skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a complex problem to be sure, and not entirely mismanagement. In some cases it is, like the links I posted. E.g:

-Where one successful project is put on hold so the scientist can prove to management the dud is really a dud.

-Or another where his project was simultaneously outsourced to India, which failed. But it made management look bad, so they wrote it off his department's expenses. When their formulation worked, it was rejected because it was over-budget per/pill (but only because the India outsourcing was added to their tab), otherwise they would have been fine.

Other times it's just the pharma ecosystem - I wrote about this a few weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3376428

I think the big problem with exploiting existing revenue streams is that A) most of the blockbusters developed last decade are going off patent very soon, with nothing to replace them and B) you can only develop so many "reformulations" before people realize what is going on.

Pharma is going to hit a point in the very near future where their revenue drops by multiple-billions. They are scared silly over this (rightfully so). I see two options:

1) Actually start doing science again, instead of firing scientists and reformulating the same pills over and over. This isn't going to happen and the time to do it was ten years ago. They are way behind the curve now.

2) Embrace the fact they are glorified marketing firms, fire all their scientists and use their accumulated wealth to purchase drugs from small companies, then push them through clinical trials. They also need to stop thinking about blockbuster hits - those days are over. This is basically what you are suggesting.

Realistically, Pharma is moving towards option 2. But they are moving towards it so slowly that they are cannibalizing themselves along the way. It is never pleasant to realize your model is obsolete, but the days of Big Pharma and billion dollar blockbusters is (probably) over.
Generally it seems the consensus is:

- make it obvious you are posting your own material (using phrases like "Show HN" or "I" in the title) and not try to hide that fact

- provide insight into "how" you've done it or how you are doing.

- don't do it more than once.

Follow those and HN will not downvote you to oblivion.
Good stuff, but I'm a bit confused by what SnapHop is. From the landing page it sounds like you are an agency, but you talk about a platform. What exactly (i.e. not marketing speak) does the platform let me do? Where can I see it in action?
Considering Eclipse is "the most popular" editor around, I don't think the barrier to entry is very high. I used it for over a year before giving up on it as useless. For me, having reliable builds is FAR more important than the editor holding my hand with respect to Java syntax. I swear Eclipse is primarily popular EXACTLY because of the latter, since it can act as a crutch for new and junior developers.

I did use Emacs for several years before moving on to something more ergonomic. I still have muscle memory for several of the more common keystrokes.

I haven't really felt like there's been a Truly Great editor available since Brief, which I stopped using because they never upgraded it from DOS to Windows.

It's not about "getting my head" around something. To the contrary, I am very good at picking up new software and using it, whether it's designed well or not.

It's about having seen what a REALLY powerful editor can do for you, and having other editors never really live up to that standard. SlickEdit is close, and even better in some ways than Brief was, but it's not perfect.

So did you actually understand what I wrote? "Stockholm Syndrome" applies when you've been abducted, and you fall in love with (and defend the actions of) your abductor. I'd say you're not disabusing me of my original notion.
Where do i sign up?
Backbone.js: Sessions and Authentication
Too bad we can't exchange that for a system where social networks let you own the data and charge a monthly subscription fee.
Chrome/Webkit will start to support the OpenType features version 18 from what I have seen - no idea about Safari yet. The current Canary build has support built into it but at this time it is only for Windows and not on the Mac. Not sure about the issues around the Mac and why they might not support it out of the gate but I assume they are working on it.

They will use the -webkit- prefix for the font-feature-settings. So like most new things we will have -webkit -ms and -moz until it settles down.
Were it not for OWS, we would never be hearing that (and certainly not from Newt).

Yes, Newt would certainly never advocate for statism over capitalism were it not for OWS.

Not only that, but OWS also caused Newt to advocate in favor of Obama/Romneycare (the individual mandate in particular), lobby on behalf of Fannie Mae, and support redistribution of wealth from the young to the old.

Oh, my mistake - Gingrich did all that other stuff years before OWS.

Gingrich was never a capitalist. He's just a christian nationalist who wants a big government (albeit a big government organized slightly differently). His current position is unsurprising, particularly since it helps him score political points against Romney.
The Amazing Pattern Of How Skyscrapers Predict Recession
HN has grown a good deal in the past year or so. It has quite a big "slashdot effect" now :)
English is not my first language, but dictionary tells me that I used the term "demand" correctly:

5. (Law)
(a) The asking or seeking for what is due or claimed as due.
...
[1913 Webster]
A Revolution in Data Roaming
The SOPA supporters are just bigger

http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/19/sopa-lobbying/
You might also want to check out an article the BBC is running today which says that sky scrapers are linked with impending financial crashes. Specifically mentions China.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16494013

Apparently, whole cities are being built in anticipation of people wanting to live there (ie, filling demand which doesn't exist).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2010/11...
Best notebook
A compact laptop, with a solid chassis and a sharp, colorful screen General Packard Bell EasyNote NM85The Packard Bell EasyNote NM85 and EasyNote NM86 offer decent performance with a good battery life.
Magento - Ease of use, template system with large selection of free and paid templates and the ability to get started with a few simple clicks.

As a novice to ecommerce and hacking, a girl friend sucessfully configured and sold an ecommerce solution withing 2 weeks. As a graphic designer non-techie, she (Hey Asiyah) used hostgator's auto-configuration via cpanel to install Magento, add a blog and create a customised cart. Additionally, she configured the template, added PayPal and Google checkout, customised layouts and added basic graphics using HTML.

For a complete novice, she managed to sell the setup, configure and sell the site withing 1 month. Now thats impressive for a designer with no experiance and no technical skills.
I'm guessing AdBlock will take care of it. It already does for other Facebook ads.
thanks, I hadn't heard of any of those. I'll definately take a look at them, also thanks for the warning with Magento. Lemonstand looks good :)
Ask HN: Compatible with $big_vendor_product
Hi,

I am thinking about turning a customer product of mine to a saas business. The software configures other devices/programs and manages access to them.

My question:

Am I allowed to write something like '$my_product is able to configure $big_vendor_product' and put the logo of the big vendor next to it? Am I allowed to use other companies logos in my presentations? Or is it a grey area? What do you do?

Thanks for your help.
+1 - best fastest way to find freelance jobs?
edit - not sure why this was downvoted 4 times - but to elaborate on my question - what were the most rewarding gigs - in terms of ease of getting hired & finding them, most money, learning stuff that was relevant, expanding network, bbb
At woboq here we are both using IRC with an IRC channel for the two of us.
As IRC client we use Quassel which is an IRC client that keeps you connected on IRC and you can attach/detach from it. This means you never lose any message and can read the backlog.

We also use a private Wiki together if some information needs to be more persistant than a chat log.

This worked well for the periods when we are not in one office (the periods had a maximum length of 3 weeks so far).
It also helps to have this when working at the same place: You can keep distractions low by just writing what you want instead of always using real verbal communication.
I work for a company that has a revenue stream making apps like this for big brands. The apps themselves are free though and development costs are covered by our client's marketing budget. Most of them are basically the same though, take content from A and reformat it into B.
The Double (2011)
Signup an see! I'll upgrade your account also for free and give you SMS if you blog about us. Yes we need a better video somewhere.
We kind of went the enterprise route as our competitor did (http://44doors.com) where showing less unfortunately pays you more.
If the Google SERPs for your site are up to date, you've also spelled WordPress wrong in the meta description (should be uppercase P).

I know the WP guys are very passionate about their capital P:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/capital_P_dang...

:)
> "With digital, you can take 1,000 photos and chances are one will be fantastic. You can brute force brilliance."

This is simply untrue.

It's true that at one point simply getting everything into focus at the right moment took a skilled photographer. But that was never the sum total of what a skilled photographer brought to the table.

A sunset photo isn't good simply when it's the best of a million possible photos of a sunset. It can be good because the photographer found an interesting location to set the picture. It can be good because the photographer waited-for and/or was present for an opportune confluence of elements such as weather, tide, etc. It can be good when the position and angle of the camera framed the scene in an appealing way, including or excluding other elements to enhance the shape, color and symmetry of the composition. It can be good when the focus highlights an interesting subject, and de-emphasizes non-essential visual noise.

Taking a billion photos can guarantee that you get a solid reproduction of whatever you pointed your camera at. But it will never render irrelevant the skills of subject identification, color balance (artistic balance, not simply accurate reproduction), composition, framing, etc. And lastly, it's absolutely no substitute for inspiration, education and experience.
While an impressive engineering feat, this probably isn't equal to a similar sized hotel in the US.

Having lived in a new and quite upscale (rent was 8K RMB/mo, apartment sold for $500k USD) Chinese apartment in Beijing for a couple years and visited many others I can attest that the build quality is absolutely awful. The stuff they're building will not last. Buildings in China are built for instant gratification using the lowest skilled labour available with fit and finishings that only look good from a distance.

This is why PPP GDP adjustment is such BS. The argument goes that you have a skyscraper in Shanghai and one in New York you have a skyscraper's unit of wealth in both places, though the one in Shanghai costs half as much to build. Therefore you double the GDP gor China (figures for illustration) in order to account for this purchasing parity issue. Problem is, that the skyscraper in Shanghai will last a fraction of time that the one in New York does. China is the land of McMansion skyscrapers.
gozman, you are an inspiration.
Sonnet
7 Mistakes Web Designers Should Avoid For Improving Call-To-Action Pages
What follows is a just a completely hypothetical idea that shouldn't be taken seriously ;p

Let's say we went from "everything has copyright" to "you must register with the copyright office to get a copyright". Now it does have a lot of drawbacks but for most things like this post on HN I could care less that it's copied elsewhere yet currently there is a copyright on this post.

Now in a system like that what would prevent the copyright office to make publicly available a database of hashes for copyrighted content like videos,music,text that would allow people from Google and elsewhere to make a resonable assumption about licensing? This DB could contain a list of urls that are allowed to host the said content or offer more open terms.

In a way google already started such a DB for youtube but it's prone to abuse and contesting copyright on there isn't exactly simple to do.(as seen from the megaupload thing)
Yeah, it's a bit deceptive to say "15 days to build". The modules surely took less than time than building from scratch, but still a significant amount of time.
How to Play a YouTube Video in ASP.NET Web Application
In this instance, I would say the WordPress Foundation. westi (a core developer of WordPress) commented below that this represents the project, and WordPress and the WordPress Foundation are really one and the same.
That video is really well done. The product looks slick too. I do wonder how much demand there is to read individual blogs on an iOS device? Would an RSS reader meet the demand better?
Some open science advocates continue to publish in the top journals out of necessity but refuse to do free peer review for them.
there is seriously something to be said for the complete solution that other systems provide.

if only as stepping stones towards eventually using something like zmq.
End the Frustration. Erase Blackboard.
Networking by and large will be your best bet. An odesk may get you some short-term work, but it won't necessarily be all that high paying. With a decent rep on odesk or elance you might get some good gigs, but those will probably develop in to non-odesk relationships with clients ("going direct").

I don't know many people who use odesk who pay more then $20-$25/hour, and it's typically for smaller type stuff. There are people who get "I want a full copy of XYZ for $500" and a number of people who bid on that, but there's "real" projects in there too sometimes. I just have a hard time looking at elance/odesk sites as something that 'real' companies use for 'real' (read: valuable) projects.
the best way is to expand your network and go to networking events. go to mobile meetups, tech meetups, business meetups, etc. From there you will notice a lot more opportunities will arise. This is also assuming you are good at something. Wether it's development / design or making pancakes. You have to be good at something before someone else will bring you on as a consultant / freelance.
I'm curious what the motivation for the potential "hundreds of millions" of messaging queues is here. having a queue per-registered user seems, I don't know, maybe overkill? Per group chat makes a lot of sense, but I'm having trouble reconciling the numbers based on what was posted. What am I overlooking?
In my school we call them 'flash drives', which I like.
I like and admire Matt, but I disagree 100% with his assertion (and Google as a whole) that searching for something and seeing pictures of me and my friends in the result is "magic." It's banal, and worse it's useless. I already know about those pictures -- obviously, because Google knows about them only because I know about them.

When I search I'm looking for answers, or at least, I'm looking for information I don't have on hand.

Cluttering up the results with information I already have available to me, and worse, modifying them in subtle ways based on information I already have available to me, is not helpful. It's the opposite of helpful.

I really think Google is opening themselves up to a competitor who is nothing but simpler and easier to use, in much the way that AltaVista and others opened themselves up to Google taking over by getting too complicated and becoming less and less useful.

Time will tell if I'm right.
Ask HN: How to deal with narcolepsy
Has anybody here dealt with narcolepsy? Any advice?
Where is the social integration? Gotta have the usual tweet, like, reddit etc. to make this viral.
We're hard at work on a native Windows port. The software was released far before node.js had any Windows compatibility, and the priority has always been to make it better in an absolute sense, and then port it when possible.
A Modest Proposal: an essay about mathematical sense-making [pdf]
If you really can't figure out the difference between the two, I suggest you go have a long think about it.

Modern, western governments, for instance, generally do not do things like dissolve children in acid.

We get that you don't think there should be any government or whatever libertopian ideas you have, but let's try a bit harder.
Physically it should be possible; you have 32GB micro SD-cards, 32 of which take up about 5.3cm^3. That would be about the same as 1.5x5.0x0.7cm, which seems like something that would fit that knife.
Cameras are expensive.

Actually, even this is less true than it used to be—hence your comment, "With a cheap DSLR and a smartphone [. . .]" You can find stuff the pros were using a few years ago for a fraction of what they paid; a used Canon 5D full frame camera goes for under $1,000 these days (and it'll probably be less when the 5d Mark III hits), and older Rebels like the XTi can be had for ~300. I'm sure things are similar on the Nikon / Sony / etc. side, although I'm less familiar.

Cheap cameras are yielding all kinds of interesting social (cops being unhappy at having their once-deniable brutality filmed, "sexting") and economic (like your paparazzo) effects.
As quick as you're willing to pay for it because prefabricated stuff can be done in parallel.
Don't worry, I'm not rankled.

So you're saying there isn't private ownership of any objects but there is private ownership of money? That's not something I had realized about your scenario and if I've got it right I find it strange.

Or do people not get paid in private money and I don't understand your original point about pay whatsoever.

And yes that scenario I was making is deliberately about an exploitative capitalist.

Yes, profits lead to both good and bad.
Slutty Types (Encapsulation)
I don't disagree with your premise, but I do think there's a fair number of people who push wordpress as a CMS rather than a 'blog' as such. Given that, many WP sites are rather static anyway.

I agree on the 'auto update' aspect, but if you only update your CMS once every 2-4 months, it may not be that big a loss if there's no auto update right now.

I saw a demo of mulberry.toura.com and that was a question that came up - auto-updating. Apparently the iTunes store is a bit iffy about updating the apps if the functionality has changed too much, but if it's just content, it should be OK.
Sticking with an operating system is a matter of convenience. Changing to a new OS requires learning a different way of doing things, be it different keyboard shortcuts, different names and locations for everything, different behaviors, and most importantly, a different set of unfixed bugs that you must discover as landmines.

The same goes for using a new piece of software or a new programming language. It's not so much the different paradigm that's the problem (though that does contribute to the friction against change somewhat), but rather the myriad different ways in which it is broken, that you must discover via trial and error.

Black boxes are great so long as you can actually look inside them when they don't work as expected. But even then, one approaches new things with caution because one cannot look inside some code and instantly spot the flaws.

But hey, there's no such thing as flawless, so encapsulation or no, you'll deal with this stuff all the time as a developer. At best, you'd restrict yourself to using popular code (since there would have already been a lot of pressure brought to bear to fix the most egregious flaws), well-established code (since it would likely be more mature, and more help would be available), or code from a reputable source.
Trying to reach you via e-mail -- www.wpengine.com can help with your site. We specialize in high traffic!
Seriously? You can't think of the possibilities for a business to utilize this?

Think about a company you would "Like". Imagine they offer a new product or have a sale. This ad would appear, and their already-fans would flock to it.
Mobile Morning Coffee (01/11/12) - The Daily goes rogue
The whole article hinges on the lines of code metric being an accurate metric for how productive a team is. But how many programmers would be happy if their bosses paid them per line of code?

I would be inclined to agree with the premise of the article, but the evidence given is flawed at best.
Best language/runtime for desktop app
What would people say is the best runtime (i.e. JVM) and language (i.e. java/jython/scala/python/C++) for building a desktop application for scientific data manipulation and visualisation?
Ideally the end product should run on at least Windows and Mac (Linux is an added extra)

I'm currently considering the pros cons based on:
- Runtime performance
- Conciseness of code
- 3rd Party Libraries
(not neccessarily in the order)

Ideally something like what adobe was doing with flex would be ideal, as you could write a (client) app and deploy to:
- Web (via flash)
- Desktop (via Air)
- iOS/Android (again via Air runtime)

But since Flex may be unsupported now, I don't want to invest heavily in the technology.

All comments welcomed.

Thanks,
Vackar
Yeah, kind of like saying you have to count all the time spent on ruby, rails, and all the gems you're using when you do Rails Rumble.

Making construction modular and plug and play is a hugely important innovation.
It does support push notifications.
"Please explain the difference between this and any other government in the world."

You are joking, right?
What annoys me to no end is that the counter-argument to the "Google is smart enough to build it" canard is legal, not technological. Child porn is illegal in this country, full stop. If it exists, it's prosecutable. An MP3 of a Justin Bieber song isn't necessarily illegal, and determining whether a particular copy is legal requires information that is not readily available for financial security reasons. So nobody can build a detector, regardless of how smart they are.

Which is exactly the point of SOPA...since we can't stop the flow of copyrighted media on the internet, we can't have the internet.
Comcast’s AnyPlay essentially turns iPad into secondary cable box
I'm using RubyMine with the vim plugin for Ruby coding. That's just awesome: all that's good about an IDE with a lot of what's good about vim.
Very nice idea. Couldn't stop admiring it.
Congratulations!!!
And what about when your camera floats around automatically getting every available shot, every available composition, framing, leaving you to just select the best?

There are only so many parameters that make up a recording of light. Sorry, but I do not see a massive amount of skill involved in it now that you can brute force most of it, or have it automatically done for you.

We've also been fed so many fantastic photos online etc, that we rarely go "wow" any more. For all we know it could be a photo, a photoshop, a CGI. What was once amazing is now often the norm.

I really wouldn't like to be a professional photographer these days, as I just don't think you can make much money at it.
No out-of-the-box solution was used. The system remained a menagerie of different messaging techniques (database, udp, in-memory storage), and the company just spent time improving the reliability and performance of these existing systems individually.
our site is back up now. visit us at http://theappifier.com
A New 'Law' for the Mobile Computing Era
"Direct the plane to fly into the building or I'll cut your nails a little too close to the skin"
Why Generation Y savers are avoiding stocks