skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Did you really think arbitrage of used goods could be a business?

Yes. Some examples (depending on how loose you want to get with the term arbitrage. I'm using it as its used in this article) would include antiques/collectibles and used cars.

It's obviously much better to operate in areas where 1) value is unclear and/or 2) goods may take time to sell.

With those things, you can get an advantage by knowing the value and by being able to hold onto something until it sells for a proper value.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1034.txt:

The TTL is assigned by the administrator for the zone where the data originates. While short TTLs can be used to minimize caching, and a zero TTL prohibits caching, the realities of Internet performance suggest that these times should be on the order of days for the typical host. If a change can be anticipated, the TTL can be reduced prior to
the change to minimize inconsistency during the change, and then increased back to its former value following the change.

and http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1912.txt:

1-5 days are typical values.
I think he's saying the cost/benefit of providing the level of support for a Python SDK isn't worth it. Perhaps, once they've gotten everything cleaned up, they'll support Python again.

I like this idea. The FB API is a mess that I've decided to stay away from. If they consolidate their resources, improve the API and provide good docs, I'd be willing to revisit.
2011: This Year In Microsoft
I'll second you on Microconf. Rob and Mike have announced they will be having a 2012 conference to. This conference focuses on individuals who want to create and run software companies without outside funding.
Either one will do. If you unlock, you can activate tethering without the carrier's permission. If you jailbreak, you can install a third-party tethering app like MyWi.
If you can create wormholes at will, you don't need bombs. Put one end of the wormhole in the target and the other in the center of the sun.
That's oddly creepy, I was reading this last week after Googling "REST".

Even though it's quite vague, even I learn one or two things, quite an interesting read! Something to share on Tweetbook I guess.
In your perception, what percentage of long-term profitability startups end up achieving it?
Users? yeah right. More like spammers and bots from the software I've seen on the blackhat forums.

Spammers have learnt their lesson and now know age is a factor in deciding if it's a spam account or not and are getting in early and big.
>Almost all of those things were actually decided by the officers commanding the tank / plane battalions

You'd be surprised:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Villers-Bocage#Mornin...
Guyenet is pushing the same idea that most of mainstream nutrition science pushes: playing with the composition of a diet may affect your willingness to stick with a diet.

This is pretty well known, and has a fairly simple mechanism. By imposing artificial restrictions on your diet (no carbs, no acidic foods, nothing brown to yellow in color), you reduce the amount of calories you can consume. I.e., where you previously saw "ooh, lemon cake, let me eat", you now say "no yellow food". Caloric consumption goes down, and so does bodyfat.

This is why basically all weirdo diets work in the short term.

The fact is that Taubes theories about insulin have been shown to be false. His theories that obese people retain more fat has also been shown to be false. His theories that obese people have a lower metabolic rate have also been shown to be false. He continues to push them in spite of this. That's the definition of charlatan.

Another experiment: go read this article of his. http://garytaubes.com/2010/12/inanity-of-overeating/

Then based on his presentation, state what you think his hypothetical fat person and thin person are eating. Most people come away with a completely wrong idea.
I want to speak to an agent
Hmm... there have been a few, and I'd have to look through my "read books stack" to remind myself exactly which ones fell into 2011 and not prior years... but offhand, I'd mention:

Fiction:

Mona Lisa Overdrive - William Gibson

Zero History - William Gibson

11/22/63 - Stephen King

The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss

The Wise Man's Fear - Patrick Rothfuss

Non-fiction:

Ghost in the Wires - Kevin Mitnick

The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene

The Trouble With Physics - Lee Smolin

Not Even Wrong - Peter Woit

The Lean Startup - Eric Ries

Blue Ocean Strategy - W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne

Built To Last - Jim Collins

Business Model Generation - Alexander Osterwalder

Started, but unfinished, may yet make the list:

Simulacra and Simulation - Jean Baudrillard

Reamde - Neal Stephenson

The Fabric of the Cosmos - Brian Greene
The point was never that the ships themselves can be bright, it was that the radiation is easily visible.

The article was also operating within the realm of theoretically available technology. There are very few propulsion systems that don't emit hot matter out the back (like solar sails) and the article addressed them suitably.
Out of interest, what formal methods were used then? I remember there being some CPU designs in the 80's (e.g. VIPER) that had been formally verified but that all seemed to die out in the 90s.
Just a few notes to keep in mind...

1. You should use the nginx PPA instead of the default Ubuntu one.

2. uWSGI is an excellent alternative to Gunicorn, and can be run as a system startup service using supervisord.

3. As you get further along in your django project development, you may find you will need to apply patches to django core. In this case it helps to install from the git repo instead of pip, then checkout to the latest stable tag.

4. Instead of running `sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart`, the idiomatic Ubuntu way is `sudo service nginx restart`.
Yeah this is bad advice. In the real world, it often takes a couple days to fully propagate as many ISPs take awhile to update their cache-- consider edge cases like rural satellite internet. Even with a brand new domain, here's a common problem: some clients will have clicked on the domain url in their email before the DNS is setup, and have a local cache of the wrong DNS.
All of those things have mathematically optimal solutions given known information. It should be trivial to solve the system.
Big companies like to hire big names. "nobody got fired for hiring IBM". In this case, find the problem to solve for everyone first. Many small suppliers of these places got their start on the inside. You do have to know exactly how you can help for someone at a risk averse place to go out on a limb. Being smart isn't enough.
JSConf's Inverted Call for Speakers
"Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell.

Completely changed the way I think about success and my future.
How did this make it to the top of the page?
Good for networking, but also forces you to stay off the smartphone and focus.
Guess I'll state the question: How many of them actively use it? Yes, yes, before anyone jumps in with the "but you have to follow interesting people", I know that side of Google+.

My question is more targetted at all those people that (had to) make an account for w/e reason, but just don't open it anymore. I can only assume they are included too, are there estimates to their numbers?

Edit: I do use Google+, I just notice a lot of (seemingly?) 'dead' accounts.
hahah. i buy my own stuff at work if its scarce. most notably kleenex; being sick is miserable, who wants to use cheap-ass sandpaper on their nose when they already feel like shit? thank you, i'll spend $4 for super-extra-soft tissues.
Well, in Greece a senior developer is a 28+-yo bald feller that f's his m0m and is also an ugly code/idea stealer/plagiarizer from Day 1.

I'm 35 and still not considered a senior developer (although I mentor two junior guys). This is due to the fact that I get things done, something very bad in the corrupt Greek state.

Cheers,
http://www.nkavvadias.com/hercules/
Exactly. It's a hobby, but while scaling it up is hard to do, it is not impossible. Two stories.

I wrote a program awhile back that would look for iPod Touches on my local Craigslist and would analyze the price for many different versions. If an individual iPod was available and was below mean price within a given time frame, I'd send the seller a note almost immediately. Then, if I purchased the item, I'd relist it at the mean price. Completely an arb play.

What I learned was that 1) iPods are easy to sell, 2) People who buy on craigslist are flaky and tend not to show up, 3) The time spent waiting around to meet people was obnoxious, and 4) Sometimes sellers see what you did with their item and send you angry emails.

I never made more than a few hundred bucks, but it was an interesting experiment nonetheless.

Second story: For years, my wife sold used books. She'd go to estate auctions and buy boxes and boxes of books. She'd go to library sales and buy hundreds of books. Then she'd sell them on the Amazon marketplace. She would walk into these places with a barcode scanner and would check their price and sales rankings on Amazon. If it was in a decent margin for her, she'd buy the item. This actually did scale, but she quit when it became less of a hobby side income and more like real work. She's a nurse by trade, and the book selling was never meant to be anything more than a hobby.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that arbitrage of used goods can be a business, but it depends heavily on the availability of the supply of used goods. Books worked for my wife because she could buy dozens of them at a time and ship dozens of them them all from the post office down the street as orders came in. For me, I was running around town picking up items and dropping them off.
Hacker News Browser/OS/Region Analytics Data
Hi Y Combinator,
Could publish visitor analytics in aggregate for hackernews?

I'd love to see browser/version, operating system and geography by year and total to date.

This would be useful for those building software that targets this community.

Thank you for considering,

-Boaz
Vote to Open Source This - WYSIWYG Website Builder utilizing ContentEditable
http://shouldweopensourceit.com/

I want to play with the source code, so everyone vote to open source this! Thanks.
I'm sorry, but the search address is my home address, and I'm not going to give that out to you.
doh, saw the "Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times" at the bottom and thought it was the end or the article, didn't see the "Page 2".
Users are one thing, active users are another. How many posts are being made? Are they just signing up for these accounts and never coming back? There's a reason Facebook and Twitter quote active users when announcing how many people are actually using their products.
Topological proof that there are infinitely many primes
HzO consumer electronics water protection receives funding from Li Ka-Shing
Somewhat glib question, but, if your wife didn't already know about REST, how did she fare with the dissertation? Is that what she really wanted? Was her response "Thanks for not treating me like a child?" or more "I don't really have time to read a doctoral dissertation. Can't you just give me the executive summary?"

I mean, my wife is smarter than me and has a doctorate and a lot of letters after her name, but she's never cared to learn too much about how the drivetrain in a car works. If she asked a simple question like "How does a car's transmission work?", I highly doubt she'd be happy if I just linked her some pdf's covering the physics and mechanical engineering of CVT's and said, "you're welcome!"
Specialforces.com Site Hacked
+100, i sprinkle shitty sunglasses and $5 phone chargers across all factors of my life ;)
I really don't want one company to control all of my services. I like that Google may have my email, MS/Google my search, and Facebook my social -- and that all three will have to learn to play together.
> And you're saying "shame on her for refusing a search"?

No, I'm not. I'm saying that if you think that reciting the 4th amendment when going through TSA is relevant, that relevance would lead a reasonable person to believe that she was resisting the search.

I mention relevance because commenters are suggesting that reciting the 4th amendment is meaningful in a way that reciting jabberwocky would not have been.
You should definitely play EVE Online. This is totally the kind of stuff that goes on in the major corporations that players set up.
Insanely large specific numbers
I hate to say this, but you likely paid a higher origination fee than $600. It just wasn't due at close - instead it was baked into your mortgage payment every month in the form of a slightly higher interest rate. At the end of the day, brokers and bank branches want to earn a few thousand for "originating a mortgage." This is fancy way of saying retailing a mortgage. Although they often take less - maybe $900 - for a refinance. You can find out how much you were charged by looking through your mortgage paperwork. The bulk of the mortgage broker or bank branch retail mark up comes from something that is usually labeled "origination fee."

That said, thanks to recent reforms, an individual brokerage can no longer charge two borrowers will different commissions for the same mortgage. However, two different brokers can each charge very different fees. Quicken Loans, one of the largest mortgage originators out there, is notorious for charging much higher commissions than nearly anyone else. And thanks to the difficulty of comparison shopping, they're still successful in obtaining premium prices... even in the age of Zillow and Google.
If you're interested in "realistic" (meaning: no FTL) space battles read Alastair Reynolds' Redemption Ark (and read Revelation Space and Chasm City before that).

It includes a chase between star systems that goes on for years and "close" (ie within a few light-seconds) combat that involves a lot of interpolation of enemy position, movement and actions.

Personally I still have serious doubts about the viability of any kind of prolonged manned presence in space. Its simply too expensive and the distances involved in interstellar travel are so vast that even perfect mass to energy transformation would make the process prohibitive in terms of cost and time.

But it's fun to muse about.
a slave would be nice. but pending that, yes, i have multiple tubes of toothpaste in several bathrooms across multiple locations -- nothing worse than not having toothpaste when you need it :(
4 Months with Rails - Launching My First App
http://www.uhpartments.com

I bought my first programming book from Amazon on August 17th (Chris Pine's Learn to Program) and have been teaching myself RoR since. I work days at a NYC startup in marketing and operations, so I learned in addition to working about 50 hours a week.

I attended a hackathon, spent hours on Stack Overflow and watching Railscasts, and just got my hands dirty and built something.

I obviously have a long way to go to be a proficient rails developer, but I'm absolutely loving programming, even if just as a hobby.

Would love some feedback! I had previously built http://www.badnycapartments.com as a Drupal site with the same sort of goal, but a year later I'm taking everything I've learned (not just tech but biz too) and re-launching as uhpartments.
How to find free images for your blog, website, or ppt without stealing them
Number of the Week: Billions in Gift Cards Go Unspent
He said they only worked for about 3 hours.

Even if you take out $75 for the GF subsidy (being generous and assuming she gets an equal share), each guy made $25/hour, cash (i.e. ~$30-$35/hour pre-tax), which is >3x what they'd get at a fast-food joint.

Now of course, one does need to take into account the fact that they're restricted in spending their loot on beer, which they are obligated to share. From a short-term economic standpoint this is probably a significant hit on their profits (i.e. unlikely that the three gentlemen will consume the majority of the beer). However, from a longer-term/more holistic view, purchasing beer for the group will surely lead to fun, team building, general goodwill, and so on, which is arguably more valuable than the $300 cash at this point in the startup's lifecycle.

tl;dr startups should use aeron-chair arbitrage to fund investment in beer, it's science.
Good to hear. What's the back story here?
I haven't heard that before. Wouldn't a real user be just as likely to join late (when a service has gone mainstream, bigged up by Oprah etc) as a spam account?
I actually considered objecting to one of the class action lawsuits where I was a member of the class due to this. I actually wound up being a part of the class action lawsuits against Microsoft not once, but twice. While in the Iowa case, they actually got a half-decent settlement, the Arizona case was a joke.

The settlement size was pitiful and they chose to "donate" any unclaimed funds to the schools, but they could only be used to buy Microsoft products. Technically, they could be used for whole computers (but not peripherals), but I know enough about their OEM agreements to know that they get paid per computer shipped, no matter what OS is on it, so they were just funneling any unclaimed money back to themselves and forcing the schools to deal with red tape in the process.

I wanted to object, but the lawyers I talked to said it was a waste of time and going at it pro se doubly so. With the Comes documents not yet online, the only thing I could have proven legally was that I was a member of the class. In the end, they just approved the settlement. I think I got a voucher or something as compensation for that one.
Where is anyone talking about conflicts light-years away? I think we may be discussing different things. The article itself concentrates on intra-system conflicts, primarily because it is trying to deal with realistic space combat using current technology. FTL drives are not part of that paradigm.

Yes, obviously if something is light-years away you would need to develop general purpose AI to make those decisions or send a command ship with a human crew to the location, but the post you are replying to was discussing 10s to 20s delays associated with local space combat.
Apple fined $1.2 million for misleading Italian consumers
Bringing Firefox Alive with Popcorn.js
>For every productive member of society using drugs there must be at least 2 -3 that drain from society

On what grounds do you make this claim?

Perhaps for every user that makes it to your hospital there are 2-3 that don't and are relatively adjusted. Drugs certainly have their hazards but it's fallacious to extrapolate the big picture from the perspective you are presenting.
Except that new customers could use that $10 on the controller that pre-order customers had already purchased, while pre-order customers would have to buy something else (your next order) in order to use the $10 coupon.
Why would that ever be a goal?
That article is horribly outdated. Hover does not store passwords in plaintext.
I agree... I see more dead accounts than live ones now. I don't think this service is in the success category at all at the moment.

I still use it fairly actively, though.
Waiting for WP8 - Windows 8 has WinJS, whereas WP7 is still Silverlight based. Hopefully they'll release something similar for Windows phone in future. If not, I won't bother.
Yep, TXL (http://www.txl.ca).

Cheers, www.nkavvadias.com/hercules/
> Do their unlocked phones really work on non-approved carriers?

yes, obviously. 'unlocked' = 'works on any carrier with which the technology (ie GSM/UMTS, works on the right bands) is compatible'. note that since tmobile almost exclusively uses an unsupported-by-Apple band for 3G (1700MHz), you're getting EDGE at best.
Throughout his administration, the President has left almost all intellectual property issues up to Vice President Joe Biden

Classic. Leave IP issues to the plagiarist.
My own experience supports this. A lot of my friends have Google+ accounts but barely use them. However, once a critical mass of this sort of users exists, they should quickly "flash" to active users, as people realize that the bulk of their friends actually are on Google+.
New Company? How not to handle PR
Subtraction.com: Subscribing to The New York Times
You do realize that by having your buyer PayPal you the money you basically lost $50 on PayPal deposit transactions. I would have had him send me a corrected cheque instead.
Good point -- VIPER isn't essential and one could argue that an assembler of any kind isn't guaranteed to give rise to totally engineering quality results (ADA and Eiffel were probably better for that at the time) but there were things like VDM, Z notation, ASM's, etc, BNF and Model Checking approaches.
Yes. For example, the Facebook numbers are always number of people who've logged in at least once in the last 28 or 30 days (or something) -- I'm sure the G+ people are computing this internally. The fact they don't report it implies it may be a bit low?
Have him try sublime text 2, it's not specialized for lisp, but there's probably plugins for lisp and it's easily extendable via python if he knows python, so it's fairly decent.

I guess it depends on how much he plans to use lisp though. If he plans on using it a lot then learning emacs would be a good investment for him.
I can't tell if this is a joke or not? Some frail guys can't hack lugging chairs around so it's not a viable business model for anyone? This is a very viable business that you guys feel too entitled for.

Open your eyes and guess what a pawn shop, antique store, used office furniture dealer, or IT equipment reseller do. It's not far off from this, but they aren't bitching about it and plugging a silly website.
No, I know all about origination fees. My interest rate was rock bottom, the absolute best available on a refinance of that type at the time. And based on what I've seen, comparison shopping is no longer difficult at all. If suckers are voluntarily paying higher prices then it isn't because of difficulty.
Good to see them making use of Tor hidden services.
The iPhone 4S Is Finally Cleared For Launch In Mainland China
I remember twitter used to have a retention rate of 30% in 2009 when it was starting to get popular, and it was probably less so before that https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+retention+rate+&... I used to see lots of twitter dead accounts at that time too.

If we apply this to google+, then it would be 18 million active users if the 60MM is to be believed. That being said, no numbers of active users have been announced so there is no way to know.
also, judging from most deals i made on ebay/craigslist, 101% of them required me to call/email the seller to make sure what they were selling.

specially for the lower-than-market value ads. and NOT excluding expensive ads such as cars.

that alone would be a complex problem alone.
GEB, Who Is Fourier?, The Little Schemer
It was moved to the "Web Developer" menu, not removed entirely.
It seems that this could only work on certain types of cases where the damage to the individuals is sufficient to make this worth the trouble. Many class actions are class actions precisely because the amount involved for each plaintiff is far to small to make suing worth the trouble, even.

In these cases, it is likely that many of thsoe wronged by the companies actions would be and perhaps are more concerned with seeing the defendant deterred from repeating their improper action then they are in individual compensation.

Still, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
For Hospitals, There's No App For Adopting Tablet Computers
In a way this already exists. For "most whites" (who happen to live in Europe and the USA) prices are quite higher compared to what they are for "most yellows" (who happen to live in continental Asia). One can spin this as being racist if one's so included, although a quite odd kind of racism when we take into account the usual usage of the word.
Very possible.

Taxes have to be collected and money laundering legislation must be enforceable -

not to mention all the "protective" internet legislation you guys seem to be getting recently...

...!