skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the other side of the coin, most of these anecdotes are instances of doing favors for friends/relatives. If you tried to charge them, a number of them would be critical of your decision to not 'do them a favor.'
But isn't it a bit idealist while the laws are written by the lobbyists of entrenched multi-billion-dollar businesses? I sincerely hope that's not the case in your country but it's definitely the case in mine.

Fixing that problem isn't impossible. There are a significant precedents where people have forced governments to act against corporate interests (eg, the environmental movement).

Even things like the Tea Party show that the major US parties can be co-opted by people power. Yes, the Tea Party has mostly been co-opted itself, but look how many entrenched players that removed in such a short period of time. I'd suggest that is a reasonable model to study for anyone interested in creating a pro-consumer political movement.
Sorting Algorithms (with demos in Java)
Probably one of the worst articles I've read on HN in a while.

The first five paragraphs contain generic filler, which are then followed by the bombshell that more information about users provides greater opportunity for targeted advertising.

Someone's being paid by the word, IMO.
I think the issue here is the language used. The research usually describes things in such a way that "rational = maximizing" and and the phenomena cataloged are "errors" or "biases" that make human behavior fall short of maximizing. So, you could easily come away with the impression that "irrational = always wrong" or "irrational = bad", but what is really meant is that "irrational = not maximizing".

Temporal discounting is just something we do. It's a heuristic[1] sometimes gives good results, sometimes doesn't. When it doesn't, the redditor suggests, that's what we call procrastination. When it works well, we generally don't even notice, because it seems so natural.

Procrastination often has no reward at all. If it has a reward, why call it procrastionation? You actually do something useful, if it has a reward.

That's setting a higher bar for "reward" than what is meant. Pleasurable activities like watching television or playing video games are "rewarding". That's why people do them. That's why people continue doing them even when they "have more important things to do". Yes, in the end, you might not get anything material out of them, but if it truly had "no reward at all", nobody would do them.

losing $100 might feel as bad, as winning $200 might feel good

That's known as "loss aversion", another cut from Kahneman & Tversky's Greatest Hits.

But if you think about that risk again for this point in time + one year it is not that unlikely anymore.

Notice that you say if you think about.... When people procrastinate, are they really thinking of those sorts of things. Suppose you're a student that has a paper due soon and opt to play video games instead. You'd probably be thinking something like "I'll play games now and do the paper later." rather than something like "I might die before the end of term, so why bother with the paper?"

That's not to say you're wrong: only to bring it back to the original context.

[1]: A heuristic, in other words, being a way of "avoiding cost" of doing the rational (maximizing) computation. So it's not really different from what you're saying.
The trouble with these kinds of calculations is that they don't take into account cascading effects.

For example reducing the military budget would require layoffs. This would cause the government to pay unemployment benefits, and also loose out on tax revenue.

And that's just the easiest consequence to calculate (which is why I picked it).
The UK risks excluding the best developers on social class grounds
I think the bzImage kernel image file might predate the release of bzip2. I'm not sure where to lookup when the kernel source first built a bzImage though.
Data recovery and collision resolution are left as exercises...

I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain?
Empower Network Apology and Leader Training
The problem with github is that people pass around links to their repositories without providing any context. This happens on practically every page of Hacker News: there's some five-word blurb describing a piece of software that might be interesting, but the link just dumps you into the repo view on Github. Gee, thanks. No, I'm not going to spend half an hour digging through your code trying to figure out what it does! I wish people would link to a page that actually explains what they are trying to do and why it is interesting.
Are we reading two different articles or what?
Uncertainty, technology development and the Aymaras
View Profile: gianinasanchez - VWVortex.com
I think the author is trying to make a poorly articulated argument that the _intent_ of G+ is not to "kill" Facebook, but instead improve Google's targeted advertising capabilities. To some extent, this is true, but I'm not sure if it is a relevant distinction. If Google had the option to replace Facebook wholesale, I'm sure they'd jump at the chance. Perhaps "not competing" is merely a way of lowering expectations?
I think it's interesting how the focus of the Nature articles is on elucidating the process by which autism develops and affects people, and not on whatever coping mechanisms there are for people on ASD or their relatives. I don't think it is a bad thing, just a particular focus of their research.

On the one hand, it is immensely important to understand the biological basis of autism. But on the other, they say autism is not understood nearly well enough now, and there are many people on autism spectrum and their relatives/friends who need reasonable advice now, grounded in proper scientific research. Advice for high-functioning ASD people/relatives would presumably talk about developing social skills, coping behaviours, and whatever else is needed for them to function well in the wider society. Identifying the biological basis of ASD seems to be a long-term research programme with little payoff in the immediate future.

It's not that I think it's wrong to focus on the biology of it, it's just that they seem to completely skip the psychology aspect of ASD that is probably just as important.
QML? That'll be the JavaScript influenced modelling language from the Qt project, right?
Most people don't realize Github provides them more than just a place to put a repo. You can setup Github markdown powered websites as well. see: http://pages.github.com/
Yes, in most cases the university will own any IP. Usually they will want a percentage of any spinout company resulting from PhD research. The best thing to do would be for them to speak to the university enterprise office (or equivalent).
ALL banks are a gigantic scam. Grow up ...
Five Hours with ThoughtWorks Go
IANAL abut AFAIK it depends on the school. In general, yeah, the school owns the research. However, it might also possible to get an exclusive or non-exclusive license from your school, again, depending on the school. It will feel funny for a while to pay for your own research but such is life. I must also note that, the school might be willing to grant a non-exclusive license for a relatively small fee (a few grands; no equity) but an exclusive license will most likely set you back a lot more (in cash or in equity).

I co-founded a company based on the research of a classmate years ago and that is exactly what we did. We paid Stanford for a non-exclusive license. I believe Google has done the same for PageRank but for an exclusive license.
Look, C is a PROCEDURAL language. But -- (and its a BIG but) without it, you wouldn't (easily) have OO languages.
Share the fun
You mean competitive advantage.
I value my liberties more than I value any democractic institution.
The trick is to do it in such a way that they don't notice, and without telling them you did anything at all.
I'm a DC-based geek visiting San Fran, CA. Anyone willing to show me around?
Hey HN,

I'm a Washington D.C.-based geek visiting San Francisco, CA for Thanksgiving and an upcoming weekend. Would anyone local be willing to make me a company and show me around?

http://gplus.to/bisaram
Apple Mirrorbook Air
"But both doesn't mean time discounting is something irrational."

It's over-discounting that's irrational.

If I have a school paper due in a month, the probability that I won't have to do the paper is certainly non-zero (I could die, my professor could get sick, etc)... but it's likely something less than a .01% chance that an event like that will happen. It's not rational to put off a paper until the last couple days if there's still a 99.99% chance you will have to turn it in. I over value my current reward of being able to watch more TV now, while under discounting the future cost of having to do the paper in the future. I treat it more like there's a 10%+ chance that I won't actually have to do the paper.
NO. A director AT the BoE is calling a banks a gigantic scam.

In this sense the BoE and the Fed are not the kind of banks he is referring to.
There was a recent highly cited paper describing the concept of willpower as a measurable, physiological, depletable quantity, strongly affected by glucose levels:

http://www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/~lchang/material/Evolutionary/Bra...

And there was a very interesting Metafilter thread from a few years ago that found that a small amount of alcohol overcame procrastination:

http://ask.metafilter.com/22924/Why-does-alcohol-overcome-my...

It's probably time to start studying these kinds of things as genuinely biological phenomena.
Want ‘Celebrities’ Choosing What News You Read? Twosift Hopes So
Good response and well put - I tend to agree that labour price differences eventually work themselves out when service providers start to work out what they CAN charge, especially in light of domestic demand increases.

As for the other aspect of the question, I'm interested to hear your take on the 'geek vs management' aspect.

Where this comes from is here: I've worked alongside and known many developers who are slightly older workers (the 40+ mark), and they seem to be under this impression that they've lost their edge, and they aren't as good as they used to be when they were younger (my age), when they were mainframe guns.

Not sure why this is the case, and I'm fairly certain it's a mental thing more than anything else - others in their peer groups have either gone into management or in some way left the technical stuff behind, and they may feel as though they've lost out in terms of pay and opportunities - because they stayed tech. So the 'norm' for a lot of folks is to try and leave the tech game behind asap and move into management.

Do you think this is a simple case of getting stuck in a "my XYZ technology is the best for EVERYTHING" rut?
The artist behind the beauty of the Mac
More awesomeness for the Compliant Website Template http://www.dchest.org/comply.html
Funding platform Project PowerUp sets sights on Silicon Valley
Google scraps green tech fund in 'spring cleaning' frenzy
Void pointers do have a purpose. Regardless, it's only about type safety, not being object-oriented, since C isn't.
We must be, because all I see are pointers to "function returning void". Show me where the void pointer is.
App developers plagued by piracy and poor cashflow, claims Shifty Jelly
Depends on the IP policy of your university but generally the IP is owned by them (some universities outside of the US have an "inventor owned" policy). The good news is that you can leverage the university for your start-up in turn.(http://techentrepreneurship.com/2010/11/16/leveraging-the-te...).
I used to like the moat idea of Buffett, but now I think it's more for mature businesses. Things like IP, brand, switching costs, channels, partners etc. As a war metaphor, it's a nasty, zero-sum game.
Defence is only part of the "business" - it's logically dependent on having something to defend. A moat around nothing is pointless.

There's a more insidious aspect: while thinking defensively, worried about how you could be attacked, you aren't out there enabling customers to solve their problems. It's not a fun way to be. But what is worse, is that the most effective way to build a moat (for a startup) is focus 100% on enabling customers to solve their problems: every person you help improves your brand [a moat]. Every product improvement (that better solves the customer problem) makes your product harder to copy [a moat]. If you learn about your customers, the details of what they need, how to solve it best given their situation, and how you could let them know about your solution, and what language they would most easily understand, then you are serving them, but because this takes time and effort to work out, it's also hard to copy [a moat].
If you serve them best If you look at the most successful companies, even mature ones, they are constantly trying to improve their product and improve their brand - in particular, technology companies like apple, microsoft, google; but it even includes mature consumer companies like colgate-palmolive, J&J, coca-cola, nike [new toothpaste; new coke flavours, bottle-sizes, advertising campaigns; new shoe "technology", design and advertising].

Be a knight, not a dragon.

By working out how to serve customers, you not only make money, but incidentally create a moat. But if you focus on making a moat, serving customers will be secondary to you, you'll make less money, and you'll make a less effective moat - with less for it to defend. This path leads to less success, deservedly so.

The only "sneaky" aspect I'd include is to be aware of your core business value (the expertise/knowledge above), and keep it to yourself. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3267432

The business part is getting your solution to customers who need it, who then buy it:
First, they need to know your solution exists, through promotion, perhaps word of mouth. It helps to have a short, pithy, catchy way to explain the product, that can be quickly understood, be interesting, memorable: easy for one person to pass on to another, and a motive to do that. It's important to focus on the problem that people that it solves (rather than the solution), so a person can think "hey, that's just what Ed's been looking for. I'll pass it on".
They need to be able to assess it easily; try it out easily (to confirm it solves their problem); and buy it easily.
In other words: build something [app] people want [problem] - and get it to them [business].

TL;DR if we divide a startup into tech/biz, the biz part isn't building a moat. It's actually helping people.
You've just covered my four tools to overcome a slump. I've coded when buzzed. The trick is to not commit and diff the next morning. [Looks like you edited and removed caffeine and "loud thumping music". I recommend streaming ah.fm for the latter]
If you have heat from friction you expect the heat along the length of the ship.

How in the world does that follow? Heat from friction will be generated in proportion to cos(angle) between the airflow and the surface at any given point, just like heat from compression would. It will flow along the ship's surface and soak into its interior volume just as if it were generated by compression.
The thing I fail to understand is this : everyone knows it is a problem, and everyone knows what the solution must be (much less expenses and moderately more taxes).

Things like the military and welfare are talked about as sacrosanct, in the way a mortgage payment or school fees would be discussed in a family heading for bankruptcy. The point is - at some time in the future the decisions are going to be forced by someone else - so you should make them now while you still have a say.

The table-thumping fear about the military being downsized is completely irrational. So what if a couple of bases in Germany, Japan, England or elsewhere were either closed or downsized? Would the geopolitical stage really change? Yes, there would be layoffs and payouts, but this happens to failing companies all the time, and it's the only way to save them.

Same goes for welfare - it's all very well to want to support everyone but at some point cuts are going to have to be made somewhere.

And as for taxes - yes, richer people and companies are going to have to pay more. Yes, that sucks. But the problem is already here, and you can't shirk it.

Yet nobody can agree to do this, while everyone bickers and fights as the raft heads for the waterfall.

Without ascribing blame to any one person or political party - any balanced view will recognise most people from all parties bear some responsibility - it makes for a fascinating case study in how gridlock in a political system is a very bad thing.
In the actual letter to Google[1], the words "violent Islamist extremism" appear exactly four times, including twice in the concluding sentence.

Am I to assume this flagging button is only for use on violent Islamist extremists?

1. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/documents/2011/11/lieberman-let...
It depends entirely on the type of business you plan to create. Let's put potential businesses in three categories:

1) technical innovation, e.g. Google. If you want to go this route then a PhD program might be your best bet.
2) business model innovation, this is the most common type of entrepreneurship (outside of HN circles), think the Inc 500 list of fastest growing companies. You probably don't need an MBA for this and definitely don't need a PhD.
3) HN type of businesses, not necessarily technically genius, but at least one technical founder is needed. e.g. Facebook. Neither MBA or PhD, just do it now.

Where can an MBA be useful? If you plan to grow through business development, i.e. deals, JV's, alliances. An MBA connects you to financiers more quickly than a PhD would and it definitely gets you talking their language. For example, running a search fund out of business school is definitely doable.

An MBA is also very useful if you want to get a solid reliable day job in corporate America and eventually run or support corporate R&D or incubators. Most F100 companies spend more on R&D than the large multi-year VC funds do over a decade. From such a perch you can have a big impact if you've got the patience for corporate politics. This is the route I've taken and I can get access to top management faster than engineers who have been their for years and definitely faster than two guys and a dog. Of course, this is definitely trying in terms of patience.

As for MBA support for entrepreneurship. It entirely depends on the program. That's just part of the due diligence you've got to do before applying to business school. Most top 10 business schools will get you in front of VCs faster than just about any other way and your competition will be nothing.

As an MBA I would recommend most people who are reading HN to not get an MBA. It's not a bad degree, like anything it's what you make of it. But I can tell you that if you have the intellectual curiosity and the "get it done now" and "show me" attitude prevalent on HN, you're going to get frustrated very quickly with your MBA classmates and your corporate co-workers. If you've got the patience, great, but be forewarned, it's a tough road.
Yet even something as straightforward as mail merge is a hurdle many MS Word users cannot clear, at least not without out a call to the help desk.
Very likely to be zeus or another related banking trojan, that's a trick that i know it can pull. You may want to watch as changing browser may not get rid of the underlying problem, and anti-virus is apparently somewhat spotty st detecting and removing this class of threat.
Uninstall Internet Explorer (Facebook Group)
I agree with this fully - especially the "proud of" part. I hate having my name on some code that I had to hack up as a personal temporary solution, then have it slowly move into production as the solution because 'it works'...
I have both (a PhD and an MBA) and I have also started a company before so I can speak to that part a little as well. I am sure a JD will also be useful but I question its utility compared to others.

Also, I am surprised that everyone is focusing on what you learn in such programs but no one seems to care that both an MBA and a PhD are also gateways to meet like-minded folks who are potential co-founders (or, in the case of an MBA, potential co-founders or future investors).

The company I co-founded was with PhD buddies and, even though I didn't do it myself with the MBA, I have seen many folks from my class working on startups during and after the MBA. Granted, both of these degrees were from Bay Area schools so that might have been a factor but still...
Reminds me of this Twitter comment: "Suddenly realized the problem with all to-do lists: they are filled with things we don't want to do. Everything else is already done."
Insert Oceania joke...
The sports footage you won't see on TV this Thanksgiving
I vote neither.

I studied an MBA and thankfully what I got from that is that being an entrepreneur is the best choice if you have the opportunity to attempt it.

I went into the course hoping to climb the greasy pole of corporate success and came out wanting no further part of it.

I would say studying a Phd is unlikely to lead to commercial success unless you're of a very entrepreneurial bent going into it, and have a strong desire to create commercially useful (and exploitable) research as your focus.

The simple fact is a good entrepreneur can easily find useful research results to commercialise if that is what they want to do.

That said, anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur could do worse than devote some time to studying aspects of marketing, accounting and finance that an MBA course provides. Recently I spoke to a guy who had a successful business but had to throw it in and get a job because he amassed a tax liability beyond his ability to handle, simply because he didn't understand how taxes worked.
I think it just makes it more "difficult" - that is, developers have to make a greater effort to stand out. I'll admit, I mostly buy games off Steam when they're cheap, and I've bought every bundle because it's cheap. But, I will buy a good indie game when I see it.

Most recently, I preordered Dungeon Defenders full price and ended up satisfied. I won't go out and spend money because it's an indie game though. Dungeon Defenders caught my eye and persuaded me to take the plunge.

In fact, it's probably because of the sales/bundles that I'm more open to purchase indie games now. I also helped fund Lifeless Planet and the NASA MMO, because the sales/bundles showed me the value of indie games. The "problem" is that indie developers have to work harder to get my attention now, either with an interesting premise (the Kickstarter games I mentioned) or interesting gameplay (Dungeon Defender).
Sebastian Gunawan, Jakarta Fashion Week 2012
Show HN: My Git-like Dropbox client that gives you control over syncs
This may sound naive but has anyone got any advice or links to advice on the best way to find real problems to solve, big or small. Preferably small, though because with the big ones its often harder to tell whether they are something that people really want. I'm looking for a way of finding the kinds of things where its relatively easy to tell whether they have a good chance of making some money right now. Its a tall order,I know but you never know what people know until you ask.
Find a big problem, identify a basis for its vector space, and build that basis.

My opinion is that all "small problems with simple solutions" that have become successful were actually cases of big problems masquerading as small ones.
While this shows admirable courtesy, I do feel that extreme prejudice against crapware toolbars is perfectly justified. So, I prefer to take the "shoot first, ask questions later" approach here.
Personal anecdote: I once came across some months-old to-do list. It included some furniture rehabbing project. The piece of furniture in question had since been gotten rid of, so I rolled my eyes and removed the project from my to-do list. My sons teased me about being a failure for not accomplishing it.