skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No. Perhaps most of the wealth that you saw, working in finance, may have come from brute force (although I would disagree with that claim, prima facie, as well); but that doesn’t mean most wealth is accumulated that way.

You get money by using leverage to take other peoples money

No. That theory is called mercantilism, and we figured out that it’s wrong about three hundred years ago. You get money by bringing about the manifestation of value into the world. People who make money via leverage are doing that in a very specific way, but it’s far from the only way to do it.
This argument comes up over and over again and it doesn't make any sense. If you are consuming the content then it does have value to you, therefore you should be paying for it.
Apple Pulls Match.com iOS App
Touche. =)

I guess it depends on what you are measuring. In terms of absolute spend, I agree that I spend more on books than I used to. However, given that I'm buying more books because I'm actually reading more, my "per-book spending" is a little lower.
That's a sampling error / selection bias.

The were defining (implicitly) their target market as their existing market. Unfortunately, this was serving not to expand but restrict the interest areas within their existing subscriber base.

This is a very common mistake. A canonical example would be the "when should we hold this meeting" question ... asked of a meeting's attendees (the answer will almost certainly be biased toward "when we're holding it now").
Thanks! Maybe I should go a bit bigger with the font...
It's a Unix with most of the bells & whistles (albeit a different flavor to Linux), plus you get to use a decent selection of commercial software.
How My Blog Helped Make Courtney Day Famous
Facebook Boosts New York's Startup Cred -- Here's Why NYC Is So Hot
It's an irrelevant event for us.
One way to look at it: in some ways Git provides a framework for almost any workflow you could possibly want. It optimizes for workflows that major users of Git care about, such as the model followed by the Linux kernel and adopted by many other projects. But Git won't enforce very much structure on you; you impose that on yourself. As a result, you can use it almost exactly like SVN, at which point it'll feel like a gratuitously different SVN. However, as you find and make use of the other possibilities available to you, you'll have more success using Git.

Some of the first things you'll want to look at: doing many small commits, using many lightweight branches, and using commit --amend or rebase -i on local changes to fiddle with them before pushing them. Think of each branch as the result of your work, despite it containing many commits; you can edit the branch as a whole until you get it right, and then push it, much like you'd edit the SVN working copy until ready to run "svn commit". You get to have more structure in your working copy, and keep that structure when you push to the public repository.

One big recommendation, though: learning Git works a lot like learning the UNIX command line. You can learn a pile of individual tools, but it also helps to know the philosophy of how they fit together, so you can more easily string together impressive ad-hoc solutions when you need to. I'd suggest reading more about Git's repository structure, and thinking about it more as a DAG, and how the commands fit in that model.
1949 was 300 years ago?
Facebook does only talent acquisitions. They never buy products.
You might be able to check what the Googlebot executes by adding javascript to your site and checking the thumbnail.

EDIT: Removed comment about the bot's user-agent. The article links to a Google FAQ which answers the question.
"buy all the brilliant pixel pushers"
The world's heaviest insect
For me, the modern Java ecosystem is more about a sweet combination of groovy at the edges with a minimalist Java core. it seems to be the best combo of static and dynamic typing and capture a lot of the best of both worlds without buying into too much religion or "enterprise" type complexity.
Looking at the details:

3.8 million data store reads for 8,000 visitors seems high. Especially for the kind of data you are serving - it's not rapidly changing.

Are you using memcache at all? A quick scan of the source doesn't show any memcache imports, but I just might've missed it.
(http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/memcache/usingm...)
Woah, really? Try auctioning it off in Russia. As of few years ago the going rate for 4 digit UIDs was in tens of thousand dollars.
This is a really well thought out and argued essay outlining the realities of teaching writing. There were quite a few lucid appraisals of students and the skills they lack which keep them from writing a "Real Essay". After reading each one however, I couldn't help but think that the author was in fact generating a very good syllabus for what should actually be the focus of his course.

If students are prone to Ad Hominem arguments for instance, doesn't that suggest that more time should be spent explaining this fallacy?

This was just one of many such examples.
> My new Git workflow: code, commit, code, commit, code, commit, code, commit, code, commit, code, commit, push

Likewise, but mine frequently looks like this: branch, code, commit, code, commit, code, commit, rebase -i, rebase branch on master, code, commit, rebase branch on master, merge, push.
How, in the same article, do you say "an expert examined the assembly of the software and determined there is no code that records or reports back" then follow that a little later with "carrier IQ doesn't make the decision, they provide the software with flags that the carriers can configure to record and/or report back".... These two statements don't really mesh up.
1700 was three hundred years ago, when John Locke pointed out in his Second Treatise that the amount of wealth in the world is not fixed.
There are many features in many languages that look superficially benign (that's why they were added to the language in the first place), but that turn out to be so much trouble that people actively steer away from them. Some are just hard to use correctly, and will blow up in your face in unexpected ways. Others are impossible for a non-expert to use at all, and will make it much harder for others to work on the code. Some will have such awful tool support that using the feature is just to painful. Yet others will work fine in toy programs, but just won't scale to large programs.

It'd be silly to not dislike these features just because somebody thought that they would be a good idea, without being fully prescient about how the feature would be used in the wild.
Even more grossly significant than this is the fact that "logical and/or beneficial at small / individual / short-term scale" need not equate to a best solution or alternative for a population at large or long-term timescale.

A classic case in economics is explained very clearly in Mancur Olsen's Logic of Collective Action, which explains why group-based decisions are often at odds with the interests of the group as a whole.

Another is Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which hods that there is no method for constructing social preferences from arbitrary individual preferences. In other words, there is no rule, majority voting or otherwise, for establishing social preferences from arbitrary individual preferences -- so long as you also require unrestricted domain, non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency, and independence of irrelevant alternatives. In other words: democracy not only may not, but cannot deliver an optimum outcome.

There are many other such paradoxes and conflicts, many of which I'm becoming increasingly convinced undermine key and manadatory assumptions of a properly functioning free market economy.

What changes might fix these is of course a rather longer discussion....
Moveis Bartira
Quer saber mais? Visite uma das 500 lojas da rede Casas Bahia e conheça de perto essa marca de móveis populares, em que popular mesmo só o preço. Para saber o endereço da loja mais perto de você, visite o site institucional das Casas Bahia.
It also says, though, that if you want to switch, switch now, not later.
Oh god, the rent! Thanks for the reminder.

I wonder when we will cross the post-scarcity point on housing. Considering that about 50% of my monthly expenses goes to rent, I think reducing the cost of housing is where most of my mental energies should be devoted. My partial solution is "Commodity Housing", i.e., housing so abundant that what you pay is close to the maintainance costs, which I estimate would be on the order of $50-60/month (excluding electric/gas, water/sewage and garbage disposal expenses which most of us already pay for separately).

I can't seem to figure out why, when there is so much land in the U.S. [1], the rents are still so crushingly high [2]? I only have a partial answer in rent controls [3] and zoning laws.

[1] http://persquaremile.com/2011/01/18/if-the-worlds-population...

[2] http://shine.yahoo.com/green/simple-life-in-manhattan-a-90-s...

http://financiallyfit.yahoo.com/finance/article-113345-10728...

[3] http://www.baycitizen.org/columns/elizabeth-lesly-stevens/sm...

@pnathan: I reposted this above, hoping it gets more visibility. Once again thanks for the rent reminder.
The Startup Choice: Get Big or Get Bought
I certainly like SVN's status as a "better CVS", and from that perspective they succeeded nicely. If nothing else, SVN has a much saner repository structure that makes it possible to migrate to a modern version control system, whereas the tools for migrating a CVS repository involve huge pain and sometimes guesswork, depending on how heavily people manually hacked the repo's RCS files and how deeply they used CVS's awful branching.
> If you are consuming the content then it does have value to you, therefore you should be paying for it.

Who do I pay?

What if the value it has to me is less than what anyone would like me to pay for it?
Well, form entry and browsing in general really are painful with a Kindle non-touch.

When you're on vacation, and want to buy a new book (hotel has wifi - but the wifi login page is has a very small button... good luck).

Also the page buttons are too easy to hit (for me), I tend to hit them while handling the Kindle in a non-reading manner (I can't always "sleep" the device before putting it down for example).

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the device, much easier for reading than an iPad.
Substack does it again. Great node developer.
It was a very elegantly designed product; cleaner, crisper design than Foursquare's was in my opinion. But I always had difficulty checking in. I literally had to be inside a venue to register a check-in; and even then it was finicky. 30 feet away? Forget it.
Rockefeller Foundation turns to HTML5 for their annual report
Would you care to elaborate on that?

I don't mean this as a dig, but if you think one of your competitors getting bought by the predominant, and deep-pocketed, social media site is "irrelevant" something seems strangely amiss.

My guess is that you might have not seen them as a competitor, which would certainly be understandable. But this would still have ripple effect that is, IMO, somewhat worth more than casual dismissal.
Oops, dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3306361
Capital expenditure. Video encoding is bursty; you either carry a shitload of capacity that stands idle 90% of the time, in order to guarantee SLAs for clients at peak times; or you don't, and you get to explain to the EVP at e.g. Paramount why their content is falling behind.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I worked pro video at Apple and am now a very happy employee of Zencoder.
Newt Gingrich: Serial Hypocrisy? ..Ron Paul? The choice will be yours
Rails' asset pipeline is painfully slow. Here's how to fix it
Because they're better at it than me. My interests are in the playing and not in the creation.

And as a customer, I'm more interested in new awesomeness than addaddons.
Mainframe programmers
Every time I see numbers like this, I wonder why everyone seems to think you have to use AWS or else you've failed at scaling.

They could run their operation for 10-20% of their AWS costs at a dedicated server host. And everything would be much, much faster.
This is - by all signs - a talent acquisition - not a product acquisition. As such, it is not directly relevant to Foursquare.
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A) They haven't really been a competitor for a long time. Once you're beating someone by a factor of over 100:1 you move on to other things.

B) Facebook isn't buying the product (they don't care about the product). They're just hiring a couple of engineers/designers/product folks.
CSS :visited may be a bit overrated
Drunk RIM Execs Force Air Canada to make emergency landing
This Ad Got 167 Leads in ONE DAY [TIME SENSITIVE]
Also, that Rhozet/Main Concept/&c. are good enough, which in many cases is demonstrably not true.
My 4 digit /. UID is also prime. Does that command a premium?
Hey, author here. To clarify, our uploads go to our servers first (where we resize for thumbnails, etc) then go to S3.
Sounds good to me. I want my carrier to know as little as possible about my phone usage unless I opt-in.
That's childsplay compared to http://ezyang.com/ezyang-resume.pdf
> For one, you can have much more atomic commits, which can help with maintaining the code and finding and fixing bugs. Just push all of your small commits at the end of the day.

This makes it REALLY HARD to keep up with your team members' code, because all you see are huge commit batches at the end of the day containing tons of diffs.

Worse yet, sometimes people use rebase to hide the intermediate commits and you get one huge "Implemented X" commit.

Just commit as you go along. If you're doing something that outright breaks the build or is disruptive, then create a branch -- it's not hard (see below).

> It's also much easier to use branches in Git. If I want to try something weird, or temporarily break some code, it's trivial just to create and use a new branch.

I don't really understand why git users keep repeating this trope.

Here's my SVN branching process:

svn cp ^/trunk ^/branches/some-branch

svn switch ^/branches/some-branch

And then at some future time (or many future times) I can merge in the latest trunk changes (or vis versa). SVN has merge tracking, so it Just Works:

svn merge ^/trunk

I can only assume that this idea that "branches are hard in SVN" is a relic of a time when SVN didn't have merge tracking -- the feature was introduced nearly 4 years ago.

> Git can basically support the same workflow as a centralized system, but it also supports other scheme.

It can, but with more work. I guess I could just alias 'git commit' to 'git commit && git push', but then why am I not just using SVN?
Is giving up the independence of irrelevant alternatives that bad?
Digg's not quite dead yet; not sure it needs the brackets.
Definitely a talent acquisition. Gowalla has always been absolutely gorgeous, through all of it's various designs. I could never really use it for a long period of time though, because it was only useful with fellow web-dev like friends. In the real world, I think it's pretty useless. Unlike something like Twitter, which managed to grow some legs and start gaining traction with virtually everyone in the world. I'm excited to see what these guys can do at FB.

Also, does anyone else find it amusing that CNN broke this news and there isn't a single mention of it anywhere on TechCrunch?
What?s the best time to join a based best business home opportunity
"Quickster" was also an absolutely terrible name. Orders of magnitude worse than "Netflix" which communicates perfectly what that company does.
Using Google Docs as a Wiki
You could also check out Fwix's API.
Tu cena puede hacerte subir de peso.
Where did being sustainable go?
Adidas AdiZero Crazy Light Lead Electricity Mens Shoes on Sale
Who is Declan McCullagh and why should we believe he invented the Internet?
I hacked together a "recipe" (requires a few steps) to migrate your gowalla checkins to foursquare. I moved 350 of my check-ins this way a couple weeks ago. I wanted to preserve the record of where I'd been, and more of my friends use Foursquare anyway. Unfortunately the 4sq API did not provide a way to back-date the check-in, so they all occurred on the same date (date of the API post). Perhaps that has changed? Take a look, fork/extend/add features etc., hope it is useful for someone else! https://github.com/webandy/migrate_gowalla_checkins_to_fours...
Node/Express Social-Auth Boilerplate
Yes, it was Greg's class.
No. Not even if you send it to your kindle via name_num@free.kindle.com.

But, Calibre is now much better at generating real TOCs and remembering their position when you go to/from sections & articles. The Economist (free!) and Reuters News auto-copy and delivery through Calibre are in quite good shape these days.
Money Making online - How to make a blog to be successful
We're working on the lack of ability to back-date checkins. We want to be a bit careful about how we do it, but should have something soon.
I don't see a reasonable alternative, short of a fixed salary. Fixed salaries are a win for poor negotiators, but don't give companies a chance to sweeten the pot to retain someone more expensive than their fixed offer.
CivicSponsor is launching tax deductible crowdfunding for public projects
Nike Lebron 9 South Beach for Sale Cheap Online
Talk about whatever prompted you to contact your competitor.
Definite false dichotomy. Get Big, Get Bought, or Get Profitable.
Is that calculation taking reserved instances in to account?
> With svn you really do not want to do this since in my experience you can only work at one thing at a time per checked out directory. Instead you have to write it down or try to remember.

svn diff >patch-saved-changes
svn revert -R .
(work work work)
svn patch <patch-saved-changes
Why did Facebook wait this long? And since they waited this long, it probably means Foursquare rejected whatever offer was made. I wonder what that was.
The intended use of CouchDB in UbuntuOne seemed to be tailor fit with the technical design. (Distributed master/master replication and resolution, eventual consistency etc)

I'd love a write up with more technical details describing the issues.
It's not that irrelevant alternatives are improperly ranked.

It's that introducing irrelevant alternatives changes the ranking of relevant alternatives:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_of_irrelevant_alte...

E.g.: in an election between La Roge and Grebe Sough, if Handle Parr's decision to run changes the outcome between Roge and Sough, you have a dependence on an irrelevant alternative.
Ask HN: How can I create a startup from my graduate thesis?
Hello everyone,

I always hear of people starting companies that spawned from a graduate school thesis. I am currently working on an idea, which I completely came up with and develop myself in graduate school. Like the professors, researchers, and other graduate students, I signed an agreement that makes the university own all my creations.

I would like to start a company from all my research (this is my life and passion) after graduation. How can I do this if my research is not my property? How have others (maybe you) done this in the past?

My research can be applied to a diverse set of fields, but if it just stays with the university it will belong to just one project, and it would stay like that forever. It's hard to watch my research trapped in one field and one project.

Hopefully the HN community can provide some guidance, feedback, and maybe so interesting stories.

Thank you. I appreciate it.
When Getting A Cash Advance
Facebook Acquires Blue Bottle
OAuth 2 a simple two step process:

1) Redirect the user
2) Do a POST request to acquire an access token

How is that a pain?
How to delete your Gowalla account (if you don’t want Facebook to have it)
I don't think that Gowalla has been a Foursquare competitor for a long time.
The Reality of 3D-Printed Body Parts
I wonder what the purchase price was. And as a side note, Jason Calacanis is one of the angel investors right? Any comment by Jason as to whether he "did ok" or even got his original investment back?
I moved my company to Austin from NYC a year ago. Not one event have I been to where Gowalla was mentioned.
Mainframe Programmers
Except "commit" means different things between the two examples. From the perspective of the rest of the team, they are both code+, push.
AskHN: Why was this submission killed?
http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-center/its-most-wanted-mainframe-programmers-180453

It was flagged as dead immediately? It's happened a couple times to me recently and AFAIK I'm not submitting anything weird.
> More seriously, it sounds like someone who had a bad experience with Git at one point got put in an undeserved position of power in which they got to enforce the results of that bad experience on everyone else.

I set technical direction and while using git isn't a firable offense, we will never support it as the official SCM system.

The reason is quite simple: in a centralized environment, it increases costs and complexity and provides no value to offset that.

We don't want:

- People hiding their work in local branches where none of the other engineers can follow along.

- Getting massive rebased commits once every day (or worse yet, every few days).

- An open-source Linux-inspired development model consisting of a massively distributed ecosystem of competing/disparate/intertwined branches.
Nancy Duarte talks at TEDx East
> 1. Pirating other peoples work is morally wrong.

No it isn't. It's your word against mine, who's right? There is no other way to find out what the majority of people think about copying than to let them vote on it. Copyright policy should be decided in a democratic manner. If the people want copyright to exist and be enforced, enforce it. If they dont want it to exist and want to copy stuff, just let them. This is how democracy works.

> 1. Pirating other peoples work is morally wrong.

This (you making a proclamation) isnt how democracy works.
This assertion (of PG's) caught my eye:

The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Certainly schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens.

That's no longer true at the university level. In fact, writing has been systematically dissociated from literary studies for a host of reasons, some political, some practical, as composition has established itself as a separate discipline. Only a minority of schools still link the two. (This isn't to say that writing courses aren't still grouped under the auspices of the English Department, only that literature, if it appears at all in a writing classroom, is used for reasons other than its literariness -- i.e. to introduce social issues, etc.)