offices such as Sococo are changing that. I propose a online communal workspace / incubator. I imagine mentors and investors becoming a part of the hand selecting / demoing / and fund raising processes. I've written up some my thoughts at www.dotincubate.com. Certainly there are advantages to working in the same room, in fact, some investors might not even consider a team if they didn't. But I think with increasingly advanced communication platforms, some great teams can form that wouldn't otherwise be possible. This provides unique advantages to telecommuting teams and they deserve their own incubation spaces to further their chances of success. What do you think.. yea or nay?
I had done both for some time. To be honest, seeing my psychiatrist made me feel like a petri dish, whereas my therapist is one of the most understanding and caring human beings I've ever met. Psychiatric medicine has terrible side effects, and popping pills has made me feel more horrible than depression at times. (especially considering they actually did nothing for me).
Facebook Stalking - A new american pastime
Having lived in LA, I can confirm this, but nothing mangles your perspective like living in Hawaii. I would put on a sweater if it dipped below 70.
This is handy, sort of the reverse of Later Locker (which I use all the time for sending links to myself from my iPad): http://laterlocker.com/
what makes you think 200 megapixel is close to actual film resolution? he doesn't mention a number about film resolution in that article. Film resolution might be 30mpx, 100mpx, 3000mpx ... or even infinite
I really liked your succinct definition of what a side project is. What are your thoughts/experiences/opinions on team side projects?
Here's a vi keys centric todo tool:
http://cauterized.net/~meskio/tudu/
I find it can be hard to sync up schedules and reliably work on it each week.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll add those to the list as I've received similar requests!
> The problem with healthcare is not that progress is being ruled out but that healthcare is highly labor-driven. So far there's no machinery that can replace a doctor.

As a matter of policy, the FDA will not approve any device that makes a medical diagnosis without human intervention. [1]

Recently there have been numerous studies and much punditry accusing the American medical regulatory environment of stifling innovation and driving up costs. [2][3][4] The arguments are strikingly similar to Cowen's argument re autonomous cars.

[1]: http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/37596/
[2]: For a quick summary, see http://reason.com/blog/2011/05/25/will-fda-regulation-kill-t...
[3]: A much discussed recent report [PDF] is at http://www.nvca.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc...
[4]: An article in JAMA opined similarly [PAYWALL], http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/305/15/1523.extract
Nice programming challenge from Martin Escardo
85% have used at least once, not "use" marijuana.
85% sounds pretty wild. Hm, looking at pg 78 of the linked document, it says among people surveyed who were exactly 50 years old when surveyed, graduating in 1977, those who tried marijuana were 82%.

1977 has got to have been the historical peak of high school usage. I notice they don't mention 51 year olds or 49 year olds, they have specifically pulled out this one exact age for this statistic.

It then goes on to say that 29-30 yr olds have a 68% "adjusted" lifetime prevalence. What does that mean adjusted? It means the actual number they measured is lower (32% for 19-30 year olds), and they tweaked it upwards because they wanted a bigger number.

About this time is where I say a study has too many methodological flaws and should be disregarded.
Commute is just one reason. Don't get me started :)
Wait 'til you have kids.
Linus' email is more interesting than the commit: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1147415
I started programming very young. I initially didn't want to get into professional programming because I didn't want to ruin my hobby. But reality set it in and I needed a decent-paying job.

For the first few years, I literally did zero programming on the side. I simply didn't have the energy left. I used it all up at work.

But then a couple years ago, I started having enough energy. Now, I love to do side projects... That is, if I can find one worthy of stealing my free time. (Lately that hasn't been a problem, though.)

So I can imagine it quite readily, even for the most avid programmer.
Ask HN: Bad writing? Product unconvincing? Please review my product pages!
I've written some sales-y pages for a product that's almost finished, I'd love to get some feedback on the pages here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/443080/landing/home.html

Is the writing bad? Is the product not well explained? Is the value proposition unclear? Would you sign up?

Please feel free to tear this apart, I'd love any input, I've been working on this by myself so I'm getting a bit stuck... Thanks!!
Pretty much.

We're going to have an awesome backend that the site administrator can take a look at all flagged content and choose to delete it or not.

We're going the embeddable code route and we're going to experiment to have sites provide their own custom content ids.

It could be abused, but so could your own manual flagging system. We'll be giving priority flagging content to users who do a good job @ flagging content (like karma).
The questions were easy (randomly pick 1 maybe, weighted). But what's the heuristics for "I worry... I worry..."?
Source: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1147415
Facebook May Make Tiny Town a Data Center Mecca.
Link is down; I believe this is the same:

http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1147415
Clicky: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/443080/landing/home.html

(you can click around, there are like 4 pages, it's just html, it doesn't actually do anything yet)
I guess you could see it that way. I just don't ever get bored driving, but that might be just because I'm weird :D
Interesting, I picked up the opposite. That is, guys can breast feed, but it takes a modern man to be able to suck his own nipples.

The author though went about it half-heartedly, he didn't have a baby nearby, he used only manual pumps, he didn't take drugs, he didn't continue long enough.

But he presented plenty of evidence that males can lactate.
Why do people imagine that organized labor (in some cases monopoly labor) is any different than big business? When big business has an unequalled advantage it abuses it, trying to milk money out of customers without returning any value. Big labor does the same. Creating bureaucratic organizations that maintain job security and job pay merely for showing up and belonging to the union, rather than actually doing the work better or more efficiently.
I believe Canonical use bzr for all their internal projects like Launchpad.
1) Sub $100 3G handphone only for use with Skype.
My thoughts on this. A fair number of people don't know how to use the computer and Skype for video conferencing (eg my daughter's grandparents). This handphone can fill in the void provided it is cheaper than the smart phone. How it can work.

Upon purchase of the phone and 3G plan, SkyPe log in details will be saved into the phone, eliminating the need to log in. Contacts from SkyPe will be shown on the address book and it can proceed to act as a normal phone.

2) 30 second Music sharing/sampling.
Most of the time, it is only a certain section of a music that plays over and over in our head. The idea I have is to select 30 seconds (I believe this is the maximum to avoid infringement of copyright) of the part of the music I like and share it with my friends and say "Check out this song, it is great. This is the part I love".

It can also be used for song samples where the wisdom of the crowd determines which portion of the song is the one that people likes instead of the current way it is done, which is the music store determines the sample

Alright, just this two for now and see how it goes, unless anyone is interested in others that I have
Just make sure your developers don't use temporary tables in very strange ways. (like between different sessions. wtf.)
Whoever wrote this is seriously delusional or on crack or something. 45 minute commute from Brighton Beach to Union Square is optimistic at best.
You're really misreading these statistics. Nowhere do they say anything close to "85% of Americans use marijuana".

On page 103, it says that 82% of fifty-year-olds (who attended high school during the heaviest-drug-using period in America's recent history) have used marijuana at least once in their lives. But only 10% of that same group have used it in the last year.

Among current 18-year-olds, only 42% have ever tried marijuana even once. And among most age groups under the age of 30, only between 23-34% have used marijuana within the last year.

However, I don't see evidence that the study you posted counts underage drinking in among illicit drug use.
"Who will be your first customer?"
"Why do they need it?"
I didn't know you were quoting Linus, you should make it more obvious.
How to Ensure Business Continuity in the Cloud
I can't help but think that people may not drive well with computer-controlled cars on the road. The decisions that a driver makes sometimes depends what they think the decision of other cars will be. Unless the computer-controlled cars account for this in their decisions, then there may actually be more crashes, as the other cars don't do what human drivers expect. Another interesting result is that computer controlled cars may not be able to use the most efficient behavior until most cars on the road are computer controlled.
I like this, but with one exception: Change the background color towards white instead of the username towards green.

Adding more contrast with the background helps pick out the good/important comments, when skimming, and is consistent with the semantics of text color fading.
Although it would be even more consistent if the text color transitioned to something, I think it would look worse.

An additional option would be to adjust text color by downvotes and background by upvotes - this would also highlight controversial posts, which may or may not be desirable.
Increasing shared buffers should not be so far down the list. It is the first, single biggest impact on performance that you can do. I think everyone knows that it's something that should be tuned right away, but I think it should very first on the list, since it's so easily overlooked by someone just starting out.
Word! Well that should be enough momentum to prove / disprove Shirky's claim that micropayments can't work.
That's really interesting. Like Amazon Web Services.
"What does that mean adjusted?"

It's explained the study.

"About this time is where I say a study has too many methodological flaws and should be disregarded."

Try actually reading it. It's really not that difficult to understand. The 'maturity recanting effect' section here also gives a brief summary of what they did and why:

http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/statistics/statistics_ar...

Don't criticize studies without taking the time to understand them, otherwise you just sound like these people:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjX1IaU1A0w
Why is Ken Rockwell disliked? (Curious, I like his site.)
You're incorrect about the methodological flaws.

Only 50-year-olds are mentioned because this is a longitudinal cohort they've been testing since 1977, and this year (2009) it's their turn to be reported.

The "adjusted" number is higher than the measured number because some people answered the survey ten years ago saying they'd tried marijuana in the past year but then in the current survey the same respondent said "no" when asked if they'd ever tried marijuana in their lifetime. So they're publishing both the actual numbers and the "we know you're probably lying" numbers.
Yea, I just found LustyBufferGrep and BufferJuggler this weekend and am definitely digging it.

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1890
I've found that most of my coworkers over the years don't really react very well to the idea of me having a side project-unless they have one themselves. I think they believe it's pretty strange to making something not work related.

I'm not sure I've worked with many programmers at all who read on the side let alone make much of anything. Maybe my experience is just weird.
Can you elaborate on that? In particular

- Why can't aggregators overcome the transactions costs? MoneyGram does so for remittances from US to Mexico.

- What's not straightforward about "addresses" ? (Which addresses do you mean?)

- Don't intermediaries sometimes lower the overall costs.

Thanks for the thoughtful answer.
I really like mongo mapper's plugin system, but mongoid tends to handle reflection (stuff like content_columns and reflect_on_association) better..
Yea that's a tough one.
Sex and Power: 'Powerful Men Have an Overactive Libido'
Although that's not very interesting either. Linus: "What's new?" Linus: "Nothing."
"Nowhere do they say anything close to '85% of Americans use marijuana'."

I said 'have used' in my original comment, which is what I meant. (In my reply I was thinking lifetime prevalence, i.e. around 85% 'use' marijuana at some point during their lives. Poorly phrased, my bad.)

"Among current 18-year-olds, only 42% have ever tried marijuana even once."

The age of first use of marijuana is highly variable. By age 25 around 65% of people have used marijuana, and more people keep trying throughout the next couple decades of their life. The important statistic is what percentage of people use marijuana at least once in their lives, not what percentage use it on any given day.

"On page 103, it says that 82% of fifty-year-olds (who attended high school during the heaviest-drug-using period in America's recent history) have used marijuana at least once in their lives."

The 82% figure doesn't count people who didn't make it to fall of their 12th grade year in high school, so you actually have to adjust it up a couple percentage points. Also, even if less high schoolers were using illegal drugs for a decade or two, that probably won't have much effect on the overall lifetime prevalence. It might eventually decline a few points, but probably not that much.
Lockheed-Martin signs on for D-Wave computer
Peter, is that true for non-OECD countries? Many poor Brasilians are on the Net and 5¢ is not negligible to all those users.

Clay Shirky also mentioned the "psychological cost of deciding" in an article linked in another comment. But what's the (quantitative) evidence for these statements?
Per my contract, every creative thought and act I perform while employed belongs to my employer. My contract could be interpreted to mean that even my comments here are owned by my employer. Rather demotivating for genuine side-projects.
It's not infinite, 35mm film resolution is around 36MP, and prints made from it can be as low as 4MP.

A better comparison for this camera would be medium format, not 35mm. So quadruple all the MP numbers.
> It's difficult to retain your composure when you're inconvenienced by the incompetence of your social inferiors, but it's usually worthwhile.

Wow. I'm not sure that's the point of the article.

Who do you see as your "social inferiors" and why?

I'll judge people based on their actions. I'm unconvinced it's fair to do it based on something else.

[Edit: formatting]
I see side projects as a key indicator of someone who is focused on becoming better, instead of just paying the bills.
car ownership needn't be a huge expense that locks you in. I'm leasing one with my wife and frankly, for the $250 a month I get to take day trips out of nyc every weekend, which frankly is one of the few ways I've found to truly survive city living :)
It is very easy for an uncorrelated stream of bits to be terribly insecure: they simply have to be seeded from the same source.

Case in point: The b0rked Debian OpenSSL RNG would certainly pass any statistical tests. But it still turned out to have only something on the order of 32767 unique sequences, i.e., 15 bits of entropy.
I tried a similar setup remoting into a virtual windows machine for awhile and ultimately abandoned it because of latency. I didn't fully realize what a difference a small amount of latency could make until I went back and it'd take a lot for me to try it again. So my recommendation is to make sure it's very comparable in terms of performance because the development time you can lose from latency will dwarf keeping machines in sync and may even go unnoticed for awhile.
Uh, I'm confused. Wasn't there one here a few hours ago? Submitted by you?
Instead of your commute killing you, the gloomy, bitterly cold weather in the Northeast will be killing you half of the year.
That is why when you are interviewing at a company, you treat everybody you meet politely and cordially - even the cranky secretary. :)
I find it just fascinating that anyone (CEO or whatever) would ever be rude to a person that is handling their food.

Oh well.
Yeah, the URL was http://gush.wufoo.com/forms/automated-office-hours-with-pg/ It probably went over the limit for free forms.

Though building a chatbot is slightly different than building a form.
I don't personally mind him either, I think he has written some useful things for the photographer world (and I also like film photography as a hobby, so confirmation bias helps there!)

I've seen him disliked on two fronts. I have some photographer friends who just think he's outspoken & over-opinionated for who he actually is (this is what jars me a bit about his site as well.)

I know he also gets flak from photography forum types as a gadget shill or for being allegedly clueless because they disagree with his opinion on some particular thing. Although I think that's mostly coming from armchair internet photographers who sit at home and stroke their L-series lenses but never take any actual photographs. ;)
ohh... sorry, English is not my native language that's why I didn't knew this.
I wasn't being sarcastic, I actually liked the comment.

Thanks for the explanation astine :)
Is NY really that dirty? I visited for the first time in a couple years last month, and given all I've heard, I found it surprisingly clean (about the same level of cleanliness as SF, where I live).
Unions on both sides of the Atlantic have made huge strategic errors in the last three decades that have eroded much of their influence, relevance and power.

Probably not strategic errors so much as natural consequences of the fact that the interests of the people running the union at any given time are not quite aligned with the interests of the union.
What would make you think the people who are waiting on you have any less an idea of social graces? They probably participate in many more social interactions per day than you do.

Having said that I do think this is business advice is a bit of a meme, it fits nicely with our value systems and has such a fairytale type character to it. I wouldn't doubt that there are many people out there who are polite to all and sundry who would screw you the second they get a chance.
Jason Scott proposes a different set-up[1], where he compares an evolution of Wikipedia to how newsgroups got set up, with different servers choosing to retain articles based on whatever rules they are run by. He, of course, envisions himself subscribing to one that would retain everything, notability be damned.

[1] http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2646
this is neat. been spending a lot of time thinking about content shifting. It wasn't instant for me, but is this using websockets?
And having a monopoly on the supply of monopoly's labor supply is the most profitable monopoly of all

Indeed, and the holy grail of having a monopoly on a monopoly is having a monopoly on government employees. Witness the way the United Auto Workers formed an offshoot, the SEIU, which now dwarfs its parent.
You are protected from this completely in the state of California. One of the many reasons this state is so great.
Is that even enforceable? If it is, I hope, for your sake, they are paying you EXTREMELY well.
EveryJS: The Right Tool for the Right Job
I used to live in Seattle, where I had a 45-minute bus commute, and now live in SF, where I have a 20-minute BART commute.

Strangely, I much preferred the Seattle commute -- in fact, I actually enjoyed it, whereas I hate my current commute. I think it has something to do with the fact that in Seattle, the buses are pretty clean/new/comfortable and you get to look outside (my particular route was very nature-y), but I hate being stuck underground in SF's crowded subway trains.
Nope, I'm pretty committed with Freshbooks at this point. Here are some of the features I'd love though:
1) Ability to upload files to my invoices
2) Ability to send as a PDF
3) Ability to use my customers address data in ways that lets me analyze it (i.e. geographic distribution, avg. invoice price per city, etc)
4) Ability to discount specific line items rather than global
5) Sending HTML emails
6) Default payment methods (per customer or globably)
7) Custom payment methods (i.e. marking payments as "email money transfers - this one they said they will put in for a next release)

Anyway, I'm just telling them anything I can think of as I can see on their forum that they have a lot of user feedback. If enough people want something I'm sure it will come aometime)

The coolest and most useful thing would be analytics with the data they have... I'm sure it wouldn't be horribly difficult either, if I can export the customer data I'm sure I could do it myself (oh there is another one, I don't think I can export my data easily)
I can not figure out the premises of the conclusion. I can sort of figure out how small businesses could help labor from the article, but on the other fork - what do unions offer a small businessman?

Thought experiment:

If I found a small software firm, I will need an office, a janitor on Fridays, a secretary, a marketer-type, and some engineers. (well, I'm approximating here, YMMV).

As an employer, I want to pay people enough so they stick around. I want to pay just enough to get the quality of people I need, but not so much the company is run into the ground. I don't see that a union helps me. If I pay people badly, they will leave; at least the people I hired, who I assume are generally hire-able and good enough to find jobs elsewhere.

Politically, I don't want to have to add this or that to my company's operation unless it makes me money (e.g., our top performer needs child leave, and him staying with leave is better than him quitting).

So, what does a union get me in my Pnathansoft firm? I am confused. Please take pity on me and explain. :-/
I like the idea of not tying the karma score to the user, but that does help identify good users from bad. Maybe cap the karma the user can get from a single comment to something low - say 3, but let the comment itself show the real number of votes.