skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> Bob Parsons killed an elephant who was destroying crops and fed an African village.

The most instructive part of that video was the end where the crop Bob Parsons was trying to "save" was totally destroyed by people trying to get at the elephant. Those people did much more damage to the crop than the elephants.

So a lump of rotting flesh that will spoil in days takes the place of a field of grain that could have lasted a season. Not very meaningful. The farmer/village sure didn't benefit from Bob Parson's "help."

Saying that Bob Parsons did anything meaningful isn't being honest about what he did. Some people take pleasure in killing things; that's the basis of hunting as a sport. I'm not really interested in it one way or another. What does pique my interest is the idea that Bob Parsons was doing anything meaningful.

If he takes pleasure in killing things, he should go ahead and be honest about it. He shouldn't try excusing himself with some antiquated colonial view of white man helping some poor impoverished people with a big gun. That's the repulsive part of the whole thing.

If Bob Parsons really wanted to do something other than kill an animal, he could have given a micro-loan or grant to all those people to help them out of subsistence.
Debugging the decommissioning of unexploded bombs
Web Server Benchmarking, a rant
This differs from fiat currency how?

http://www.appapillai.com/blog/2010/06/13/the-pound-sterling...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program
Mr. Cowen is somehow overlooking the relative scarcity factor.

But you can create an arbitrarily high number of bitcoin-like electronic currency units, simply by taking the exact bitcoin implementation and changing the genesis block. Bam, Patiocoins, with guaranteed scarcity, anonymity, and a new goldrush phase -- so if you got dumped rather than pumped, you have a new opportunity to start at the top of the pyramid scheme this time.

The equilibrium is that sooner or later expected returns on starting a new distributed pump-and-dump dwarf expected returns of getting in late on bitcoins. And then poof.
Hipster Offers PBR, Skinny Jeans and $10,000 for Hiring Help
It is certainly the case in the UK that a stolen car remains the property of the original owner even when purchased by someone who has no knowledge of the theft.

See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/2753701/Motorists-u...

My understanding was that the due diligence one is expected to conduct under caveat emptor would include ensuring the buyer had the legal title of the goods to be purchased, but this might be a regional variation or I could just be wrong.
WebOS apps are Javascript/HTML. So porting from Web to WebOS is the simple thing.

https://developer.palm.com/content/resources/develop/buildin...
" I suspect your interns know they're not going to get paid, but they should get something out of the deal. Are you giving them individual attention and making an effort to build relationships with these kids?"
absolutely. i'm hands-on with everybody. even though their work may tail off towards the end of their experience, the great majority have positive things to say after it's over...in fact, many choose to stay in the loop of our progress.

"Is GoRankem something I should have heard of that I haven't? Yet another benefit could be brand recognition on a resume. "
probably not on a real national level to date, but as i truly believe we can offer some of the best 'bullet-points' in town.
If it's an immeasurable amount, how do you know whether it's worth it?
I thought that Armstrong's _Programming Erlang_ was the best intro-to-a-language book I'd read since K-and-R.
Your/TC argument above mistakes a handy feature of bitcoin protocols for the whole thing, and then argues than as soon as that feature will be replicated everything will be lost.

Well, good luck with that.
The author is talking about the problems of education. But the issue is deeper and more general than this, and arguably has nothing to do with education.

It has to do with human nature. Look around us. Everyone is concerned with his or her own life. Values such as friendship, community, etc are being thrown aside in exchange for climbing the corporate ladder, and wealth. Individuality is important, but it seems it's being overemphasized.
What It's Like to be Recruited
The task switching is nothing like and far better than iOS. Unless you like that hacky double-tap home thing.
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The point is that if you put anyone under the microscope, they are probably violating at least one or two Federal laws. There have been numerous articles written about this. The Patriot Act is all about making 'putting someone under the microscope' as frictionless as possible, which isn't necessarily a good thing.
HP can also leverage its huge enterprise market to sell Palm enterprise "solutions". Think RIM Blackberry.
How many more miles on the clock did it have? :)
Shopify is next in 37signals' public customer happiness report card movement
Except that you could already use and profit from the algorithm indefinitely without any patents in place whatsoever, simply by keeping the algorithm secret.
True, a powerful GPU is crucial, but also a reliable deployment, not a live environment.
there's always at least one other country involved

You seem to be arguing that everyone's personal security should be set at the level of the lowest possible endpoint - a race to the bottom for security. We should be arguing for improving the security on the other side, not lowering ourselves to that level.

the FBI has always been able to haul you away with a minimal amount of effort. All they have to do is suspect you of a crime. That's got nothing to do with the Patriot act or with the War on Terror

False, in two important ways. First, it used to be that suspicion was insufficient: the required standard was probable cause. Second, the required standard today, thanks to PATRIOT, is far lower. There's no requirement that there be any suspicion of a crime, or indeed that there be any crime at all. If they don't like you, you're done for.
Within the last couple of hours, I have received a newsletter from chart.io, Ducksboard and Geckoboard. Coincidence?
i encourage them to aspire to be indispensable. that's what the former intern that earned his spot did.

i make sure their expectations coming in are understood. unpaid (we tell them to go out and find part-time (or full-time) paid work if money is a necessity). you'll come out with some great experience working with a company that's taking shape. great opportunity to get three strong & unique bullet-points on your resume (compared with the other opportunities in town).
A battleship, even a big automated one, has a series of weak points, such as sensors, removal of which can cripple the ship

The smoke and the rain squalls at the Battle of Samar were sufficient to make the larger guns available to the Japanese fleet irrelevant.
How apps stay on top in the App Store
It's the people that inflate their own importance and think the government would actually monitor their every move. Sure, you do business with someone from the ME they might check up on you but once they figure out you're just a web developer they're going to move on to bigger fish.

The government has actual work to do.
What about AirBnB? You don't think a $500M valuation would be considered reasonable by many? AirBnB seems like a classic example. $25M in revenue and $1B valuation (40x). The market moving slightly to a more hardcore earnings based valuation could easily see their valuation cut in half (20x).

No less of a company, but a slight change (yet reasonable change) could drastically effect their value (as it would with most startups at a similar phase).
The (not yet deprecated) Google +1 API
I've used a security cable for my personal laptop on the rare occasions I've brought it to work. A security cable isn't practical in a coffee shop where there are few places to secure it. Bonus, my 12" PowerBook (yes, ancient) fits in the safe found in many hotel rooms.
Hopefully moves like this from big names like Google will help convince these enterprise companies to make the switch.

Wait, who am I kidding, that's just wishful thinking.
Hindsight is 20/20. Current missile and nuclear weapons technology obsolete monolithic armored weapons, just like gunpowder and cannons obsoleted medieval castles. No doubt the same argument will be trumpeted across the interplanetary neural net in a few generations against nuclear submarines, ICBMs and capitalistic culture. The answer is: they aren't perfect, but they get the job done.
A comment that is [dead], but worth seeing:

ajennings 1 hour ago | link [dead]

AskForIt is my startup, by the way. :)
New York / Telecommute

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(edit: added link)
Not to mention, if what you've got going on is so interesting that other governments want to spy on you, does it make sense for your own government to be the only one that doesn't know what's going on?

If the French secret service really wants to know what I have to say to my relatives overseas, maybe I really want my government to know too?
You've misunderstood the math. The $22.4M figure was reached by assuming the bottom 90% of companies are worth $0. Therefore, it's strictly a lower bound on the mean valuation.
Scientology makes more money [than the field of psychiatry].

This seems really questionable to me. If we assume 13 psychiatrists per 100K people in 2005 ( http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=523453 ), and just count Europe and the US, that's ~80K psychiatrists, and if they average 120K USD per year, that's nearly 10 billion USD. Scientology had a worldwide income of less than 400 million in 1993 ( http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jD-Xo-q... ), so it would have had to grow by 20 times to rival psychiatry circa 2005.

I think psychiatry (leaving aside everything but actual practicing psychiatrists) probably dwarfs Scientology in total income.
I'd equip those drones to launch anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles as well as aerial drones.
Reliability of the IPCC AR4 (CMIP3) ensemble
Don't know... we made it public a few days ago that today we will be giving invitations.

Ask them ;)
Someone that lives in another country isn't necessarily of a different race. If races were defined by country, then you couldn't call discrimination (by Americans of European descent) against African Americans racism as they would be both of the same 'race.'
Are Oracle intentionally being nuisances?
Ah, a classic. Here's another post of a guy paying $90,000 for a couple of pizzas: http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=137.0

It's fun to look at the reply history and notice that someone new discovers these posts every month like clockwork and reminds this person how much he paid for pizza.

As others have mentioned, exchange rates have exploded since then and the titles are hyperbole. In May 2010, the exchange rate was about $0.005 (when 10k BTC was worth about $40). I don't have exact numbers, but I'm guessing around August 2010 the exchange rate was closer to $0.05 (or 8999 BTC worth ~$500). Given that gridecon says he bought the coins over time, I doubt he lost more than a couple hundred bucks of "investment".

Update: Based on forum posts in August 2010, seems like the rate was $0.06. I was close!
Willing to download and try it. I run an online football simulation without a graphical display. If I can create one, that would really flesh out my online game.

Hopefully stencyl is the tool for that.
Fun math: if

- the average YC investment is $20K for 5% (400K valuation),

- YC's share get's diluted in each company by a round giving up 30% of the company

- the average YC company is worth $22.4M

...then that translates to a 43X return for YC. Woah.
GNOME and LibreOffice developer Michael Meeks' summary:

"Apparently this is a somewhat divisive attempt by an exiting Oracle, along with IBM to sideline the existing developer community, their governance, their aspirations, membership, licensing choice (explicitly adapted to meet IBM's needs incidentally), bylaws, and so on. All of this despite a profound, frequently stated open-ness to including new (particularly large) corporate contributors inside TDF, and taking their advice seriously."

http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2011-06-01.html
The problem was that until WWII-era bombers, airplanes couldn't deliver ordnance with enough accuracy to actually hit enemy ships reliably.
When is it OK to use Flash?
From the post, it doesn't sound like it stopped him from doing business this time, so that just seems like a very forced segue into the political rant.

And even if he did, that would just be his personal choice, not something the government is actually doing to his business. As I said, it's a tenuous connection. I personally agree with his politics, but until the government actually does something to interfere with his business, I don't see how it's strongly related.
Terminology question: In footnote 1 it says

"We're looking for companies with high beta. E.g. we're
ok funding groups for whom the likelihood of failure is
high but for whom success, if it happens, will be big."

I'm not sure what beta means here. My understanding had been that beta for an investment refers to correlation with a benchmark index (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_(finance) ). So high beta for YC would mean startups that perform similarly to the average, which is probably not what YC seeks. Alpha ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_(finance) ), or risk-adjusted return, is what any investor seeks, but still doesn't seem to capture the idea of seeking very high-risk, very high-return investments.

Am I using the wrong definition of beta? Is there another term that better expresses this characteristic of investments?
wohoo :)
Dying on Everest isn't a matter of sensibility. Most people who die are stricken with altitude sickness[1]. HACE and HAPE move fast, and the only effective treatment is reduction in altitude. Hyperbaric chambers can buy time, diamox isn't shown to be effective for HACE and HAPE.

Acute mountain sickness (AMS) can strike even lower. A friend of mine was in Nepal with the Discovery Channel this past Fall. One of the producers was evacuated due to AMS when they were under 6000m. Altitude is a lottery. For my part, there's plenty of climbing near sea level that kicks my butt.

[1] http://news.softpedia.com/news/Leading-Causes-of-Death-In-th...
there's always at least one other country involved, so their secret service is at least as likely as the US's to be monitoring it.

Not really. Just because two entities have the same capability does not mean they are equally likely to exercise that capability.

I have two hands. Therefore, I am at least as likely as Michaelangelo to paint a masterpiece.

Don't forget, too, that our spying agencies have RIDICULOUS budgets. The NSA has tens of billions of dollars per year to spend on spying on people.
Oh gosh, all of these games came out long, long, LONG after I stopped playing computer games. I feel so old... :(
It sounds to me like Oracle realized that they didn't quite grok community driven open-source projects and are finally starting to donate them to good homes (Jenkins to Eclipse and OOo to Apache). All it took was for the projects to go through the hell of major forks before Oracle realized what was going on.

It's probably too late to engender any kind of good will out to this though. They put both of those communities through hell. And neither of these products fall under an Oracle core-competency.

But I wouldn't expect the same result with either Java or MySQL anytime soon. Those are both things that Oracle "gets" and knows how to extract profit from.
London, UK and Manchester, UK (remote is acceptable for the first few weeks until we have office space established and set up)

Symfony developers, SQL experience, front end experience (HTML5, jQuery, etc preferable but not necessary), experience as a software architect also preferable

http://postdesk.com/ (use developer contact form)
We're a start up based around editorial, discussion and debate on line.
Right, the control group is required to tell you what the YC influence is (which is probably quite significant). Charlie Munger once said you could lock up the smartest students in a closet for four years instead of sending them to college and they'd still be the smartest students, what were the outcomes of the other 'smart students'?
It's not specific to GA cookies.

You can set cookies on uncached pages in ruby and read them without issue in JS on Varnish cached pages. The page will still be cached even if the user has a session cookie.

Basically: don't set or get cookies in ruby on cached pages and you'll be fine.
Well, you do need to turn on A20 so it will jump to right address, but if you are in protected mode it should already be on.
Beta can also refer to relative volatility. A stock with a beta of 2 has twice the fluctuation of the index.

But in terms of asset allocation, you're right: PG is actually looking for alpha. You can get all the beta you want with leverage: just buy short-term out-of-the-money calls if you want extremely high beta.

(There's actually a lot to think about, here. Startups are pure "alpha" since the beta component is an expected return of zero.)
Does anyone else see this as a regression? This is like the Wild West of economies, where you'd have to keep some Bitcoins locked in a safe in your study, some buried in a secret location under the porch you only know about, some under the mattress...

Doesn't anyone else feel like Bitcoin is (re)introducing a huge number of problems that were the primary drivers of creating banks in the first place?
To most people Facebook's graph represents their friends, their family, their coworkers, people they went to high school with, random people who sent a request even though you met them once at a party... that is the norm. I've been saying for a while that the best representation of a true social graph is on you Android and iPhones. the people you call, text, email, and Facebook wall post are the people you care about. Why Google and Apple haven't used this to their advantage yet, I'm not sure.
It's not just that international calls may be monitored. It's the fact that international calls to (and other business dealings with) certain places or groups of people are significantly more likely to be monitored, and this creates an incentive to avoid contact with those groups, assuming one wishes to avoid government surveillance. And what matters more is really the perception that dealing with these groups will attract government attention, even if it's not actually true.

Racism may not be the right term, but the point is that the possibility of government spying incentivizes businesses to share in that government's (perceived) prejudices.
Don't understand the downvotes, but just to explain: with intelligence information, there is always a possibility that it could have come from an unreliable source or a source who purposefully tried to mislead. With an official ultimatum such an ambiguity is absent.
Real-time webapps in python without going mad
Good idea. I wonder if there's some way YC could survey these people without offending everyone. Maybe offer a 30min advisory session (to known YC post-interview rejects) in return for filling out a survey indicating their current status?
My definition? If your definition of "meaningful" doesn't take into account an act's impact on the external world, I don't know what to say; we probably have very little to discuss. I have no interest in arguing against what effectively amounts to solipsism.

"Murder" is the intentional killing of humans. Hunting elephants, licitly or otherwise, is not and never can be "murder tourism". But since you seem intent in this discussion on using words with meanings other than their commonly accepted ones, perhaps we should go our separate ways now.
Completely agree. Although your code wouldn't help make a worm. Because even though you could get the Bitcoin client's peer addresses you couldn't remotely exploit them.

I'm worried about the bitcoin client being in c++ rather than java because that seems to make a remote code execution vulnerability a lot more likely. And given a single remote code exec vuln it'd be easy to make a worm which destroys the entire network.
Tweet Entities
Hmm, you're right, I saw the source for the GPL ioquake3 based part and assumed it was for the entire game.
My attention was drawn to Streamerapp who also announced today!

Welcome to the space :)

http://betali.st/startups/streamer
http://www.streamerapp.com/
Just another victim (of the Google Translate API shutdown)
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Opera is a good browser. Also IE7 "has the chops".

More BS from Google. I thought they had a clue, but apparently not.
There's a good point in this blog post -- "it's unfortunate that dealing with certain types of clients puts my civil liberties at risk" -- but it's buried in a bunch of sensationalist drivel.

Lines like "it makes me racist" or "it could even affect your kids" or "Osama Bin Laden won after all" do nothing for intelligent discourse of the issue. The author could have easily made the same points without using such counterproductive emotional appeals.
A fine Reddit politics post. Really!

Does not belong on the front page on HN.

Flagged.
What are the main flaws in Android OS which still somewhat inhibit its growth?
In the case of software, a patent doesn't promote innovation, it hampers it. Allowing a company to sit on it's laurels for 20 years because they patented something as simple as swiping left to right to unlock a screen is absurd.

This isn't to say that companies shouldn't be able to protect their products. Trademarks are very valuable and help prevent cheap knockoffs, but patents aren't being used to protect their products against knock-offs. They are being used to force other companies to find complicated workarounds for a simple problem.
Ask PG: what's your take on Bitcoin?
I haven't seen you comment on any recent Bitcoin threads. Surely you must have a position on Bitcoin, or at least be forming one.
I'm not sure I understand your point. Yes, in order for a Bitcoin fork to succeed, you'd have to convince the majority of clients to use the new protocol. However, once you gained a majority, the Bitcoins generated by the old protocol would fall in value relative to the Bitcoins generated with the new protocol. If your Bitcoins are worth $100 using the new protocol, but only $50 using the old protocol, there's a strong financial incentive to start using the new client so you can sell your bitcoins at a higher rate and to a larger audience.