skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
41 and about to embark on startup #2.

The talk about late bloomers as "searchers" struck a chord with me, because that's what I started doing about 3 years back... searching for that money-maker.

If I'm like the writer in the story, I've only got 17 years left and I'll find it. :-)
reminds me of the sex.com case.
Hesse wrote, semi-autobiographically, in Steppenwolf, that "the person with ordinary gifts will indeed achieve greatness, given two lifetimes."

My opinion is that socio-economic environmental factors weigh terribly hard in the favor of the young "geniuses" who are just doing what sparks their interest. After their works are appraised ten years later, most of it will be forgotten or worse -- rubbed down. Once the youngsters are 'on their own', in the socio-economic element of their own making, comes the true test of time.

The present is always too sexy for its own good, though I do sympathize w/ the 24-year-old who sees 31 as aged over the hill, knowing that she will be 31 and see 24 as happening just a moment ago. I'm 31, the present is still a bitch, and I'm 32 in March. Also, I wrote a poem that's as good as "The Snow Man" easily, probably on par with "The Fish".

Don't take any wooden nickels, as the oldsters say ;-)
Nature reports on Thomson/Reuters lawsuit against GMU
generalization is not always correct, and isn't intended to be. that i have to explain this makes me sad.

i have worked with 120 or more indian programmers over the course of many jobs and several years, in bangalore, kochi, and chennai. i have met a few that were technically solid, self-directed, and would give me hell for my code, or the code of another american on my team. i'd have been happy to hire these folks if they'd walked off the street into my office at the market rates. i've invited a few to come visit when they get to the states. some i'd even call friends. by and large, it was through these individuals explaining the mindset of their coworkers that i came to understand it. i didn't drop in, make a bunch of judgements and bail. i asked the people who were driven why the other people on their team weren't. they made the generalizations, i just observed their correctness.

in observation, those driven and enterprising developers are the exception, and the exception by a wide margin. i can't speak to Absolute Truth here, and maybe there's a secret society of programming ninjas in india that few people have ever heard of or interacted with, but i have to lean on my own observations, my conversations with indian developers over half a decade, and the observations of a wide swath of software development community.
Do you have any examples where Krugman literally and undeniably contradicts himself within two consecutive sentences?
there is someone in a big company who gets in trouble if they buy a start-up for more than $50M and it doesn't meet forecasts each of the next few of years
Yeah, I use my MBP's optical drive all the time. Having it external would be a big pain. Do tech work once in a while so it helps with that and burning Live CDs, etc., and it's just nice to have around. I would be sad if there were no more built-in optical drive, there's already limited USB ports.
If that's true, I'm surprised. We go through Macbooks like they're disposable. The case cracks, the keyboard gets unspringy, the screns sometime flicker, PMUs die. I love them, but "low maintenance" they are not.
I've had a MacBook Pro for over a year and I've used the optical drive less than 5 times, actually I can't even remember the last time I used it. If they secretly removed it without telling me, I don't think I would even know.

I'd love a 13" MacBook with its own GPU (like my 12" PowerBook). I'm hoping the HDD is easily replaced like the current MB.
What seems terribly hard for many economists to accept is that all our models involve silly assumptions. Given what we know about cognitive psychology, utility maximization is a ludicrous concept; equilibrium pretty foolish outside of financial markets; perfect competition a howler for most industries. The reason for making these assumptions is not that they are reasonable but that they seem to help us produce models that are helpful metaphors for things that we think happen in the real world.

I don't get it - how helpful are "metaphors for things we think happen in the real world" if they aren't based in reality? Is that not like saying "let x be an odd number divisible by 2 [...] hence, taxes should go up!". Or am I misunderstanding the relationship between "proof" and "modeling".

Here's how it looks to me: economists believed that people are utility optimizers, and form a lot of conclusions based on the idea. When it is found untrue, economists modify what their theory is explaining (they say it's explaining "market psychology" or some nonsense) so that their conclusions still hold. It's not so obvious when the complicated workings of academics and their institutions behave this day, but if a single individual ever behaved like this, it would just seem stubborn.
There's a roughly monthly Python user meetup:

http://announce.londonpython.org.uk/

They're a friendly bunch who get together for informal talks on Python and usually go down to the pub afterwards.
"Evidence-based medicine (EBM) aims to apply evidence gained from the scientific method to certain parts of medical practice." - wkipedia.

What on earth is "right-wing" about that?
Do most doctors reject evidence based medicine? Do you have a reference or citation for that assertion?
While the article is interesting, the title is misleading: it offers no specifics at all about how Windows 7 search improves, the entire thing is about how Windows search currently works in Vista or XP.

The only mention of Windows 7 is at the end with the highly useless statement "And we’ve done even more to improve performance and reliability for the indexer in Windows 7 which you’ll soon see at the PDC.". What is "even more"?
Ask YC: what is the relationship between proof and modeling?
In the top story right now, Krugman says: What seems terribly hard for many economists to accept is that all our models involve silly assumptions. Given what we know about cognitive psychology, utility maximization is a ludicrous concept; equilibrium pretty foolish outside of financial markets; perfect competition a howler for most industries. The reason for making these assumptions is not that they are reasonable but that they seem to help us produce models that are helpful metaphors for things that we think happen in the real world.

In math, you can't begin a proof with "Let x be the largest prime..." (because there is no largest prime), why can you start economic theories with "Let individuals be utility maximizers..."?
I think you're confusing ambition with narcissism.
So?
Circumstantial evidence may be admissible in court, but particularly in science, it is not sufficient.
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This is a big opportunity - as more academics begin to feel that textbook and journal publishers are going against the interests of the scientific community, who is going to replace them?
Emacs Muse Mode. Write the thing in Muse. Than export it to whatever you like it's everything available: wiki, html, pdf, latex and so on.
d00D UR t3H 31337 H@X04 :-)
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From what I've observed, part of being a founder and CEO is having a huge amount of confidence in yourself. I think erring on the side of overconfidence is much better than the other direction.

People who are really successful in these roles seem to be completely unafraid in business situations where a lot of fear would probably be warranted.

And there are always lots of people standing by and ready to offer up plenty criticism...
Understanding Toll Free Service Billing
Toll free numbers have become very common these days. Every business today understands the need for toll free services. To meet the increasing demand many toll free service providers constantly emerge in this industry. Each service provider has his own billing system, some of them are straightforward and others are not so straightforward.
Cutting out an employee with $100k in salary is just as good as increasing revenues by $100k.

Only if your margins are 100%.

If your margins are 10% then cutting out that employee is just as good as increasing revenues by $1 million.

Food for thought before any new hire.
thank you - this was very helpful
Indeed, but I'm being realistic here. This isn't just a hypothetical "wouldn't it be nice if...".
What "stay hungry, stay foolish" really meant?
Gnome Do
I did think of that, but I realized that there wasn't too much additional value because map-reduce can be run cheaply enough on Hadoop clusters via EC2. I wonder if there are other ideas that this would open up.
the audio: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/142733/Audio/Lectures/future_of_w...
Should not the companies that are in the industries then pay higher wages?
Microchip and OnSemi (On Semiconductor) want to buy Atmel
Microchip and OnSemi (On Semiconductor) propose to acquire Atmel. This is not a good news for the electronics designers or for the electronics operators, creating big discussions on related blog and forums. Let's analyze the facts!
Ask YC: What was that tool for rapid prototyping released on News.YC again?
There was this flash tool that allows people to build GUIs quick, and the founder released all his financials on his site. It was released a couple of months ago, and got pretty big. What was the name of it again? Thanks!
Ask YC: What are you working on these days?
What are you working on these days?

I just met my co-founder, and we are working out the concept for this product idea I've had for a while, to help with email overload. Lots of fun!
A quote from the seattlepi.newsource:

"What few people understood was that the reason that they didn't make money was that for the previous five years every time there was a trade-off between making more money or growing faster, we grew faster,"

They were making money.
http://jessewarden.com/2007/09/flex-gui-wysiwyg-creator-prot...

off the top of my google. yes?
Balsamiq Mockups [http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups]
Hmm, no actually it was commercial.

The person was selling it, and laying open the financials in his blog.
Technically, Amazon made money but opted to grow faster. Youtube on the other hand didn't make money at all. They were losing money fast. They got lucky Google bought them.
FCC approves the use of the white space spectrum for nationwide, free wireless internet
Exactly! Thanks Eric
Free links to your site
A kick-ass reputation monitoring tool... once I find the right lead developer / partner ; )
Darn. And I had all my money on Windows EX Hyper Fighting Alpha: The New Challengers Turbo.
That may be your understanding of "beauty," but it's not the author's.

It's not worth arguing semantics, substitute "prettiness" if it makes you feel better.
So when you register the copyright on bankofamerica.com you also gets rights to all misspellings of that term? This seems unlikely to me.
I think I like that idea. Now just add in a kick-ass reputation fixer module and you're set :)
What's your story? Why start Balsamiq?
Can people seriously not wait an entire day for the announcement?
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日本語ユーザーです。
変換のするときにIMEみたいに変換候補が出てこないのが不思議ですが、それを除けば使い勝手はとても良いと思います。
頑張ってください。応援しています!
You missed his point. Normal IMEs do not have the huge latency that this one does.
This is so interesting really. The the contemporary Buddhist concept of breathing or mindfullness trying to tie your emotions to a physical act that grounds a person in the present moment. To true to be ignored.
Really? Usually I have to do on Windows is push Alt+` to switch between English and Japanese. Sometimes I might have to press Shift+Alt first. It isn't very intuitive but it is very quick to do.
I always feel guilty quoting others because I want to be my own thinker. That said...

There's really no reason for this blog post, and especially no reason to post it on HN. It's just a repost of an essay, with absolutely no additional analysis. The HN link should just go directly to the essay.
Hi, it was me. Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks ericwaller for answering so quickly! :)
Wow, and I thought I was fancy by using jQuery for AJAX form validation.
If that was your intention it's strange that as an example you suggested something that is not shown on the graph.
I know, I almost bought a current-gen MacBook off someone I know, with the intention of replacing the built-in 80GB drive with a brand new 500GB one, but decided to wait out this new release. The new ones are rumoured to have 160-250GB of disk space, and if past experience is anything to go by, getting bigger disks from Apple is going to be a ripoff.

The store site is down right now, but I vaguely remember the upgrade to 320GB being of the order of a brand new 500GB drive (~€125), if you fit one of those yourself you end up with a spare drive as well of course. Plus, being able to replace it yourself within the space of a couple minutes in case it fails is worth a lot to me too.
Interesting. All I seem to need is a big hard disk, the optical drive only gets used when I'm installing something like an OS, or ripping a CD. I guess I'd probably use my laptop's drive more if it was my only computer, but I'd still prefer it to be external. Oddly enough, laptops without optical drives are almost all more expensive than comparable ones with.
I don't claim to understand why, but looking at recently sold Macs on eBay you'd think they'd stopped making them.
84.66 MPG: Toyota Yaris Diesel Wins 2008 MPG Marathon
Won't Work On Clients: Silverlight runs terrible on Macs, not at all on Linux.

Won't work on Servers (yes, scripting FF on servers with Python is useful): Did we mention Silverlight doesn't work on Linux?
Thanks for offering help to rlachenal.

As the webpage states "a white bar shows which language implementation had the better time, and a black bar shows which had the better memory use".

More flattery - in context "most" is not ambiguous, it's vague.

As you are saying how to read the graph, a specific example will be more helpful than a vague summary.
Google has been doing this for over 3 years. They do this more for unused domains and not so much mis-typed domains--but I'm sure many do slip through.

That being said you need a lot of traffic to get into their program. The type of people with high-traffic unused domains are typically domain squatters.

See: http://www.google.com/domainpark/
JS-Kit, the widget company for dummies, gets boost
FreshBooks Releases First Quarterly Industry Benchmark Report
Yahoo Sets Out to Prove that Advertising Search Engines Doesn’t Work
The point is to realize that economic models are metaphors, not truth.

This seems like a big statement. What is the point of models, if they aren't true? Metaphor is important in political rhetoric, but not necessarily in science...
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This is a porn forum for porn, sex and fucking girls.
http://www.brainfuel.tv/web-app-pricing-tier-comparisons

(Posted last Friday)
I think the core problem is YOU lost belief in your product.

It is very common for successful companies to have key founders quit before payday and during shitty times. The company lives through the tough times.

What has served me well is to have an attitude that I am going to go along on this ride(my startup) regardless of my cofounders. Until you can sustain that belief, your start-up will live on(hopefully with your co-founders--but not necessarily).
"On the "should be" line, let's just reflect for a minute that America, after 8 years of a ranch farmhand, is about to elect a black technocrat with a Muslim name as POTUS. There's no "should be" for that scenario. It's utterly amazing."

I'm a little more cynical than that. I think once you realize the president is just some idiot that we use for a single-point-of-decision-making and scape goat for stuff, and that just about any idiot can and has done it, the particulars of the idiot in question are not that interesting.

But my opinion is post-partisan. I can completely understand folks getting excited about their guy and angry about the other guy -- that's the way the system is supposed to work.

It's not a popular thing to say, but I imagine we're going to see a lot of reverse-racism in this election: folks voting for the black guy because it makes them feel good. Sort of to help settle the civil rights score. I don't say that in any way to disparage Obama, simply to profile the voters. It will be interesting, if he wins, to see how he does once he has been president for four years and is no longer unique or can run as an outsider.

(cringes for upcoming downmods)
Online Invoicing Service FreshBooks Takes Industry Benchmarks Public
Well from their point of view, there is no reason to do so since the government is taking care of it.

I'm sure they'd gladly pay what is needed (and still profitable) if it came to that.
Not quite sure what a "TreeHugger" post is doing on HN but I must say the Toyota Yaris is a great car. We have one of the current diesel models and use it for all of our running about. It turns in an effortless 60+ MPG with no attempt on our part to conserve fuel. 84 MPG is a bit of a challenge - I might give it a go when next we fill the car up.
Heck, I've had access to a supercomputer for years and I still don't know what to do with it "to help mankind".
I've had jobs in Western countries involving report generation, formatting, testing.

These are indeed boring. I've given myself a challenge of automating the living shit out of them:

* First time I learnt bash was to work out how to make server documentation with it (I'd built some shell functions to handle headings, tables, columns, etc.

* First time I learnt xPath was to fix 60,000 GECOS fields of a customers Linux hosts when the customer refused to give us programmatic access to the corporate directory.

You'll be appreciated for the labor you save (if not, leave).

Then go off, find some more interesting problem, and work on that. With good managers, they'll pick up you're a 'self starter'.
Context Includes
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The difference between common knowledge and universal knowledge
Have you used Moonlight?

You might notice it doesn't fucking work then.

More specifically, it is:

* not stable

* not up to date with Silverlight

* does not include video or audio support. Videos just ask you to download Silverlight.

* not packaged

* not presented by Microsoft to users who need a plugin when they access Silverlight content. When you visit a Silverlight page, a 'Download Silverlight' button takes you to Microsoft. The Microsoft page gives another 'Download Silverlight' button that tells users their 'platform may not be supported'. Clicking them gives no download and returns back to the same Microsoft page ad infinitum.

Try it yourself - http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/.

Yes, you'll get some ancient shitty bouncing balls Silverlight 1.0 test app.

No, you won't get any actual content.

Moonlight's a furphy.
making online dating reasonable @ flowmingle.com. the balance of structure and expression is a challenge, but a fun one.
Actually, it is not even formally a recession yet. No official declaration has been made by the NBER (official definition in the U.S.) nor have there been two consecutive quarters of contracting GDP (the traditional rule of thumb).

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession#2008_recession_in_som...

According to Intrade there is even a 20% chance or so that we avoid recession entirely for the next couple quarters.
It will only happen when $200 million is "nothing" to a company. Pharmaceutical companies have an equivalent of "chief aquisition officer" who deals with finding partners and aquiring companies, but they only do that because the cost of developing a succesful drug is ~ $1 billion (no exageration). Drug companies often partner with someone and will aquire them if the partnership proves fruitful.

It is often much quicker, and ultimately cheaper, to aquire someone than to develop the software themselves. When software development costs reach the dizzy heights of drug development costs, then there will be the necessity for a cheif aquisition/partnership officier.
How is it easier? FiveThirtyEight has all that electoral-vote does and a lot more. You can just go and check the map, but you can also see a lot more data.
I wouldn't call it "sheer ignorance" - I don't think anyone can predict what is going to happen. If you think we are going to fall further, then buy some gold and make yourself some money.
Internet use good for the brain
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I love the comments by Numble
LOL, the spec doesn't cover that I'm afraid, though it would be a killer feature. I can think of various politicians that might want it...
An independent security analysis of the Monotone distributed VCS
> What is the point of models, if they aren't true?

Because they can make testable predictions or approximations for the truth. This is not unique to Economics, even the "hard" sciences have to deal with this problem. Before relativity was conceptualized, Newton's models for gravity and inertia were considered "good enough" even though they were observed to break down at the cosmic observational level. Even today, many measurements have to account for uncertainty in unit size (even at the macro scale!) and have to be accounted for when crunching numbers in serial calculations. (Wikipedia's got several acceptable pages on several types of uncertainty, especially measurement uncertainty.)
Repubs only get token money from RIAA and MPAA and their members. They go along on this one because they're the stupid party. The Dems would probably go along for free because they're the evil party, but they're happy to take the money, and it's a lot of money. (The Dems big three donor classes are trial lawyers, wall street, and "entertainment", read MPAA/RIAA members.)
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Cut the PR Agency? Are You Sure About That?
Come on... there is a standard definition of the "unemployment rate" and that's what the original poster is using. Historically speaking we are not yet at recession levels of unemployment.

I'm not saying things are going well... just that there is a lot more room for things to get worse. :-/
Isabella Rossellini to make "Green Porno Films" on the Sex Life of Marine Animals
"incapability to handle situations themselves.."

being in this field for the last 2 years, i completely agree to this. But, as someone else has pointed out, this has to do with the bad management practices followed. Also,kids directly from college expect a spoon feeding kind of situation and are afraid to take decisions of their own.
Well, the sad part of pyramid scams is that the victims are also the perpetrators. An Herbalife salesperson is probably making the world a worse place. So, it is sad, but it is probably better for the world if they lose their job.
I work from Chennai and I don't and haven't seen or heard this stuff before!!
The same people who thought UAC was a good idea.
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You forgot about Bob
Jag.ag brings efficient mobile site creation to the masses
Microsoft Pushes VoIP to Fend off Cisco