skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey guys, thanks for all the responses to my blog. Some sound advice that I will definitely take on board. The idea of targeting IT startups is something that I will get onto asap. I set up a linkedIn profile shortly after arrival as it seems to be one of the biggest and most used methods on networking here in the U.S.Here is the link if any of you are interested; http://www.linkedin.com/pub/mervyn-fealy/42/a28/388 . Feel free to connect with me on there.
StockTwits is the biggest player I can think of in this space.

I like the idea of focusing on negative stock recommendations. There have been studies that show Wall Street research analysts have a positive bias in their recommendations because they do not want to ruin relationships (investment banking, capital markets) or potential relationships with those companies that they rate poorly. So, if you did a startup in this space, then you wouldn't have to worry about that.
I felt like this warranted more than just an upvote. I think this should be required high school reading.
Congress said no such thing. The headline is completely wrong.

The body of the article is a little better, in that it correctly mentions that this was actually about the tomato paste on pizza and whether or not that should count as a serving of vegetables.

However, the article gets that wrong, claiming that the USDA said no and Congress said yes. In fact, there is no dispute that tomato paste can be a serving of vegetables. The dispute is over the quantity needed. The USDA wants a pizza to have 8 tablespoons of tomato paste to be counted as a serving of vegetables. The USDA wants the requirement to be 2 tablespoons.

And yes, tomatoes are vegetables, despite being botanically fruit. Vegetable is a culinary term with no meaning in botany. Fruit is both a botanical term AND a culinary term, and a botanical fruit may or may not be a culinary fruit. Other vegetables that are botanical fruits are corn, cucumbers, and squash.
Video Game Lessons for Business Strategy (2009)
This varies by country; some countries have laws keeping police off campus, for various historical reasons. Some date back to the semi-independence of medieval universities, which weren't supposed to be harassed by the local authorities; others are more recent laws, e.g. Greece's "university asylum" law was a reaction to police raids on campuses by the '67-'74 military dictatorship.

The U.S. doesn't have any particular no-police-on-campus rules, although they do have an interesting arrangement in many cases, including this one, where the campus police have been upgraded to "real" police, and non-university police are not usually allowed on campus, because it's not in their jurisdiction. How they relate to the university administration tends to be complex, but the goal is to make some mixture of a regular police force and a campus-security force: more "official" than only a campus security force, but university-controlled, like a campus-security force would be, as opposed to having city-controlled police on campus.

It usually actually works pretty well, I think. Incidents like this are a lot less common than they might be with a regular police force, and many campus police have a geniune interest in keeping campuses calm and defusing confrontations. Even in this video, you can see that only one cop is really acting out of line, and many of the others look a bit uncomfortable with what's going on (especially when he's taking other cops' bottles of pepper spray to go back for more).
True that. I'm with you, man. I've got my opinions about it and I see everyone's point (which I agree with, incidentally) but when I'm actually using Facebook I just allow whatever and keep moving.

Maybe this backlash isn't as big as some would like us to think. Maybe it's just news fodder to rile up the privacy crowd and people like us on HN. The heavy users are mostly high school kids who don't give a damn and allow anything. That's the future, I guess.
This is fantastic. Thank you for posting it. I plan to use MPD as an alternative to iTunes for the foreseeable future. The number of people clamoring for an alternative to iTunes seems to be growing. I hope Apple gets the message, I'm sick of needing three music players to handle my library.
> Why this insistence on mystery? Why this insistence that Jobs had some magical special sauce that all of us are lacking?

Because your and my (and humanity's) articulation capabilities might be less but perception capabilities could be more.

Also because, each of us may actually have some "reality distorting" capabilities, which we may or may not use.
This scenario is the background of an amusing John Grisham novel from 2005, The Broker, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broker

As a novel it was okay, it would probably make a terrific movie, perhaps as comedy.
I'm personally afraid of the more likely possibility of networks spinning off their own Netflix clones which is arguably even worse: to watch an NBC show you would need an nbc.com subscription, a CBS one for CBS shows etc.
Have you used ICS? They don't have a consistent icon theme, there's multiple messenger apps with different look and feels, the UI favors Tron era styling over actually using the capabilities of a modern display, and the widget adding has a strange 3d effect that means your not quite sure where you're putting something anymore.
" 99% of the design problems you'll encounter have been encountered before and are probably cataloged. "

Bonus: It's already been done!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns_(book)

I heard that when they wrote the book they basically mailed a whole bunch of people in the field to find out all the patterns people were using and they weren't able to find more then 23. After getting 23 every other pattern they would hear about would be just an iteration of one of the ones they had.

Full Disclosure: I haven't actually read the book yet. But I'm planning to...
The strongest feeling that this open letter communicates is how strongly the author views himself. Starting with "I am an asset...you are not" and peppered throughout with "I [verb]" statements, this just reads as an exercise in self-promotion.

There must be plenty of support with other faculty, where a simple and coherent statement could be made as a group. But the author apparently felt the need to jump out ahead of that with an open letter. How revolutionary.
Ok, forgive me but I'm not sure what this link is supposed to demonstrate. I see mostly pictures of white men here punctuated with a few asians. I know the article mentioned a Ruby conference getting a larger female audience but these aren't pictures of that conference.
I'd also add that just a good monitor isn't enough, make sure you calibrate the brightness, contrast, and colors. It makes a big difference to your eyes. You'll have less eye strain and see more details at the same time.
Reminds me of how the ancient Greeks thought of mathematics in a purely geometric way. The pythagoreans wouldn't buy a proof that you couldn't demonstrate geometrically, with whole numbers. They couldn't conceive of infinite or infinitesimal entities, so they explained them away, making calculus one of those ideas that "the Greeks could have had but didn't".
Thanks for this comment. I'm glad that some people understand OOP. It gets really anoying reading the whining Of developers that don't realize that it is them that suck, not really the patterns, language, or whatever they are attacking. Ruby programmers use to do this a lot.
The introductory compilers class, CS143, will be available to Stanford students in the spring. I have no idea if they'll put it online, but it would be consistent with their current initiatives. I think you'll have to inquire more or wait until then to find out.

http://cs.stanford.edu/courses
The unexpected impact of Facebook’s “seamless sharing” on newspaper sites
Fabric Engine Turbo Charges Web Applications
Unveiling new collection of home furnishings products at the Garden Gates
Mobile/Front-End Developer Wanted
Hey HN,

This is an open letter to one kick-ass mobile/front-end developer out there that wants to work with a growing cleanweb startup for purely equity to help us build out our web, mobile and cross-platform native application.

I know, I know equity is paper and doesn't mean sh*t unless there is demand for it. Well we are starting to raise our seed round and raised a round already from and are about to graduate from the GreenStart Cleantech Accelerator Program in San Francisco that had a 3% acceptance rate.

Here is how the equity deal works: say our web/mobile/front-end development would normally cost us $10k. We give you 2x that or $20k worth of stock (50% upfront, 50% upon completion with the option to buy it back within 30 days in cash) and then when we raise our seed round it will be valued another 2x at $40k. That is a 4x return within a few months in a young startup that is at the beginning of its growth curve. After Series A 12 months out that original $10k that be worth 40x or $400k. If we are so lucky to grow like a weed and raise a B then that could be worth 400x and you are a multi millionaire. You are basically taking the same risk as YC or any VC. If you did this 5-10 times (as I am sure you know) you would come out on top, both with experience and valuable stock.

So what do we do? WA.TT is a fun, simple and social consumer application that helps people save money on their energy and go green. Think of it as a mashup of Zynga & Mint for energy. Our demographic spends $800b on energy and related products every year, that is a big market and it is rapidly changing as we move towards a resource constrained and warming world. We are building the social energy platform that manages all of a consumers energy data, gives personalized recommendations on how to save up to 20% on their energy and manages consumers home appliances as they get "smarter". We make it fun by adding in a game and social layer on top of our energy analytics and

We have a kick-ass team of a back-end developer, business hustler and designer. You are the missing link that can add the spark to take us into orbit.

The magic of our technology is that after a 60-second signup, consumers can see all of their energy in one simple location. We track it over time automatically providing a tight feedback loop.

Interested? Contact me ASAP at james@wa.tt
The StockTwits API is great if you want to build a sentiment based tool.

Again as murtza said negative sentiments are often more correct than positive.

The only problem is when it comes to monetizing the thing, the hurdles in legal terms then become huge and costly.
Here are some statistics by FT how seamless sharing is affecting newspaper top stories:
http://blogs.ft.com/fttechhub/2011/11/unexpected-impact-face...
Mourn them do not. Miss them do not. Celebrate them, do.
"Given that he's speaking of whole numbers, the number zero comes to mind, which satisfies this. So his whole proof is shot."

Both Wikipedia [1] and Wolfram [2] indicate that there are varying interpretations regarding which integers are included in the definition of the term whole number.

Since Conway is discussing two-dimensional distance in order to determine area, his definition of the term would not include integers that are less than or equal to zero.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_number

"Whole number is a term with inconsistent definitions by different authors. All distinguish whole numbers from fractions and numbers with fractional parts.

Whole numbers may refer to:

natural numbers in sense (1, 2, 3, ...) - the positive integers

natural numbers in sense (0, 1, 2, 3, ...) - the non-negative integers

all integers (..., -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, ...)"

[2] http://mathworld.wolfram.com/WholeNumber.html

"0 is sometimes included in the list of "whole" numbers (Bourbaki 1968, Halmos 1974), but there seems to be no general agreement."
What happens if a domain name changes hands legitimately? Maybe the old owner of the domain would have to sign off on the turnover?

But what if the turnover was because of domain-squatting, and the old owner doesn't want to hand over their domain, but they might be legitimately forced to anyway?

Or what if the old owner just stops paying for their domain and disappears, and someone else buys it later but can't authenticate their ownership because the old sovereign key is still around?

I don't know of a good answer to these questions. I'm not sure there is an answer that will still provide the level of security that the EFF wants (which I like).

The fundamental problem seems to be this: we have a bunch of identifiers (domain names in this case) and we want to associate them with people or organizations. How do we verify that identifiers can be transferred to different people or organizations, but only in some "legitimate" way? The only known solution is to have some other entity verify that the identifier->person mapping is legitimate. But this relies on the other entity to be trustworthy, which is what the EFF doesn't like.
Creating OpenSocial Gadgets
There are two things which look and act similar but are different, gadgets and widgets.Widgets can be referred to any icons or graphical interface element that is operated by a computer or internet use to execute a preferred function online or on the computer. You can add a widget in all kind of web pages.
added thepumpkin1979 at gmail. thanks!
For all you guys targeting startups, do you have a recommended location for finding them? There are plenty of amazing startups around that I have never heard of. I feel like I just don't have the time to keep up or am unaware of some magic resource that some of you must have.

I am mostly curious about companies specific to the bay area but a larger scope would certainly be welcome.
I think it's neat, but serves no business purpose.
The main problem with this article that meritocracies are a mythological construct and not something that empirically exist. This probably shouldn't be much of a surprise, considering that merit is literally a religious concept.

Try replacing every instance of the word merit with the word Jesus, and you'll see there is essentially no loss of meaning.

Figuring out how to reduce bias in startup funding is important, but really it's only a small part of the larger problem of identifying talent in general.
One of the problems with racism in particular is that it has effects on people from birth. Past racism may have hurt their parents' socioeconomic prospects, forcing them to be born in an economically depressed ghetto with poor schools and gang violence. Even if there's no racism past that point, if their parents were prevented from ascending to the middle class, they won't pass on middle-class virtues emphasizing the importance of education. No matter how good the schools are, they don't really work the same without positive parental involvement.

And there's obstacles to how good the schools are, too--good teachers will be scared away by the violence and gang activity that's common in those environments, and district-based taxing, funding, and student allocation procedures mean that kids in those areas are trapped in bad schools. If the school system is racist on top of that, that's even another barrier.

If you don't fix something that's that bad when the kid is five years old, by the time they're eighteen and getting out of high school, let's suppose they go to college. Okay, the colleges do everything they can not to be racist, but it's genuinely harder to meet academic standards for admission if you went to shitty schools your whole life. And even if you get in, you have to compete with the students who went to better schools and got a better start. That's a barrier against even getting into difficult academic tracks like STEM. And if the university system is racist, that's even another barrier.

Okay, the job market for developers is pretty good right now even in startups. It probably isn't even racist. But even at this point, all the forces I've already described have thinned out the numbers to the point where a disproportionately small minority of the genuinely qualified population of entry-level developers are, well, minorities. But let's say the job market is racist, too.

Once you're ready to found a startup, it's absolutely true that the pool of candidates coming to YC and others for funding is genuinely unbalanced. Even if investors do everything they can to be perfectly non-racist, racism in any or all of the levels previous to this in the person's life is going to take them out of the population of qualified startup founders. And no matter what you do to fix investment, it's not going to restore the proportion of minority startup founders to the proportion of minorities in the population. You have to fix these problems at the root, not all the way out here when it's too late to make any difference.
Whoever gives you the most money.
Vimeo PRO: Simple and affordable video for your business
Gizmochimp, Hacker News clone for gadgets
Police Pepper Spraying and Arresting Students at UC Davis
Windows XP or Windows7
Which one do you prefer? Both of them have their advantages and disadvantages. Let's see them in some quick points...
CBT isn't a technique in itself, it's more of a general strategy. This seems to be a particular CBT technique.
Just wanted to use this opportunity to tell everyone; I setup an experimental web site at http://www.jobrupt.com to help people challenge the companies to create or open a job position for them by telling how they can add value. Would love to see that it will be useful to at least one person on earth. Except the design which sucks, I would like to hear if that will at all be useful to anyone or how to modify it to make it useful.
Pizza can be reasonably healthy - use thin crust dough, less cheese, plenty of tomato and lots of other veg. That's a lot better than other "child friendly" "junk food".

I'm not sure about children, but I thought the salt == bad thing had pretty much been debunked?

(http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=its-time-to...)

If I had to pick one thing to control it wouldn't be salt, or potatoes, but fat. Maybe the potato growers would be happier if frying was banned, but roasting wasn't? Potato wedges also have the skins on, and most of the nutrients are just under the skin, so that's another benefit.
I've used MoC, Mpd + ncmpc, and I am currently using cmus (http://cmus.sourceforge.net/).

Currently cmus has been my favorite. Just another option.
The 20/20/20 rule

Every 20 minutes, look at least 20 feet away to unfocus your eyes, for at least 20 seconds.

Also, if you already have prescription eyeglasses, ask your optometrist about a weaker "computer work" Rx to get day work eyeglasses.
Intellectual Property Lawsuits? What Would Bill Shakespeare Do?
That'll be worth checking out if there's an NBA season this year. Does it truly have the whole NBA? No blackouts?
I think Molly could fairly blame the apps and not Facebook. This flow (prompting for permission before a user accesses your app) is completely optional. You can still use the new graph APIs and not do this.

In my opinion, this flow makes a lot of sense when the page the user lands on is going to be completely uninteresting without their info. For example, if the page is going to show you a visualization of your friends' birthdays. However, I think it's overkill if you're just using it to grab permission to auto-share what they do.

The apps can choose... I think these apps are choosing incorrectly.
Why SOPA will destory the Internet as we know it
In the article: "When we see extremely skewed demographics, we have very good reason to suspect that something is wrong with our selection process"

In my chess club have the same kind of female/male ratio: 12 females on 220 members. Leaving out the youth members it is 8 out of 180 or about 4% ;-) Something must be wrong with our non-existent selection process.
Error 502!
Terrible idea -- BAC can vary between people, users may fudge timelines. And how soon is it until someone gets a DUI and blames it on the app telling them they were right under the limit?
I'm getting a 502 Bad Gateway at the moment, you may want to try and fix that.
there might be an inherent gender imbalance simply because men can afford to settle down and start a family much later in life than women. founding and managing a startup takes an incredible amount of time and dedication solely to work, which can easily turn into a multi-year workaholic wormhole that leads nowhere. perhaps the majority of women would rather put 5-10 years into a guaranteed, fulfilling family than uncertain stress and a large paycheck. if i was a woman and wanted to have children before i was 30, it would definitely change my outlook for embarking on the entrepreneurial path.
I agree there isn't much monetization value to the app. I mainly did it as an exercise to learn Rails 3.1, Coffeescript and Mongo.

I also plan to open source the JQuery plugin that constructs the timeline. Hopefully someone will find that useful for their projects.
It's brutal (but yeah, 'click to skip' upper right)... I really wanted to share this article, but the number of ads on the page is so crippling that I was embarrassed to send anyone there.
Snideness is about HOW you say something, not WHAT you say. "What is the statistical significance of a YouTube video?" is a snide comment completely independent of the question of whether or not a YouTube video actually has statistical significance (whatever that could possibly mean).

BTW, your claimed math literacy is not much in evidence here. Of course opinions have no "statistical weight" (whatever that could possibly mean). Only data has statistical significance. So let's examine the data. So far in this discussion I've offered up three data points:

1. A video (hosted on YouTube, though I fail to see how that could possibly be relevant) of two individuals, one of whom claims to be a lawyer and another who claims to be a former police officer, both of whom say that it is unwise to talk to the police under any circumstances, and explain why in considerable detail.

2. The well-documented fact that the Innocence Project has to date exonerated 280 people.

3. The fact that Troy Davis was recently executed for a crime he almost certainly did not commit.

Are these data points statistically significant? I have no idea. I haven't done the math. But 1) neither have you and 2) the burden of proof is not on me. I am only arguing that it is not unreasonable to be wary of law enforcement. If someone wants to dispute that, the burden is on them to show that law enforcement is trustworthy. So far no one participating in this discussion has offered up EVEN A SINGLE DATA POINT in support of that position. So my three data points may or may not be statistically significant, but (and here comes a fine example of a snide comment) I dare say they have better prospects than your zero data points.
I restarted the server. It's working now.
Two-factor via SMS is for dumbphones. Facebook should support RFC 4226 to allow smartphone apps to generate codes without communicating with Facebook.
Let me rephrase: Why isn't the default mode of the mysql command line client to diverge from the SQL standard in the name of safety, with a command line option to enable "100% standard" (aka unsafe) mode?

I understand the SQL standard, and I understand the behavior. Why is the behavior of the software defaulting to "fuck up your life" in deference to some book on a shelf? (Especially considering you could revert to "fuck up your life" mode easily with a flag.)
Where I study, it's a general consensus that in Math, N does not include 0 unless explicitly included as N index 0. In CompSci on the other hand, 0 is assumed to be included for practical and technical reasons.