skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, this is one of the most painful things to do as an experimentalist. You just know that there's some kind of error in the data. Because -- in the memorable words of some teacher of mine [1] -- "you can't really believe an experiment until it's been confirmed by theory."

And, yet, you've spent lots and lots of energy and you can't find the problem yourself. And what if there is something there? There are many famous cases of experiments that weren't confirmed by theory until well after the fact; theorists often don't bother to think about a particular corner of the unthinkable until an experiment calls attention to it. So you've just got to publish your data, but also be prepared to laugh it off when the mistake gets identified, or the data proves irreproducible. And then to spend the rest of your career laughing it off, because this spurious result may be the most famous thing you ever publish.

You've got to have a good sense of humor to survive as an experimentalist.

---

[1] I wish I remembered which teacher said this.
They should at least mention that it raises the question: what good is having this technology if most people can't afford it or it's not more effective than technology available elsewhere? Shouldn't we care more about making existing technology more affordable and effective rather than chase the latest technology gizmos?

They're separate questions. In many cases, the best way to make technology more affordable is to improve the technology. Furthermore, developing new treatments where none existed before might make healthcare seem more expensive but in fact it's a flawed comparison. The cost before the treatment existed was essentially infinite.

In some ways, better insurance can actually aggravate the situation, because existing drug companies have no real incentive to do serious innovation. They're already collecting enormous revenues from prescriptions and would probably just as soon not have any technology disrupt that model.
That is correct. I will try to make Gerry's one of the first to go up.
Ask HN: What do you think about Qatar .QA TLD?
As you probably know, Qatar recently opened their .QA TLD registry. I would like to know your opinion about them.

There are no english words ending with 'qa', but QA can stand for Quality Assurance or Questions and Answers (Q&A).

(I registered few .qa domains but I don't want to spam those names here.)
Matlab commands in numerical Python (NumPy)
Will there be an API? I can think of a few services that could integrate with this nicely.
I'm a fan of bootstrapping, but it's not always an option. Plenty of opportunities in consumer require a critical mass before you can start making money. These are the kinds of plays that make sense when VC is flowing more freely. For some businesses, it really does take 10 developers plus 5 others working for a year to hammer things out. That clocks in at $2-3 million, which just so happens to be a reasonable Series A.
Please re-read the line, there is a but before "on a deep social and ethical level, Facebook and its platform are not web-scale".

I think he meant for any company to be web-scale there are other sides of the story included too - having big, distributed data centers alone is not sufficient. There is a thing called "privacy" and "trust" which would scale throughout the internet, for which Facebook never had serious concerns, IMO.
David Wood's MLM Prosperity Blog
This Week In Social
Recap of some of the top stories in social media from the week
We've been using this instead of TestFlight. The crash reporting aggregation is a huge time saver, and the developer is responsive.
Precisely. My consulting rate was $150/hr when I last did the work. Were I hired by just about any company to do the same job, I wouldn't make anywhere near $312,000 a year (assuming 40 hrs a week, 52 weeks a year salary), even when factoring in benefits. My staff counterparts within the corporations I worked with were making right around six-figures, so in that context, the government is doing really well.
Most Americans have long left the "rural community" and equate sharecropping with the exploitation of freed slaves after the end of the Civil War.
As far as I can tell, government contractors are quite full of "non-performers". It was pretty much the standing assumption around my alma mater that if you were an engineer wanting a bill-hours-and-do-nothing job for a few years past college, a place like Booz(e) Allen Hamilton was the way to go. Leverage your degree into some bullshit powerpoints and "recommendations", and rake in the cash.
Sorry about not replying to you on the other thread a few days ago. I haven't been keeping up with HN regularly and forgot to check whether you had replied to my comment.

I think you are badly misinterpreting how the courts work. The Federal Circuit did not overrule Benson or Flook, even if Justice Stevens disliked their interpretation thereof in Diehr. Nor did the Supreme Court write off State Street or Appalat as bad precedent in the Bilski decision. When Bilski was before the Federal circuit, it rejected his claim and also narrowed its earlier criteria for patentability substantially. The Supreme Court affirmed the Federal Circuit's judgment that Bilski's business method was not patentable, but said that the extremely narrow 'machine or transformation' test identified by the Federal Circuit was too narrow, and would exclude many patentable inventions while seeking to exclude unpatentable ones.

Now, you're talking about this bit, I think: And nothing in today's opinion should be read as endorsing interpretations of § 101 that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has used in the past. See, e.g., State Street, 149 F.3d, at 1373; AT & T Corp., 172 F.3d, at 1357. (Bilski v. Kappos at 3231) Is this right? If not, ignore the following.

They're not saying those earlier decisions are bad precedent. They're warning people against interpretations of the form 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend.' You're reading it as a binary: they're not endorsing something, therefore they must be against it. but non-endorsement does not equate to condemnation. Their point is that they are not passing judgment on those earlier decisions at all, and it would be a mistake to look for an implicit endorsement of those decisions in the case they were judging at the time.

It's important to understand that courts don't like to settle open legal questions if they don't need to, and they definitely don't want to do it by expanding the scope on their inquiry. Why? Because that would put them on a collision course with Congress, and the judiciary is less powerful than Congress. The Courts could lose some of their existing powers if they exercised them too freely. So what a court much prefers to do when presented with a knotty problem (like the state of patent law) is to either throw the ball back into Congress's court, or to wait until a case comes to them where the issues are clear and well-defined. In the latter situation, the Court can make a straightforward argument that it is exercising its legitimate function of deciding the answer to a question that has been brought before it. The court does not want to look like it's asking questions of its own. So another way to read the non-endorsement statement above is 'don't anyone get the idea that we are trying to usurp Congress and articulate a new law here, because we're not.'
It was mentioned that ROI tracking stems from the urls created using the google url builder tool.

Do you have any insights on how to best set up the funnel tracking with google? The interview briefly mentions seeing the help docs from google (is there a better resource you use?).

In my experience, google misses some sales and perhaps you have developed some best practices, thanks again!
Funny Girl Hot Movement
Interesting that you use website as a synonym for company. The web site of this company is nothing more than a front end for interfacing with the public for marketing and customer service. Presumably, the company also has their actual VPN structure which they use to deliver their service to their customers, offices (optional), bank accounts, etc.
Culling, Crawling, and Machine Learning in JavaScript
Meet the I School's New Advisory Board
Accepted into Start-up Chile still thinking about YC...
Startup Chile announced their winners earlier today and I was accepted.
You can see the list here http://www.startupchile.org/154-startups-selected-in-start-up-chiles-2nd-round-of-2011/

Now comes decision time, though of course I've been tossing it around in my head for a long time already.

On the plus side of Chile, I've never lived in a non-english/western country. I can definitely use the money and connections to help grow my business.

One of the challenges for me is that from a friend who lives in Chile, I've heard that my product doesn't really suit the Chilean market.

At the same time, I've already made a few great business connections in the industry, so I'm not a completely unknown factor.

Any suggestions on how to decide, plus or minuses that others have considered?

Congrats to all those who were accepted.
I've started to for some things, mostly as a courtesy to the viewer over filtering publicly consumable content.
Just use an alternative in-app payment processor for now. Oh wait.
Slaying BEAST: Mitigating the latest SSL/TLS Vulnerability
Eric Schmidt testifies: Bing could eclipse Google by next year
The timing submissions has a huge effect. Posting at a busy time makes a story far more likely to get buried. Posting at 6:oo am Saturday morning is more likely to provide enough time for a story to gain traction than 10am Monday.
Just posted a job add on dribbble. Agree that it's a great place to recruit designers.
are you doing all of these manually, I looked around but didn't see that you require the message and address in any particular format ? So how are you programmaticly parsing the incoming emails ?
NB: MS SQL server is based on / is Sybase SQL Server.
Manchester united vs Stoke City live  Espn Tv -24 September
Am I crazy for considering switching from TestFlight to HockeyApp mainly because HockeyApp actually charges for the service?
If necessary, we can go back in time and make sure the discovery doesn't take place.
I suspect this will be resolved in far shorter time than it would take to switch your app to a new API and distribute updates to your userbase.
In general I think SV has a nice culture: people help each other. For example, Jonathan and Laura from Hackers and Founders.

The competitive environment does not require behavior which is dishonest and win at all costs. There is a simple rule in business: if you are not sure whether to lie or not, tell the truth. Follow that rule and soround yourself with people like that you will be fine.

Yes there are some assholes (and they ended up rich - go figure). Just be smart and avoid people who are not transparent and dishoest.
ازياء زهير مراد
If you're still on CentOS 5.7 you might need to upgrade your openssh package. Might I recommend openssh-5.8.p1 with the HPN patch (http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/hpn-ssh/#patches)
From the article:

The scientists reached their conclusion after sending
streams of tiny, subatomic particles called neutrinos
hurtling from an accelerator at CERN outside Geneva to
a detector at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in
Italy, about 450 miles away.

"The neutrinos seemed to get there too soon — 60
nanoseconds too soon, give or take — than they should
if they'd been traveling at the speed of light."

So... How do these guys measure speed for something that is faster than light? If they start the stopwatch in Geneva, how do they know when the stuff arrived in Gran Sasso in order to stop it? The stuff used to communicate the arrival needs to travel at most at the speed of light, right? Are the neutrinos themselves the stopwatches somehow?

I guess physics is hard, let's go shopping!
This service looks similar to various 'MMS postcard' offerings that many telcos have for their subscribers.
I was a software engineer with no reports at MSFT, and at the time had 5 people between myself and Steve. Since leaving, I've heard from former coworkers that the team was reorganized... to make it flatter.

The problem with Microsoft's org chart is its width, not its height. The best metaphor is "warring city-states", with a large helping of "the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing". Each Microsoft product team or department has the ambition and manpower to believe that they can build a world-changing product - after all, this is Microsoft! We can make a new, better standard for web content if we want to do that! Go big! At the same time, no individual product team has the official authority to quash other projects that might duplicate, negate, interfere with, render obsolete, or drain resources from its own project.

The key word is "official". When a decision has to be made about a troubled or behind-schedule project, the more-important divisions will typically get their way. Software development being what it is, there will always be several troubled or behind-schedule projects in a company the size of Microsoft. Then you have to sit down, compare future plans and bug lists to schedules/budgets/available developers, and decide what to do about it. It's in those meetings that Microsofties discover some product teams are more equal than others.

This is what the original article sounds like. There's an ambitious product, yet it suffers for lack of attention and resources. Some developers are overworked (their project is too large) while others are bored by inaction (their project is too small). It suddenly comes to the attention of Team Foo that Team Bar has built a system which does not use Foo, even though Foo is supposed to be Microsoft's all-purpose framework for your Bar needs (Team Bar did not know about Team Foo and vice-versa). The problem is recognized, yet nobody actually seems to be in charge of deciding what to do. Finally there is a come-to-Jesus moment in a "corporate realignment". Foo: Yes or no? Microsoft retroactively discovers that actually, it's OK with Foo not taking over the world. The project ends, often with the notable developer/evangelist/whatever in charge saying that they were very excited about the Foo technology but it seems Microsoft didn't agree. Some level of bitterness is expressed at the fact that Microsoft never said so up front.
With 'real-time' apps, Facebook is always watching
This is headline news for iOS.

For Android, this is literally a daily occurrence.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3028999
HockeyApp's crash reporting is far more comprehensive and useful than TestFlight's, especially in the server-side symbol/line number associations and grouping of crash reports.

This was a major deciding factor in our switching.
He is illustrating unbecoming behavior from Valve.
The term sharecropper has two meanings.

The first one is the modern day practice. "He's a sharecropper because he uses share cropping in his business" refers to the modern day agricultural practice. Whatever economic system they use is irrelevant.

In almost all other cases, particularly in regards to Technology, it refers to the old school practice of share cropping and is using it as such.

Present day usage has nothing to do with it. It is all about context. If 80% of HN agree that sharecropper means X, then it means X. Sharecropper in this sense has become a piece of jargon among business and technology folks.
Any other feedback from folks on the usage of RC4 in lieu of a CBC like AES?
Why Good Visualization Matters: Rethinking the Food Label
http://magazine.lankahelp.com/2011/01/21/chamath-palihapitiy...
Question marks sprinkled liberally... reading this guy's writing is like listening to an Aussie speak.
I agree on the Zend. It really is weak. But seems to work for a lot of peoples basic needs and has brand recognition, so I felt compelled to include.
Good luck, brother. I had the same moment this week and launched an idea this past Monday. I didn't get much traction here on HN, but I did in other places. The response was overwhelming, and we raised some seed money last night over drinks. hmmm...maybe I should write that story up for HN? "From fuckit, I'm launching to seed capital in 4 days!"

Cheers, and good luck!
Oneiric server, Deploy Server fleets
URDU SEX STORIES: Khooni Choot
get params?
> Or before they sell it all to markters

They do this now...
What Tau to 126 decimal places sounds like
I thought about this recently, but because I need to send mail to a few government offices, and to my university for my transcripts. Both have to be done in paper, but I'd love to upload a PDF, add an address and be done with it. I'd try to market this to legal offices as a time saver.
I've never had any trouble monetizing Android, but I've never known anything else. I only do Android, not iPhone. Although I did just get a mac..

My apps are paid, ranging from 2.99 to 4.99. Some hits, some misses. I don't do any marketing whatsoever.
The difference is between:

My intuition is telling me this is true.

and

My intuition is telling me this is true. Let me test it.
This is the right move for you. Most start-ups that fail never even launched anything at all. Some are trying to perfect their product before exposing it to beta users then they run out of money. This is a flaw. You can never achieve perfection but the pursuit of it will make one great product. You do this by letting people try them out and get feedbacks from it. Launch quickly and learn fast....good job and good luck!
This is a great insight, thanks for sharing!
Startups on a beach... I like.
The author also says "Under a scientific framework, input from intuition, tradition, experience, common sense, experts, and logic might be incorporated during the construction of a preliminary hypothesis"
Hey, I am Andreas, one of the developers of HockeyApp.net. The service provides some pretty unique features especially advanced crash report management. Crash Reporting is based on PLCrashReporter (see http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/code/objc/Reliable_Crash_Repor...), works also in the App Store with full server side symbolication grouping all crashes by class, method and line number.
Let me know if you have any questions.
How EWA Has Been Providing Aid for Africa
Sept. 23, 1846: Neptune Right Where They Said It Would Be
It'd be helpful to know how much it costs without having to watch a video. You know, like an upfront price or something.
Pretty much anywhere you go there is corporate infighting. Learning to deal with that in a constructive way and not let it get you down (too much) is important.

The conclusion the author was trying to sell (I think) was that Silverlight didn't have a five year plan so that is why it failed. But it sounded like no matter how well it was doing it could have been killed simply because HTML is the new hot thing.

Honestly he comes away as a guy who didn't have much influence and when he didn't get his way, got aggravated and started fights. And when the product was killed off he is trying to spin it as though he knew it was going to fail all along and wasn't listened to, but to what point I am not sure, it isn't helping him.

Edit: and him openly admitting to being the leak for a major tech news lost him all sympathy from me. People who leak news that they know they shouldn't rub me the wrong way. For someone who does consulting this seems like a kiss of death for future jobs.
How your hiring process is ruining your development team
Finding what customers will pay for is the single most important skill in any business. Having worked full time out of school for 12 years on my own has taught me how to create value for customers in a lasting way. I can only get better and better at it every day. It's the single most important skill I can have and work on, and translate to a product of my own -- find how an idea will work as a business.

Bootstrapping has a short runway based on our own pockets. VC funded runways are often more controlled by outsiders.

If you can bootstrap to breaking even, you can let it sit and grow for a longer time even if you return to other work, in a way that VC backed startups wouldn't linger.

Sometimes great ideas need to let the market / demand needs to grow. Like buying property before area area starts to re-develop. If you have a business that's selling already, it will help get better and higher amounts investment should you want to go that route.

Imho, VC's want to be water to an already sprouted and growing plant.

Great link, thanks for sharing
0.02
With 150 startups, this is much more interesting. For less than the tax abatements to incentivize a single tire factory, they're getting hundreds of active entrepreneurs in their country. Who knows if it will work or not (I'm optimistic), but this is so hilariously cheap for a national program. I'm pretty sure it will work out better than advertising in the WSJ for a month or two.
When I read about FB Timeline (and watched the trailer), I was concurrently impressed and uneasy.

Impressed because it's an elegant way to deal with a problem that didn't exist until recently...how to make old user info useful and re-relevant. Until they had so many multi-year users there was no need to revisit old data.

Uneasy because I've seen this before. Essentially, they've created a version of the Officer/Enlisted Record Brief (ie - US Army personnel dossier). Surely, there's nothing wrong with creating a consistent, repeatable format for understanding people and their experiences. It saves time and reduces effort required to pass judgment. In two specific ways, though, I found dossiers inadequate undesirable:

(1) A record brief never accurately captured the skills and experiences of the person being considered. A life is so vast (and variable!) that it can't possibly be captured in a proscribed format. I guess this abuts my general unease with FB as a whole. I felt that I would never be able to capture myself through my profile/pics/etc and didn't want to be judged by a poor facsimile. Status updates and the increased ability to interact with friends and family tempered this unease. Now they've gone a step further towards formalizing a life's structure.

(2) The ouputs could drive the inputs. Because FB inevitably has to be selective on what can be recorded in any type of dossier (standardization being the key), FBer behavior might be modified to match those fields. Army dossiers drive Army people to focus on activities and experiences that look impressive on the dossier (awards, deployments, schools). FB Timeline is an order of magnitude removed, but if it catches on and becomes the de facto way that users are judged by family/friends/employers, the possibility of driving user behavior certainly exists.

Yes, I know that FB is voluntary.
No I am not assuming anything - I am speaking about the way privacy currently works on FB. You are assuming that at some point in the future FB will change their privacy settings and everyone can see your posts. In which case, FB may not be for you.
Huh. Chile is taking a $6 million ($40,000 × 154, assuming they all accept) bet that one of them becomes successful in some way.

I think the chances are pretty good.
Flaw in OS X Lion allows unauthorized password changes
I'll pay for this. I would pay an annual or (small) monthly fee for this.
Props to you for launching, knowing it's not ready yet and there will be pissed off people because of the bugs. That's a scary thing to do, no matter how easy it is for us all to say we would do it too.

More people need to do this. Like you said, without constant customer feedback, you're tweaking things because you think you should, not because it will improve anything necessarily.
I seriously question the quality of nanex infrastructure in general ... they may have had a clock shift (if they left NTP running)
Mechanical Keyboard Guide (with several models and styles): http://www.overclock.net/keyboards/491752-mechanical-keyboar...
If meth was available like cigarettes or beer, there would be significantly less private production of the drug ;-)
What's next for Paul Carr?
SEO-agency