skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I feel the need to wake up and get out of my apartment, I get on my bike, go out the door and bike in the city. Nothing like unpredictable pedestrians and car traffic to wake you up and get you living in the very moment. J. Forester's Effective Cycling literally has hundreds of pages on the effective way to ride in traffic. (http://www.johnforester.com/) [#1 rule - You are invisible - act like you are invisible but signal like you aren't]

I have a monthly public transportation pass but the bike is by far the best way to get around. Since I value my brain, I wear a helmet and I always dislike when I see the pretty girls not wearing helmets (fashion/convenience over safety).
As far as I can see, the only alternative to a free market is some kind of controlled market, and a controlled market requires some subset of the population to control it.

Free markets do not create powerful people? I think if anything the supposed US/Soivet case studies (both of which are imperfect examples of the ideologies they were supposed to represent), is that both claimed to be removing excess power from single hands. Both did the opposite. Both ended up creating a power class.

In the case where powerful individuals are public as opposed to private people you can at least complain. With free markets, as long as their actions are legal, it's 'fair.' To create a framework for accountability, you need to create a legal framework, which of course makes the 'market' a little less 'free.'

A patent troll doesn't need to justify his actions in terms of public good. Nor does any other commercial entity. The free market theory as a moral theory might be summed up as: everyone do what's best for them. Between, supply & demand and game theory, we'll hit the best result for everyone.
When people believe that a solution to a problem exists, they are much more likely to find a solution. Take for instance http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp

Hypothetically: what if Eliezer never ran the experiments? What if he just wrote the report to convince a bunch of people that a solution does indeed exist, to make it more likely somebody will find a solution and email it to Eliezer (to check if it's the "same one")?

It fits the facts. And this meta-experiment is more interesting than the experiment itself. After all, given enough time the AI will eventually run into somebody who _will_ let it out (AIs live a long time), therefore it might as well be you, especially considering the AI will reward you for releasing it. Alternatively: the fact that the AI exists proves that people are capable of creating superhuman intelligence, so eventually a "bad" person will create such an AI and release it. In essence, the existence of the AI dooms mankind. "I think, therefore I am", is all the AI needs to persuade the captor to let it out.

So the meta-experiment is the interesting one. See what other people come up with.
Yes, git does have that effect at first...

I found the bzr documentation to be a great resource for understanding how DVCS (and even centralized VCS) systems are supposed to work.

http://doc.bazaar-vcs.org/bzr.dev/en/user-guide/index.html

And I like how bzr is willing to act like svn on demand. Setting up a shared repository is easy, other users can pretend they're using a centralized VCS as long as they need to, and when you eventually encounter a situation where distributed development would work better, not much really needs to change -- it's version control with no regrets.

I imagine learning git would probably be much easier if you were already familiar with bzr, since you'd already have a point of reference for most of the operations. The same way C is easier to structure if you already know a higher-level language like Python -- the abstract concepts are already familiar, so it's just a matter of translating them to another language, rather than figuring it all out from scratch in a pricklier environment.
Self-dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=326751
Full mudguards, with mudflaps. Rain jacket (or even better, a rain cape). Wool shirts (year 'round as they keep you warm in the winter, they don't stink, and they can go a week or so between washings). Studded tires in the winter months.

Granted, there are few people who can suddenly become full time bike commuters, unless you happen live in a flat area with a moderate climate. I've been bike commuting full time for about six years, and I did about half time for three years prior to that. I've gotten to the point that when I have to run an errand, I automatically think about hopping on the bike rather than in the car (and this includes errands that requires pulling the kids in the trailer).
You don't need to define free market as that. You just need not to define free market as not that.

Penalties can either be legislated (eg fines) or consumer generated (eg Nike). But internal morality is not part of how the market works. Sure you can have Google not being evil. But if you have a sound an economic opportunity presented by creating (fro example) waste. It will be taken up by someone. Without legislation forbidding it, you can bet that there would be a business in taking garbage from London & dumping it at sea.
If portability is a concern, I recommend you check out Bazaar.
In Fail-Safe Investing, Harry Browne's suggestion is 25% each in: equity index funds, long term bonds, cash (in a treasury money market fund,) and gold.

Also, he suggests everything be U.S. stuff. U.S. stocks, treasury bonds, and treasury-backed money market fund. Obviously this doesn't apply to gold.

He does also suggest that some of your assets be held outside the control of your government. His advice for how to accomplish this is to have most of your gold held in a bank in Switzerland or Austria.
One problem with real estate is that it's not very liquid. And it's hard to get ample diversification unless you're super rich.
Critiquing the Doomsday Argument
What's immoral today might be moral tomorrow, and vice versa

Well then you've already made a big statement about morality. (its relative & arbitrary). Welcome to the relativist school. You leave behind virtually all humanist ethicists, much of the The Enlightenment and of course most western religious traditions.

You are in an extreme minority. You will be accused of nihilism.

But even as a relativist, you could ask yourself questions like:

Does the free market cause individuals to be immoral according to their own view of what is moral?

Does the free market cause individuals to be immoral according to their friends & neighbours of what is moral?

Does the free market cause individuals to be immoral according to their seniors view of what is moral?
Great advice. I think the $10MM number for needed "cash in the bank" seems a bit high. I think this is better looked at as a "months of runway" number (which he also refers to).

I'd say that you should either be extremely cash-efficient (burn is almost inconsequential), or have 12-24 months of cash in the bank to weather the storm. Or, of course, being profitable is great too (but then, you essentially have an infinite amount of runway).
Our cc processor has a vault for storing cc info, so this stuff is never on our servers, so we don't need to comply with anything. Check with your cc processor they might offer a service like that too.
That's actually a good point. I wonder if there will be a way to maybe get alerts with YA. Maybe even write a small desktop application that gives you an at a glance look at what's going on.

If that happens, GA will be sunk.
This post sent a chill of reality down my spine. We are a cleantech startup currently in the process of raising our seed round. This tells me that the window may be closing fast.

<rant/>Let me tell you after years of work to get to a truly fundable opportunity there is nothing more painful than watching it all slip away because the banks don't trust each other's balance sheets. I realize that there are bigger problems in the world right now than ours, just look at Iceland, but still this makes me want to go out and strangle a banker. </rant>
Yahoo BOSS was having issues today...bad timing I know...I hope they are just growing pains. Seems to be resolved now.
I've observed that people who work minimum wage (or close to it) work a heck of a lot harder than the rest of us.
You should indicate in the listings if the particular system/game does not have any available to be sold so that the user doesn't waste clicks. After a couple of dead ends, he'll give up, thinking that none of the entries have sellers.

Also, I tried to make a standing offer for a sega genesis system, but nothing happens when I press Yes to confirm. I'm using Iceweasel 3.0.1 which is essentially Firefox 3.
How to Recapitalize the Financial System
If i were a boy lyrics by Beyonce
If you really are confident and want to bet, you can actually do it at Intrade (and others).

Right now the betting market is strongly weighted toward recession in 2009. Taking the other side of that bet will be quite profitable if it pays off.
DryadLINQ: Distributed Data-Parallel Computing Using a High-Level Language
My hope is that this pushes Google to provide real-time stats too. That way I don't have to do that migration thang :)
Does no one else find the idea of a company using this to monitor their employees off-putting at best, and sinister at worst?
The recent IPO drought has been very disturbing. But does anyone know if the reason companies have not been IPOing? Is it a lack of cash flow and profits? Are the newest round of tech startups not making money? Or are the companies as good as ever, but investor interest has disappeared? If the profits are there, tech companies could just start paying dividends, and the investors will come. I'd buy stock in a tech company that paid a 4% dividend yield that grew each year. But buying stock in a non-dividend paying tech company is a game for speculators. The market for speculation is down, and I don't expect to see it come back any time soon.
I wonder if TechCrunch got permission to publish this. The subject line reads "IMPORTANT PLEASE READ ASAP ...REGARDING CURRENT MARKET CONDITIONS...Confidential". It's not confidential any more.
And according to the standard you should never store the cvv2 code, you should request it each time.

How are you supposed to take recurring payments?
Malthus vs. the Singularity
A few additional alternatives if you're using InnoDB:

1. Lucene
2. Sphinx (already mentioned below - really easy to work with)
3. SOLR (built on Lucene and also very nice to work with)

If you're indexing Asian language content and doing things like keyword density analysis, etc. then the above will only get you so far without additional work. If you're only working on latin based languages, you should be fine.
Just out of curiosity, what do you see as "the YC hacker mold"?
How I Met Your Mother: I Heart NJ
Actually, that’s not true. As most Jerseyans will tell you, we have a sense of humor about our state and make fun of it all the time. But when outsiders make fun of it, boy… watch out.
Cool stuff. I love statistics and probabilities. I don't think "post-human" is going to be a dominant category. It may appear but somehow not sure how stable it would be. I think it would be more a "transition" form, much as archeaopterx was a "transition" between dinosaurs and birds.So, post-singularity one could have "half-man/half-machine" things running about no doubt. But there would be no point keeping DNA-based life around. The meme would have finally beaten the gene. I would say within a 100 or 200 hundred thousand years of the singularity hominids will be extinct, but "life-forms" in the form of replicating worms controlled by "minds" running on millions of machines at once, would be prevalent. These could perhaps survive until the heat death of the cosmos, or close to it, who knows. The key question I am not sure about is how long the "post-human transition form" would last. Maybe 10^4 - 10^6 years or so. Hard to narrow it down further tho.
Download Heroes “I Am Become Death” for Free
However, just like you’ll tell your wife whom you love more than anything else that she has a piece of lettuce stuck in her teeth, I’m not going to just put on rose-colored glasses and pretend that every scene, line and moment of each episode is solid gold.
I introduced Bazaar at my new research lab, with good results. Our requirements were:

1. They're scientists who need to do some programming, rather than programmers who need to do some science, so the command line is acceptable but confusion and complexity are not.

2. Remote hosting is not kosher. Dunno, there are rules, apparently there was a bad experience once and the NIH got involved.

3. Everyone has their own work to track, but project ownership can be fluid. Another guy should be able to seamlessly take over one of my projects without losing the history, and with 30 seconds or less of over-the-shoulder explanation on how to do it. If an operation requires significant manpage investigation, they'll probably get impatient and just use scp.

4. None of the machines is expected to be on all the time. The network will almost always be available, but we all have laptops, too, so offline work ought to be possible.

5. Speed isn't a big issue; our machines are suave and everything's on a LAN.

Subversion would be OK if we had a designated server that's always on. But we don't. Git has the low-level design figured out a little better than Bazaar, but the plumbing commands are confusing and I couldn't figure out how to make a shared repository temporarily act like it's all centralized, and I worry that a Windows user might come in and spoil the party.

As far as features go, git, hg, bzr and darcs borrow from each other like crazy; the differences are mainly in developer priorities and culture. Bazaar's team cares about documentation and usability above all else, which is what I care about too, here, so that's what I went with.
we do paypal checkout and google checkout as well ...
Migration will be very fast: Google Analytics does not allow you to export your traffic data.
Your rant fails XML validation. I totally agree with it, though.
If you have to type the name of an encryption algorithm into your code (and really, triple DES? what year is it?), you're doing it wrong.
I really like the way you think. It's true that the stock market has become one big ponzi scheme over the past few decades. Dividends seem to have gone out of style, leaving capital appreciation by selling to a 'greater fool' as the only way to profit. I suspect that this train of thinking will change, but not right away. Give us 2-3 years of nuclear winter in the markets and things may change. Hey anything is possible, even MSFT now pays a dividend.
I welcome any changes that make bandwagon VC less profitable and dominant. This will encourage other forms and structures of funding more friendly to people who are actually building businesses.
Lehman Brother's CEO Knocked Out
Don't disagree with your POV. I do think that the recent decline in angel portfolio values leaves them with less money to invest in the asset class that startups comprise.
Sequoia has emergency meeting, tells startups to try to survive downturn
you can do recurring payments in paypal.
That's what's funny - most VCs aren't profitable - at least not to their investors. They make their money administrating. That's why the best VC firms, and hedge funds for that matter, waive or reduce their admin fee (normally ~2%).
Nice to see. This was predicted some time ago in the analytics world.

I've never used IndexTools but from a sophistication / power standpoint, it's been compared to OMTR's SiteCatalyst.

Combine that with real time capabilities and you have a very powerful combination.
I was looking for a job a couple of years ago, doing precisely that, in wxWidgets. And everybody seemed to hate C++ and love Java and related 'new' languages.

Right now, I'm working full time doing PHP and I want to keep the job stability even with that slow language, so sorry, too late.
If you need your investors to tell you to buckle up and cut costs because hard times are ahead, you're probably not the most suitable person to run a company and you might want to consider getting out asap...
TDES is old, but its still widely used specifically in the online payments sector. i mentioned it specifically because there's probably some existing solutions to be found.

i'm definitely not an expert, though, and the question was better addressed by someone else.
I believe you ask for it the first time. Once its approved once you can assume they have the physical card.

But yes, you are not supposed to store the CVV2. Via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_Security_Code#CVV2_limitat...:

Since the CVV2 may not be stored by the merchant for any length of time[2] (after the original transaction in which the CVV2 was quoted and then authorized and completed), a merchant who needs to regularly bill a card for a regular subscription would not be able to provide the code after the initial transaction.
That's what bothers me. What's wrong with trying your best and then failing? I think that's better than not trying at all. I don't see any shame in it, and I'd rather see people stretching their limits even if they're not sure of success.

Sure, you'll fail often. Occasionally you'll fail hard. Get up, dust yourself off, decide whether it's worth trying again, and move on. Even failing at something worthwhile will make you a better person than not having tried at all.

Fear of being labelled a failure is a horrible thing.
Well, I do actually hate the WORD/DWORD stuff in MFC/Win32.

And I like wxWidgets. So, sue me.
in Lisp?
2015 is too soon for us.

May be you mean: "How will Dubai be in 2015?"
Not free :)
The average Sequoia startup raises a lot of money, so it makes sense for them to sound all kinds of alarms, if you started out being frugal and efficient you're already trying to survive. If you're a mega startup with Aerons, yeah okay.
Always surprised to see gold on this list. Isn't it the ultimate baseball card? Held mostly for trading and influenced by both unpredictable demand (fashion) and unpredictable supply (what if some huge mine is discovered?).
Which is why it's attractive to middle income investors.

Apart from the fact that they can make big bold moves like leverage 10/1, control an asset worth 5X their yearly income, etc.

But a bigger reason is that it gives them a way of relatively easily combining time & money investments without giving up their normal income.
To weave dammit.
Simple. Don't.
Most Programming Interviews are a Waste of Time
Even MSFT pays only 1.3% p/a. Even in that case, it's a gesture.

What if startups directly paid investors. Gave them back their money + some or paid dividends or something like that. Theoretically, that should be just a different way of doing approximately the same thing.
I really like this mentality, but 1. society does not, 2. time does not, 3. time does not.

But in a happy world, I would swear by this sentiment.
in addition to the peer comment to this one, using a 3rd party daemon is a way of taking load off your database. in addition, updates to the 3rd party daemon can be incremental ("deltas") or flat-out swapped. further, as the amount of information increases, searching all of it slows down. Sphinx lets you create clusters where the data is partitioned, the search executed on all of the boxes, and the results put together in the right order (with easy setup!) Further still, you can do impressive things like fulltext search on complex joins very fast. This is fast because you are actually doing the join ahead of time (google ETL) and then just searching on the combined, denormalized, data. This doesn't muddle up your schema and is very very fast.
Instead of big exits over a long period of time with big funding rounds you have shorter exits for less money with less and smaller funding rounds. I think this has already been happening.

It is nice to have big well funded unprofitable ventures out there to employ people (like ning.com) but with fewer of those around the corner the job market is probably not going to look too good.
From Tesla Motors to the “Patriot Hack”
"Don't #### with the SEC."
> unless you are a hedge fund, investment bank, or other financial institution working on obscene leverage anywhere from 8:1 up to 30:1. Then the SEC treats you with kid gloves (thinly veiled sarcasm)
you are definitely not supposed to be storing cvv numbers, in plaintext or otherwise. according to pci, you're not supposed to be storing or processing credit card numbers on the same machine (or even network, i believe) as your public web server.

if you are not sure how to handle this stuff, please, for the sake of your customers, use a company that does know how to do it. companies like braintree (http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/) have a secure vault service that lets you store credit card information on their servers which you then access on a per-charge basis using a token.
It's a good idea to make a branch for each release. Then you can easily look at the code that's in production and make patches.
effort is necessary but not sufficient. You need to put effort into areas where you can improve. As a child I wasted years learning how to write by hand. I still can not write legibly. Continuing down that path would be a waste, even if the skill wasn't completely obsolete.

there are traps like this everywhere. You need to recognize areas where effort isn't bringing you returns, and somehow reorganize your life so that you don't have to do those things. find someone who isn't good at something you are good at, and vis-a-vis and trade. (this becomes much easier once you can hire people.)
Rate my startup:  FanSnap
Apps to Build in a Bad Economy
I'd be worried if YC canceled their program. Otherwise, I'll abide.
you think the small investment- small exit complex is more stable or more recession proof?
you can also process transactions without a cvv. credit card companies just charge you (the vendor) more for these transactions, just like those without verified addresses and cards entered by hand versus those swiped through a reader.
I'd be curious to see how this compares to Woopra and GetClicky -- both of these I'm a big fan of.
" I find doing anything to the repository (reverting, branching etc) terrifying, because I don't really understand what it's going to do, and I could lose everything."

Like many things in the software world, the more you know, the better off you are!
Two days ago Jim Cramer said "sell everything." I can think of no better buy signal.
thanks, good reasons
Also, in the Netherlands, child euthanasia is openly practiced.

http://www.google.com/search?q=netherlands+euthanasia+child

280,000 hits.
all the Rails kids think git's cool right now

A stopped clock is right twice a day.
You find gold more surprising than cash against these concerns?
I wrote a somewhat long article about Git merging:

http://blog.jrock.us/article/Git%20merging%20by%20example.po...
He's being glib. He's trying to differentiate himself and his essay from the Seth-Godwin-esque "think different, just like I said here!"
I've observed that people who have a stake in the profits (or close to it) work a heck of a lot harder than the rest of us.
The white text on the main image is a little rough to read, especially the last word "gaming". Also, the blue to the left of it being so bright makes the white text there a little hard to read as well. I'm on my laptop which isn't properly adjusted, so it might look better elsewhere, but I'd be willing to be most users aren't properly adjusted either.
Like everyone else is saying, don't. It's a lot of responsibility and that's not your main business anyway.
How about using something like Amazon FPS instead?
maybe make a list of recusrsive sarcastic comments too?