skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
also, when you have a business model that's not based on any real technology or a strong user base, it's hard to compete long term. Groupon could win in the short term only.
Me first, indeed. That's what I did; it works.

That's also a completely different argument from the one I was addressing. It sounds like your version is that 18 to 22-year-olds are too dangerous to be unleashed on society (the person getting the "operation" in your analogy), so we need to send them to school to keep them out of trouble.

But I don't understand why school is a better alternative than the job market.
Startup Weekend Australia partners with Singapore incubator
1. Neat. Just to clarify, this doesn't require a landline?

I keep my phone on vibrate all the time, which tends to mean that when I'm at home I miss a lot of calls. I'd definitely pay for a thing that looks like a regular landline phone but docks with my mobile phone.
That's a really compelling point. Thanks.
Also, it would help if you could give us a ballpark idea of what's the average cost of this kind of service :)
Not to worry, I'm sure it's highly illegal anyway.
Hello Throwaway789a,
Could you post a little on your skills and any other experience you have? Are you a Developer/Designer/Consultant, etc?
Chiming in on the "it's a lot like dating" band wagon. If you put too much pressure on yourself to find the right girl, you'll miss the steps you really need to take to find the right girl - living your life confidently, being social and befriending as many people as you can along the way. Having a large social network is by far the best way to find both a girl and a co-founder. Some of those people will know other people, who may introduce you to the guy who just "clicks" with you.

That said, you sound pretty cool, and you seem pretty cool for writing this. I'm thinking about moving out there myself, ideally to found something. I'll be in town next week for two weeks. Ping me and we'll try to grab coffee. :)

Oh, and where are these "HN Meetings?" Will there any chance be any between Oct 25th and Nov 8th? :P
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Lisa Maree Domican: Two Steves who changed my world
Occupy Wall Street Survey Topline
Bummer. My first try. #FAIL. Thanks for letting me know.
1. Software that shows videos of real visitors using our website

http://www.clicktale.com/

3. A wrapper around PayPal

Why put lipstick on a pig? I'd rather use Stripe (not as full featured yet, but getting there)

4. An iPhone code editor with Github / Heroku integration

Github lets you edit and commit tiny changes right from the site.

5. Zerocater for startup swag

Lots have tried; nobody wants to pay for swag it seems. [Edit: I misread this one, they want their own swag.]

http://www.schwa.gd/

http://techcrunch.com/2006/05/04/get-web-20-schwag-from-vall... (closed)

http://www.startupschwag.com/ (closed)
I'm surprised there isn't a company that fits #5 yet. That seems like it would be a lot of fun.

startupswag.com and hackerswag.com are taken but aren't hosted yet.
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HL10 Handset Lifter you are able to save more time and energy in answering calls and be able to promptly respond to concerns as they come.
Default Browser of Android 4.0 Shows 550% improvement on V8 Benchmark
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When people advise you to say 'No' more often, I really think they mean to qualify your "Yes" so that you can actually follow through. For example, instead of saying "No" to your boss about the Perl, or even saying "No, because I don't know Perl", say a qualified "Yes." There are plenty of examples above of a qualified "Yes" that let you convey your doubts about the project without seeming uncooperative.

You can even get creative and say "Yes" in such a way that demonstrates you're not serious about the commitment. I used to do landscaping work in college, and when my boss discovered I was good with numbers, I took over part of the pricing for new jobs. When someone asked for a quote for something we could do but didn't want to (e.g. building a large retaining wall, mowing a 50 acre field in an inconvenient location), I'd give a "go away" price (usually by tripling our labor rate and padding the estimate) that would signal we didn't really want to take the job but didn't hurt our reputation in the same way a blanket "we don't do that" would.

This let the owner call back and say "Yes, we'd love to mow your field. We've run some numbers, and based on the location and the size of the job, it's going to cost you $2500. Oh, you'll pass? So sorry to hear that, have a nice day." Most of the time, people passed. The couple of times that someone took our "go away" price were rare enough that we were able to keep our focus on residential landscaping (which has much lower overhead) but frequent enough that we could still advertise we did larger scale jobs.

A qualified "Yes" will leave doors open when a "No" would slam them shut, and it's good to know how to say one in any field.
WaterField Designs iPad Ultimate SleeveCase
If You Sold Your Apple Stock Today, You’re An Idiot
Too little too late. I already severed myself completely from Google's services. Cancelled my Google Apps subscription, moved my email to another service, docs, calendar, contacts, etc. The only thing I use Google for now is Google Voice.

Google Apps users couldn't even use Google Groups, Buzz, +1 Buttons, or anything that requires Google Profiles. Leave it to Google to ignore their paying customers.
This is gonna sound stupid but I'm serious. Did you learn anything worthwhile from your investment? Any new useful "skill" or all just top level knowledge? Do you consider materials learned from Khan life changing?
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Well, this is why you shouldn't be using semi-well-known problems as interview questions.
Unless you practice your mathematics and physics daily, you will eventually forget most of what you know.
This is (yet another) good example of a computational camera: where you can exploit megapixels, physics, and computation to build more capable cameras. There was a really good plenary talk by Prof. Nayar (Columbia) about other techniques a few years back:

http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/06/26/computational-cameras-...

My personal favorite is the "flexible depth of field," where you can actuate the imaging element during image acquisition and then use DSP techniques to create an image that is in focus across all depths simultaneously.

Also... if you'd like to get involved in these type of projects, a team from Stanford is working on the "FrankenCamera" -- a open-hardware and open-source effort:

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/fcam/
Unless you are using a magical computer, you still have to worry; there are resources you must manage that depend on the underlying OS and von Neumann architecture.

An example that bites Haskell programmers are space leaks due to too much partial evaluation and not enough full evaluation. Other problems include keeping a file open for too long and leaking the fd. An ideal computer has infinite space and no files. A real one... nope :)

The advantage of functional programming languages is that you get to write part of your program as though you have an ideal lambda calculus evaluator. But at some point, you still have to realize that there's a grey box under your desk that doesn't know what a lambda or fixed point is. (But this is better than programming languages that say "hey, you've got a heap, a stack, and some registers! well, so long!")
Do GSM jammers also affect GPS devices?

It's illegal in most places anyway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_jammer#Legalities
Not sure this relates 100%, since the article is mostly talking about your understanding of concepts.

If programmer A understands recursion and programmer B does not programmer A will write better code regardless of deadlines.
Google tells "open" platform users: No ice cream sandwich for you
There should be decent public visibility in time, if an A7 ever shows up on a Nexus phone or on a successor to Beagleboard/Pandaboard. Actually, I don't have the link just now, but IIRC someone was trying to write software to do the same thing on the Pandaboard's OMAP4, transferring a running Linux kernel from the A9 core to one of the OMAP4's built-in M3s. (I don't know what they were planning to do for memory protection.)
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Looking at the samples, low would be a good guess. Or the optics are really blurry.
I agree that that strategy's pretty feeble, but IMO it's still better than e.g. a thousand-line function. If nothing else it forces you to break out the parameters explicitly, instead of just having a thousand lines of intermingled state transitions.
>To start with, a large portion of the photography process has been removed — and not simply a technical part, but a creative part. There’s a reason focus is called focus and not something like “optical optimum” or “sharpness.” Focus is about making a decision as a photographer about what you’re taking a picture of. It’s clear that Ng is not of the same opinion: he describes focusing as “a chore,” and believes removing it simplifies the process.

You really seemed to miss the point here. The Lytro camera captures all possible focus settings, allowing the photographer to choose one later...or combine multiple settings together in a single image. This isn't the machine taking over the photographer's job, it's the machine increasing the choices available to the photographer. Similarly, you might not like images which have been heavily dodged/burned, but it certainly was a victory for artists when that technique was developed, allowing them to choose differing levels of exposure in the same image.
Placebo-ball: the science of baseball's magical necklaces
I'm not declaring it is a technology they are capable of developing, just wondering, still a bit surprised that with all their top engineers they couldn't (if they wanted to) come up with a solution to this?
People with toddlers? A lot! :)
Yeah. I've also found that some well-known good practices might be well-known in an abstract concept but when it comes down to pure implementation it's a lot more murky.

Like you say though, that leap from beginner to experienced is so large as to make practical code examples rather scary, and you can't get anywhere if you're not confident with experimentation.*

The other problem is that there are many ways to skin a cat and one brilliant solution might be unworkable for another person. But that's just a characteristic inherent of any creative pursuit.

This thread's inspired me to try making a nice HTML5 presentation or something that outlines some of these practices as a beginner's aid. Like how Dive Into HTML5 really helps you learn what you can actually do with the new additions.

*It's surprising how many people won't experiment because they're worried about breaking something or blowing up their computer, and that irrational risk aversion just makes it difficult to learn what you can and can't get away with; and difficult to jump into the unknown.
2. Yelp for business services

This is exactly what BestVendor is doing.

www.bestvendor.com
I think it would be nice if MIT (and others) would make a deal with the khanacadamy to provide there courses in a khanvideo style and change there exercises in khan-style exercises. Everbody on the World should be able to learn anything from 1+1 to quantum physics on khanacadamy.

OCW kind of stuff is already super awesome but in would be much better in a khan-style. When you watch lectures on OCW you know its not for you, its for the studens in the class. The professor talks about when the exams are and so on. The other thing is that its hard to know when you are ready to take a course, in the khan system you could show what you have to know to do the course.

I see a bright future for education.
Google+ to support pseudonyms
Very interesting question, especially considering what strikes me as the newly singular vision behind ICS. Which also brings it to a new level of quality from what I can tell.
"If all IQ measures is your ability to take an IQ test, I think you'd be pretty confident that the bottom 10% will perform about as well as the top 10%."

Unless the top 10% has some systemic advantage at taking IQ tests. Type words into a search engine for further inquiries in this area.
(Disclosure: I did the understatement.com piece)

I agree with many of the points people are making (there are some differences, there are many Helvetica/etc based fonts, etc). Really the most amusing thing to me is that Google made a big deal out of the type change - it was the first point in their Ice Cream Sandwich launch. Can you imagine if at Apple's iPhone 4/iOS 4 launch they said "and our first big feature is: we're dropping Helvetica! For Helvetica Neue!"
Yes, the largest problem with the graphs is that so much work is being done by the phrase "taxable income".

Imagine Joe Example makes $500,000 per year, and faces an average tax rate of 80%, but through various quirks of the tax code he can deduct $400,000. He pays $20,000 in taxes on his $100,000 in "taxable income". Next year a tax reform bill is passed; his tax rate drops to 40%, but deductions are completely removed. He now pays $200,000 in taxes. In other words, his tax rate halves, but the tax he pays increases by 1000%.

Deductions matter! The headline rate is, frankly, one of the less important variables in how a tax system works.

(A smaller problem with these graphs is that it only shows income tax. That's only one of many taxes, and for the rich and poor, it's often not the most important one. Payroll, capital gains, and dividends matter too! As do sales taxes, property taxes, and even corporate taxes...)
<<Comparing with Android 2.3 browser, the Android 4.0 browser showed improvement of nearly 550% on the V8 benchmark and nearly 70% in the SunSpider benchmark>>
I thought it was interesting that Apple, who is usually so finicky about things being just so, apparently didn't filter or edit this data set.

To me, it took away from the experience, and kind of muddled the emotion I expect Apple - and the original authors - were trying to convey. I think it would have resonated more with me if it was a little cleaned up.

But whatever.
Right. One-on-one lessons are the most efficient way to learn things, but not necessarily the most practical, because experts generally don't have infinite patience for stupid questions. If I were Unquestioned Emperor Of The World, I'd learn everything from calling the appropriate expert into my office, but as it is I can only do this sometimes.

Still, I'm often amazed by how long I can spend trying to understand something tricky in a book, and how quickly I can get un-confused as soon as I start talking to someone who really understands it.
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I'll bite.

<devil's advocate>
Drug dealers/producers produce products that provide the user with exotic and novel experiences and which may increase the user's sociability. Similar to the travel industry and a personal life coach in a small form factor, drugs are good/service that many people seem to want.
</devil's advocate>
Have you ever seen a senior citizen try to use an iPod? A better idea would be "as easy as a toaster."
Well could you post the news once they did it? This has no useful information content.
Lots have tried; nobody wants to pay for swag it seems

I think you're missing the point. This is startups ordering schwag for itself. Not for other people to order the coolest new startup's shirt.

Github lets you edit and commit tiny changes right from the site.

How would you test them? The ask is for a complete stack right on his phone.
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It's really tough to say. The short answer (I'm assuming you haven't done much embedded/mobile development) is that doing _anything_ uses power. Power is the Big Problem in mobile development. Use the CPU, it will burn up tons of power. If you are easy on it, but you are constantly streaming network data, the radios will burn up tons and tons of power. Even the GPS module uses a ton of power. Even the accelerometer measurably drains the battery when apps are accessing it. They say the reason the iPhone and some other smartphones still ship with such limited ram is that continually striping additional DRAM to keep the values fresh has too big of an impact on power consumption.

It's crazy, if you aren't used to thinking about it, how much your software's behavior can affect power usage. Have a sloppy inner loop where you spin on a lock, destroy the battery. Leave open HTTP connections that aren't really doing anything but are waiting on data, destroy the battery. Set the accelerometer update frequency hire than you absolutely need to, there goes the battery. Fire up a GL view that turns on the GPU, god forbid you try to run synchronously and spin on framebuffer renders, goodbye battery.

I have a theory, and it's...essentially totally baseless, hand-waving speculation, but I'll share it anyway, that that's really the difference you see with a lot of these new phones that come out that have terrible battery life. It's not necessarily that running the slightly larger screen automatically decimates the battery, say, its that the carriers don't have the discipline to be brutal with regard to the software's power consumption.

With iOS, this has historically been mitigated to some degree by the fact that 3rd party apps weren't allowed to run in the background, and that Apple was fairly psychotic about managing power use in its first party software. That is changing, but I suspect a lot of what has driven the API design there is sensitivity to power consumption.

It's actually wild, if you have an iPhone, say, to turn off the Wifi, 3G, and BT radios, and location services. Use it like a dumb phone. The battery will easily last for a week, probably a lot longer if its a new battery, and all you do is send texts and make the occasional call. The OS and phone radio can idle for a long time on a single charge, with occasional powerings of the screen. We think of phones as just being intrinsic power hogs due to the screen and phone functionality, but the power efficiency of those has risen dramatically over the last several years. It's all the other shit now, which is the shit that makes the phone interesting, that consumes all the power.

So yes, a dramatically more power-efficient CPU would make a huge difference. However, I am personally skeptical that having a separate, off-die CPU that's lower power consumption will lead to dramatically better power performance, but we'll see.
There's are a number of services in the US for shipping US products overseas such as http://www.shipito.com/
Finally.

[And to make this a less shallow post]

I find it interesting that Google thought they would have had more time.[1] I would have thought that they'd know that social networks these days either grow exponentially, or stay flat. Google should have been betting on the former, which would have made plain that they wouldn't have much time. Perhaps they thought they could limit it through the invite only stages?

[1]: http://mashable.com/2011/10/19/google-plus-google-apps/
Seems like people with their own domains who use google apps should have been be the ideal lead users to seed google+. A missed opportunity.
Doesn't that seem kind of redundant? "People who do well on IQ tests have systematic advantages which allow them to do well on IQ tests, but IQ tests are meaningless."

Obviously, it's possible to imagine a world in which IQ is not largely heritable, and in which rich people pay lots of money to game their kids' IQ numbers, and then the kids somehow use these IQ test numbers to get better jobs (even though IQ testing from employers is basically illegal).

But we can adjust for that. I'd be happy to do the same bet controlling for parental socio-economic status.
A crappy developer will actively damage a project.

A bad farmhand will damage equipment worth far more than most pieces of software, destroy crops and animals, the list goes on and on. I can say from experience in both that farming is significantly more challenging than programming.

Even a small farmer will have several millions of dollars worth of equipment that is easily broken in the wrong hands. Like good programmers, good farmhands can be paid quite well because they bring a lot of value to the business.

If a bad programmer gets into your codebase, it is trivial to revert their work. It is much less trivial to replace a $500,000 combine because of an minor operator mistake.
Hilarious, but some of the alternative careers I don't agree with. Particularly the first example of order of execution.

If you can't grasp that and decide to be an architect, I wouldn't want to drive on your bridge, work in your building, or live in your home. Same for the options!
This is a pretty well known problem. (First problem the professor in my undergrad algorithms class ever gave to us)

SPOILER

p = probability of heads

1 - p = probability of tails.

flip the coin twice:

head head = p^2

head tail/tail head = 2p(1-p)

tail tail = (1 - p)^2

Notice the two in the middle there. We can just say head tail = Heads and Tail Heads = Tails. If we get HH or PP, just do it again.

Ok, now call the above procedure, our "randomization algorithm"

we can calculate the expected running time -- our algorithm succeeds with probability 2p(1-p). The number of trials we need to run our algorithm for is a geometric random variable. Thus, the expected running time is 1/(2p(1-p)).
I think it's only going to be useful after the technology fits into a mobile phone camera.

There's a big disadvantage in having to carry an extra device.
Of course it exists: it is a test that gives a result. Personally I don't find the "structural brain changes" bit not very enlightening. Is it surprising that a brain that performs differently has changed? It would be more surprising if it hadn't changed.

What about those taxi drivers who had enhanced brain regions for geographic knowledge? Kind of the same thing...
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Is there any substantial difference between this and the 2008 version on YouTube?

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA89DCFA6ADACE599
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They sold some Pre units over here (Spain), I had one.
It would also solve obesity, because they'd all be human-powered. I actually imagine a future where we could basically have gigantic power generation stations stocked with complex exercise machines.
I think the enormous growth of content (and usage) is exactly why Wikipedia hasn't advanced much technically. In its early years it was a total shoestring operation, mainly focused on keeping the site up under incredible traffic. Just surviving that is a titanic victory.

However, that victory came at a cost: the software fell way behind. The community picked up the slack, making a fantastic reference site despite the handicaps. But many of the ways they did that (e.g., duplicating references all over the place) make improving the software even harder.

Now that Wikimedia Foundation staffing is starting to catch up, I'm sure some of these things will get better. But it's definitely going to take a while.
Why is that? Are those people more likely to be "taste makers", influencing and connecting other people? I think Google Apps users must wait for new features because of technical difficulties that Google would like to defer to a post-1.0 version.