skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How many Twitters/Facebooks/Dropboxes/Airbnbs don't exist because the founders sold them for $15M in 18 months?

If the founders exited with the cash they were looking for, so what?

> How do you tell Aaron Patzer not to sell, when he's going to make $40M personally?

You don't, and why should you?

> That's more than he might have made in an IPO after years more work.

Who care about an IPO? If you can cash out before that, awesome!
Hacker news is near the optimum of what a site of this size and type can do. By type I mean the slashdot/digg/reddit social news format. Pg got a lot of things right to shore up the format. ui geared towards a certain community, strong focus on community, seeded with essay readers, slow scaling, quasi-non-profit so quality remains almost top priority. Its just that the format of squeezing the subjective realities of more and more people into an objective 'top intellectually interesting articles right now' list cannot scale civilly when everyone is subtly pulling in their own direction just that little bit. The tension adds up. Maybe limiting max number of users (one joins as on leaves) would do it but that is extremely drastic and probably defeats the point of hn.
Interesting. The extensions to the type system remind me of Ωmega (http://code.google.com/p/omega/), though without higher-order kinds.

EDIT: Turns out "Programming in Omega" is cited by the section on related work. No wonder the mention of proving red-black trees using type-level computation seemed familiar...
The problem with talking about the detail - that it was a statistical result - is that this doesn't match up with the headline abstract (that experts can't tell the difference).

As for the the statement about my Coke v Pepsi - first time it happened, I had as much idea that it might be Pepsi as the people in this experiment had that they might have been served white wine masquerading as red. I wasn't particularly thinking about it. I'd ordered a Coke, the drink came in a Coke glass and I was fully expecting to drink Coke. My first thought wasn't "Oh, this is Pepsi". It was "There's something funny about this Coke".
Subway "maps" tend to be more like generalized graph diagrams than cartographically accurate maps. After all, you're stuck in a box and your only choice is which node to get off at.

But it wouldn't surprise me if an overlay on a cartographic map was intentionally inaccurate. One time I was in DC a cab driver was trying to get me to my hotel. His GPS went totally nonfunctional when we were in view of the Pentagon.

It would be an interesting research project to ride around subway systems with a data-logging accelerometer (like a smartphone). Integrate acceleration to get velocity, integrate velocity to get relative position, get GPS fixes when the signal is available, and diagram the results.
Being in the same datacenter is a feature since it means there is extremely low latency between your dedicated and cloud machines. Sub-millisecond vs. 10s of milliseconds round trip times can make a huge difference.
>pygtk
No, dad, no!
One reason to live in the Valley is the opportunity to exercise outdoors in shorts and a t-shirt 365 days a year. That's why I want to move out there, anyway.

Winter is highly overrated.
The world is better off when companies like Dropbox exist as large transformational forces of technology progress. If they all get strangled in their crib's progress slows.

Imagine if Yahoo hadn't flubbed the acquisition of Google? We'd all be worse off.
I'm guessing the reason you are being downvoted is because "the girl" is Jessica Livingston, a partner at YC, who has earned a lot of respect here on HN.

I agree that Zuck seemed unprepared and rambled, frequently forgetting what he was talking about, but that's not something the host can control.
Hucksters are opportunists.
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Well, actually it determines that it comes precisely from where it's supposed to. There are more to this, like the late 19th century classification of Bordeaux' wines through the "crus classés" system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bordeaux_Wine_Official_Classifi...
I saw the talk, and felt his point was hypocritical. He said that FB couldn't have made it outside of the valley, but that knowing what he knows now, it probably could were he starting it today.

In other words, he needed the valley when he was young and inexperienced, but it's not necessary if you have the experience and connections already.

[Edit: The reason I'm saying it's hypocritical is because his point was initially obfuscated, and if you took that statement at face value, you wouldn't get the whole point.]
I'm sure he objects to that too, but that's not what he says.
What Is Empower Network? The Insider's View
Another example for your list, John: Born atheist, indoctrinated into the church, learned more about it, reverted to atheist.
OWS could use some Silicon Valley love...
To Get Ahead, Stick Your Neck Out
> If they all get strangled in their cribs progress slows.

A founder exiting with millions isn't strangling anything. They aren't working to change the world, they're working to make enough money to not have to. Those who want to change the world, like Zuck, wouldn't take the buyout offer because money wasn't the goal. Those who take the cash would have taken it whenever it was offered and left regardless, better to do it early and it's just wrong to say the company was strangled.

> Imagine if Yahoo hadn't flubbed the acquisition of Google?

You don't know that. For all you know, the combined money of Yahoo and talents of Google could have resulted in something better than what we ended up with. No one knows either way.
Persian Carpets and Oriental Rugs
I would amend that with, "or ride a motorcycle".

That's half of why I moved out here. The fact that this place is a programmer's mecca and I've wanted to live here since I was a kid was the other half.
No assets (like car/house) to speak of. Getting rid of old laptop and few things but expecting only few hundred dollars back.

I've thought about credit cards but assumed I couldn't get them because I have no official income?
One country, two systems.
I recently submitted an article about lemonade stands. Most of the discussion was political. I was disappointed - I thought people could talk about ways to promote entrepreneurship or to teach basic concepts like added value. So, I apologise.

I try hard not to respond to any political posts. Now I can downvote I might consider downvoting those.

I avoid anything that mentions Apple, or MS, or often Linux, especially if they're in the same thread. These threads could be great, but often they're content free bickering. I upvote good information. I will consider downvoting flaming.

I haven't submitted many articles. I notice some people submit very many articles - 10 per day. I don't know if there's some way to nudge people into only subbing good articles. Maybe once they've got over twenty submissions they need an average score of X (for the subs) before they can sub any more??

I'd also welcome more power given to people with high karma scores (and maybe high average scores (although I realise there are some problems with average karma)) to have super downvotes, or downvotes for submissions, or some such.
What are you basing your comment on other than utopian world views?
Ah, delicious delicious meta-contrarianism: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metaco...

But seriously, this is a good example of how meta-contarianism goes wrong. An example would be the lottery. Contrarian position: 'the lottery exploits human biases and rips them off, ruining lives.' Meta-contrarian: 'ah, but the lottery lets you buy hope, and is cheap at the price! You simply don't appreciate what it does and expose your own intellectual shallowness by being against it!' But really, the lottery just sucks, because if you want to buy hope, there's a lot of better ways to buy hope and engineer superior lotteries http://lesswrong.com/lw/hl/lotteries_a_waste_of_hope/ eg. by running long-drawn-out lotteries where you could win at any time over years! (Hey, if people can enjoy a 1 in a millions chance of winning, then they can enjoy a 1 in a millions chance of winning.)

We can run the same analysis with fine wine. Contrarian: 'expensive wine does not taste better as proved by blind-testing per OP, so it is simply a waste of money and expensive positional signaling which makes us all worse off.' Meta-contrarian: 'this is evidence of the wonderful experiential nature of being alive, isn't it grehttp://lesswrong.com/lw/hl/lotteries_a_waste_of_hope/at how framing can make us happier?'

Well if that is so, why don't you engineer better framing? For example, if you couldn't buy a particular fine wine but instead buy a 90% chance of the fine wine and a 10% chance of an equally-good tasting wine (as measured by blind testing), would peoples' enjoyment fall by more than 10%? Probably not, in which case there's a clear utility gain here to make people happier at less cost! Or, does their enjoyment fall by more than 10%? Then here's another chance to win, by making the gamble the other way. (There's always a way to exploit a bias, after all, that's kind of the point.) But the status quo is not the best status.
1. Avoid friends.
2. Never leave school.
3. Shoot people.

Got it.
Do what I do: whenever I see someone being rude, impolite, or inflammatory I point it out and ask them to behave. Like so:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2972222

When you see that someone already pointed out misbehavior (but no more than say 5 such opinions), add your own concurring opinion rather than upvoting - the offender needs to see the public opinion and they no longer see the vote count.

Also when I see a comment that does not add to discussion I downvote it.
"In one Dutch study, participants were put in a room with posters proclaiming the awesomeness of high-definition, and were told they would be watching a new high-definition program. Afterward, the subjects said they found the sharper, more colorful television to be a superior experience to standard programming. What they didn't know was they were actually watching a standard-definition image. The expectation of seeing a better quality image led them to believe they had. Recent research shows about 18 percent of people who own high definition televisions are still watching standard-definition programming on the set, but they think they are getting a better picture."

They are actually getting the better picture. One cannot argue that modern TV SD is not better than what we used to watch on CRT's. Everything has improved, so it is a better picture. HD is mostly undetectable to human eye to make that much of a difference. At least to me. Wide screen SD is a sufficiently pleasant experience.

My husband claims to see the difference. I think he's conditioned to see it.
That doesn't seem inconsistent. That's why he was saying if he started Facebook today, presumably after having some Facebook-like success. The caveat is this is not advice that should be taken by inexperienced entrepreneurs.

The important takeaway is that he would be willing to trade a culture of connections for a place where there's less drive for big cash-outs (like Boston or New York, presumably) from entrepreneurship. This gels with his particular philosophy that entrepreneurship should not be about building companies, but building products.

In practice there is a spectrum and neither approach is less valid than the other.

EDIT: Agreed. Though even he called that headline being on TechCrunch, when he tried to couch his reasoning more carefully than just "I would've started in Boston".
Let me help you out here to end your confusion as to who 'the girl' is:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jl

Nice way to make someone smile though, even if it was not intentional.
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Asbestos testing and asbestos removal pricing will differ broadly contingent on your specific situation, but it’s not cheap.Some abatement companies will have a minimum charge as high as $2,000 or higher.
What, if any of these, make sense to a mid-level C developer: read K&R inside and out, had a bit of code in the kernel, worked on a major "C+", i.e., "C with classes" project?

The only one of these I own are "Mastering Algorithms with C" (fairly useful) and "Understanding the Linux Kernel" (rather useful and well written, could actually be used for an graduate/advanced undergraduate operating systems class).
Everything in moderation? Arguing that a little bit of X is inherently bad because a whole bunch of it would be awful is silly. You can die of water poisoning. Not everything is a slippery slope.

I like a certain amount of convenience and a certain amount of freedom. iOS affords me a lot of convenience and a lot of freedom, including the freedom to stop using it when something better, or just as good but cheaper, comes along. (Consider that my sunken cost into iOS software is probably about $200 whereas my sunken cost for Windows software was closer to $10,000.)

Stallman advocates a world where, for example, I am not free to sell software I write or install proprietary software on my computer. Admittedly he is probably exaggerating for effect, or his supporters assume and hope he is.
Similar: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Work-to-rule
Underground maps usually don't match the real geography. If you made a "real" map, it would be next to useless since the central stations should be all in one place with lots of empty space around. It's the destination / via station you care about when you know the destination, not realistic detail of the path itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_map has some examples of more realistic London underground maps (older editions). It's a common topic of graphic design / visualisation courses.
of course it is china only. in china licensed gps maker can buy a chip deal with the offset ,provided by government.

it is a non uniformed transformation.being applied to.whole map , to lower the accruacy.
I don't think it was hypocritical at all, but I think Zuck didn't clearly explain what he was trying to say.

His point was that the valley was essential for when facebook was starting because he didn't know anything and could have only learned the necessary things and met the right people in the valley. Because he has learned so much, he was saying that if he started over, knowing what he knows now, then it wouldn't matter where he started because he knows what to do right.
I don't understand why there seems to be so much confusion as to how node works. Here's my mental model:

1. The basic part of the system is a single thread running an event loop. It has a queue of waiting events. Every time the event loop starts, it pops off all of the waiting events and then gives your code a chance to process them, one after the other. Once your code is done processing this batch of events, a new even loop starts. Any events that occurred while your code was running will now be processed.[1]

2. Some kinds of work take place outside the event loop. I/O tasks such as sockets and file reading/writing are good examples. In Node.js, I/O calls automatically spawn a new thread, which goes off and does whatever task you wanted it to do. When it finishes, it pushes an event onto the event loop's event queue, which will be handled by the event loop the next time it starts a new loop. Other things, such as TCP servers, run perpetually in their own thread, but will push new events onto the event queue whenever something interesting happens (receiving new data, etc.).

3. You, the user, cannot do work outside the event loop. You cannot spawn threads. That is something that the framework does automatically, and only for certain, built-in tasks like file I/O. Node might add support for arbitrary asynchronous work later on, but for the moment this is not possible.

4. Remember from #1 that a new event loop only starts when the previous event loop has completed. Since an event loop is essentially "the code you have written to process events that you care about", if any of that code takes a very long time to complete, then there won't be another event loop for a long time. Any new events that occur during that time (such as new HTTP requests) will not be processed until a new event loop occurs.

[1] Exception: events that your code emits are processed immediately.
I would imagine you're being downvoted by people who don't know what winter in Chicago is like. ^^
Depending on your qualifications, you can also get a H1-B job from a major US corporation and convert it into a green card. Being sponsored as the spouse of a US citizen is probably faster (especially if you are from a country where employment-based green cards don't have a current priority date), but the USCIS are suspicious of marriages and the process can be somewhat gruelling. You also end up with a temporary green card until you have been married for two years.
> 2) A full-featured API that would allow members of the community to have more control over how much of HN they view and participate in.

That's nice, but the problem is that those people then don't know just how bad the stuff they're ignoring has got.

Maybe they'll start to notice some churn in users; they'll notice that a favourite commenter is no longer around, or that there are many newer members who are creating odd posts. And then BAMN - HN is suddenly worthless.
Proper diffs with ODF files in Git or Mercurial
I don't think this would solve the problem.
Devbuntu would basically just be kubuntu or xbuntu.

If Ubuntu wants to target less technical users it needs to make itself a compelling platform for them which means resolving almost all of the niggling issues and an influx of end user apps, in other words a miracle..

What would be more useful is a more sophisticated UI that can be scaled back by default but have lots of custom options to enable depending on taste. Gnome2 provided this quite well, but I fear that it will be no longer maintained in some silly attempt to poorly imitate other platforms.

If you want uber-simple Linux then what is wrong with android?
Well we could bring the points back so that it would be possible to scan a long thread and find the good comments. The bad comments aren't gone, but they'll be easier to avoid.

Also, your point about upvoting certain comments will probably be moot if users can't see the result of their action. Without having seen the numbers I'll make a bold statement and say that overall voting per user has gone down significantly.

Many new users might not even know that the arrows are for voting since it isn't explained anywhere.
Actually all these problems have been solved in FIDO net about 20 years ago. There's usually a set of rules, updated list of off-topic subjects, a moderator, a set of co-moderators, public punishment, and ex-communication of repeat offenders. It worked fairly well for as long as moderators stayed on the ball.

I continue to be surprised that we have to re-learn all these things the hard way on the web.
Similarly, 1.8.7 is the stable version of the 1.8 series.
how do experienced people compare one (or 8, by the number of cores) threaded node.js performance with java's asynchronous IO servlets?

http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/aio.html
Seems to use old PyGtk instead of the newer GObject Introspection way:

http://developer.gnome.org/gnome-devel-demos/3.2/image-viewe...

From PyGtk website:

New users wishing to develop Python applications using GTK+ are recommended to use the GObject-Introspection features available in PyGObject.

Existing authors of PyGTK applications are also recommended to port their applications to PyGObject to take advantage of new features appearing in GTK-3 and beyond. More information on PyGObject and GObject-Introspection can be found at http://live.gnome.org/PyGObject .

PyGTK-2.24 will be the final major release of PyGTK. Additional bug-fix releases may appear when necessary to maintain compatibility and stability with the GTK-2.24 series.
Here is my perspective on Taiwan grossly simplified.

A bunch of Han Chinese moved to the island. The Dutch established a small colony there. Japan took over. Post-WW2 they were given independence from Japan. The pre-communist leader of China moved to Taiwan and took over politically. The KMT party ruled until recently, when Taiwan peacefully transitioned to a democracy and now has two main parties.

There is nothing in Taiwan under Chinese control. They have their own government, constitution, military, their own passports that are recognized worldwide, etc. However, there is a looming threat that China will attempt to take over which drives mandatory military service, and tight relations with the US.
I don't have a lot to add. It's not an issue I've spent a lot of time on (not because it's not important, just because of limits on time).
I would like to see more people linking to the original source article, rather than a blog about that article. (As per the guidelines.) Often the blog is silly or inflammatory or pointless.

Some method of de-duping might be useful.
Let's not overcorrect here. Mental agility does matter a lot in programming; here are some quotes from _Coders at Work_, which surely features interviews with people who are not merely sour-grapes-management types: http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#fn19
Thanks, I'm trying to structure how to approach F&F circle without burning bridges. Because although I'm optimistic about my startup, I know it could go either way (up/down) or at least take longer than expected to bloom, so I don't want to falsely promise "I will repay by X date".

Also, anyone whom I think may have close to 10k is probably in terms of assets (eg house), not sitting in accts, plus they have expenses (mortgage, family, etc).
Seems more likely that Chinese maps make Taiwan smaller, and when people in China point to the differences between locally made maps and foreign maps, they are told that foreign map makers are playing some sort of anti-China political game.

Or, people have it ingrained in them that Taiwan is small, and they all know that Chinese map-makers are politically motivated, so they assume that all map-makers are equally politically motivated.
O'Reilly's ebooks are DRM-free. Kindle version is not.
Not sure why the focusing on the learning alogs or the utility of the thermostat - my guess is that company really isn't about the thermostat at all. You can almost hear the founders/investors excitedly throwing around the various buzz terms with this one: 'Big Data!' 'Data Exhaust!', 'DataScience!' 'Household Traffic Patterns!' 'Web cookie for the home!!!!' etc. Looks like a cynical play at trying to become a BigData company by collecting household energy consumption and traffic patterns and who knows what else. Doesn't seem like it provides enough value to trade off being spied on in your home.
SQL Select Query Examples for programmers
The "market" is actually a big element of Buddhism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Bulls
stage 10

Buddhism typically evokes the image of monks sitting in caves. This is more characteristic of Theravada Buddhism. Mahayana Buddhism is about bringing the Buddhist way into all aspects of life. In Zen(Mahayana branch) temples for example, simply washing the dishes is an art in itself.
Google removes '+' from Chrome's tab bar
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Thanks for the kind words! I joined a startup (kaggle.com) at the start of the year and that has used up most of my time I had for blogging.

I'm hoping to get back to writing again sometime before the end of the year. Unfortunately, it takes me a long time to write so I'm hoping to get at least one post in this year :)
Mercator distortion has nothing to do with the anecdote in the parent post. There the allegation was of deliberate inaccuracy, which renders a map non-functional for most purposes.

All 2D map projections produce either distortion or discontinuity. Neither of these affects a map's functionality in the way that outright inaccuracy does.
Facebook’s Wall of Shame: An Infographic on Its Failures