skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At the moment I'm still a little averse to the stock market

You're smart to have recognized that you need to diversify, but don't fear the stock market! How much of this applies to you depends on your age (I'm 22), but this is when most people should be setting aside a little money for higher-risk investments. Risk doesn't mean invest into a poorly-performing company and start praying, but try to find a couple profitable micro-caps or small-caps and stick $500-$1k or so into them. Personally, I look for foreign micro-caps that run great profit margins and make physical products that people need (primarily healthcare / transportation). Patented products are even better.

Not only that, but right now there are plenty of large-cap companies that have lost a lot of value not because they're bad companies or losing money, but because everyone is simply dumping stocks out of fear.

Either way, do your research on the balance sheets + income statements, take a good look at how they well they approach their core competencies/products and make an informed decision. Regardless, the job losses and increasing foreclosures have only begun to take effect, so don't be surprised when 2009 brings the market lower and opens up even more investment opportunity.
Clean energy technology? We're not there yet
Poll: Who would you like to raise money from for your Startup?
PG's comment on Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession? forms the basis for this interesting poll.

The quote: "The current generation of founders want to raise money from VCs, and Sequoia specifically, because Larry and Sergey took money from VCs, and Sequoia specifically."

I am of the opinion that Sequoia might not be the first choice anymore for post YC type funding (including TechStars, Seedfund, etc.). What do you think, please vote, and if you select Other, please explain. Thanks!
Angels, preferably ones that started a startup or were there during the early days: Marc Andreessen, and the likes -- many of them around
Founders Fund, Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital, Atomico, Ambient Sound Investments and the like
Sequoia's, KPCB, Khosla Ventures, Benchmark, Accel's, Menlo's, NVP, Matrix, etc
Other (please explain in comments)
Most of the papers one sees about serious, potentially lucrative applications of biologically inspired optimization metaheuristics (algorithms like the one in the OP) are engineering-oriented.

For example, NASA used evolutionary computation to design a little antenna thing, and it went into space, and it was human-competitive (as good or better than anything a human could design in a reasonable amount of time). http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/projects/esg/research/antenna.htm

Most of the applications, in other words, have little to do with the kind of highly data-driven web applications with rapidly changing requirements that seems to occupy a lot of the time of the users on this site. :( Still, excellent candidate for spare-time/weekend hacking.

Finally, one basic thing to observe about most of these heuristics is that they are embarrassingly parallel, which means they really could make good use of a 16-core machine.
http://fantasticcontraption.com/

fantastic contraption. It's a physics simulator/puzzle game. I'm not aware of how it would be scripted, or why you would want to script it. But, the open ended nature of the puzzles should appeal to hacker types.
You know, by that logic anybody developing an application for a single operating system is being a fool. And yet: most of the applications I use on OS X are developed exclusively for my operating system. See: anything Panic has ever made. See: Delicious Library. And they're obviously made by developers that love my system, and they're making their developers a ton of money, so why should they bother porting it over?

Considering Hacker News talks a lot about appealing to a niche rather than trying to appeal to everybody, I find this comment a little irritating.
OCaml: no library compatibility between compiler versions -- recompile everything when you upgrade compiler.
I've hit some snags playing certain media files with VLC in the past. I prefer Media Player Classic now. Not sure if the issues with VLC have been fixed, as I think it was .mkv support I had issues with, but I have no reason to switch from MPC.
"Right, which is completely preposterous and will never happen."

A lot of the curtailment of civil liberties in recent years would have been preposterous a decade or so before they occurred.

"You can't clobber free will with gadgets."

Tried to photocopy any money recently?

You still have free will, but your ability to act on it can be constrained as far as it relies on the use of technology.

I agree with the article in that such things will be cracked, at least initially. But these processes do get better iteratively.
Hi Bruce,

Please check out www.ES2F.org. The ESF is the kernel of a larger project.

If it's interesting to you, let's talk.

Best,
Kevin Johansen
NextDB: The Hosted AJAX Database
Who does it alienate? Certainly not the mainstream. I've linked his (poignant) guide to friends who aren't big programming types, and they all fell in love with it. Isn't that the more important audience as it is? The people who want to fall in love with programming but haven't yet?
There are downsides to the pro athletic lifestyle, full stop. Why do you think there are so many teenagers in Olympic gymnastics? This is what I mean when I say hypocrisy; no-one has any problem with a 14-year-old winning their country a medal, who even remembers them when they're 24? The puritanical attitude towards steroids is inconsistent.
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Well, it's not just that we wanted to avoid asking the same question twice in a 5 minute span... we do have users that spend literally HOURS just answering questions (instead of paying attention in class). So in order to maximally squander their education, we wanted them to receive new questions all the time.
I think it would be good for the government to take the initiative in improving connectivity across the country. At the moment, media companies seem more concerned with limiting the download capacities of users rather than improving the infrastructure.
It's most likely a bug. "Go outside" is intended to come up when you've answered all the quandaries that need answering that you haven't voted on yet.
Yea, I think most people are a little late to the game, we have been in a resesion for over a year and plenty of people noticed. What I found most intresting was:

"One of the largest changes in the GRE is the introduction of the Personal Potential Index, which ETS is adding to the GRE next year and that will allow students to have people who know them rank their creativity, communication skills, teamwork, resilience, organizational skills and ethics."

This does not seem like a good idea. It seems to test your ability to network and get people to lie vs any real skill set. Most companies and collages seem to have done away with personal references because of such issues and they want to add it to a standardized test?
good insight, but twitter has lots of noise (people doing things) vs the signal the blogger is referring to (people looking to solve a problem or people shopping for things)
Ask YC: Any startups here have luck outsourcing sales?
As a small startup, I think the CEO should definately be doing sales. But to supplement the CEO, has any startup on HN had success outsourcing their sales? Or hiring salespeople on a commission basis.
Our biggest demo is highschool girls wanting to know if they should stay with their boyfriends. If you're asking icantdeci.de (or an 8ball) it is probably immaterial if you ultimately act on the advice :)
Hopefully lessons about the first Great Depression, such as how the policies of the New Deal actually lengthened the depression, will be learned this time.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GreatDepression.html
Great Depression
Some people like it, some people say "WTF is this!?" and never look at Ruby again. I'd show WPG to friends but never to "serious" work colleagues.
Excuse me, but I am compelled to call your bullshit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Overuse

The only difference is, modafinil is classified as a drug and so the negative effects are termed "side effects" while caffeine is classified as food and so the same exact negative effects are termed "overuse". It's an emotional/connotative difference. The list itself is almost identical: nervousness, headaches, insomnia, dry mouth, rapid heartbeat etc. In fact, I don't see caffeine's potential dangers of mania, depression and psychosis on the modafinil list. How's that for conservative?
Guess not. Still can't login though. Site is up, but if you click sign in, it doesn't go anywhere.
Well, the payments seem to fail for every possible reason imaginable (and many of the error messages aren't very descriptive), so it feels like death by a thousand cuts. The problem is that we're new to this game, and reliable information seems surprisingly difficult to find. Maybe it's perfectly normal to see 9 out of 10 people entering bad information or carders trying out numbers, but that seems high to me, and tech support has been useless.

We'll look into what AVS options we have available, and I'm also reading through the Protx link you posted.
"Mr. Bush and other Republicans have resisted such an approach in part out of concern for the already soaring federal budget deficit, which could easily hit $1 trillion this year. Borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars today to try to fix the economy, they argue, will leave a huge bill for the next generation."

Anyone besides me find that paragraph a little ironic?
Here's what change is about: Knowing that infrastructure includes not just roads and bridges, and mass transit, but laying fiber too.
This is a bit lengthy to debug via HN comments, but feel free to chat me on IRC (freenode), where I hang out as (predictably) swombat for a chat about this, I might be able to help in figuring out what's going on since I've implemented 2 such systems already...
Hmm. That's a shame. It's well-written, easy to follow, and teaches well. I'll never understand the programming mentality that says hard is better just because it excludes people.
Sometimes getting Government involved in areas makes thing worse.
Tankschiff
But, with some pre-processing before the genetic action starts, it might make for an interesting effect for Hollywood, or to show off to your friends.
Wait, then how do you do integer division in Python 3?
Isn't the C extension issue the same for other languages, eg Python or PHP? (I really don't know, I'm not that familiar with Ruby internals)

I think this issue, like Capistrano's, would benefit from having more Ruby coders, which in itself might require a more newbie-friendly approach from the community.

(BTW I hope it doesn't seem like I'm criticizing Jamis' choice - actually I think he's doing the right thing in the current situation, just that if there were more Ruby coders around he might not be forced into choosing this path)
That's really stupid. This sounds like an advert for 'positive segregation' or some other silly concept. Making software for specific ethnic groups will lead to increased segregation between the ethnic groups and is a terrible thing socially.
While I'm all for improving the state of broadband and internet access in general, I think 15th out of 190-odd countries is decent. It's certainly in the top 10%. In fact, according to international studies, it's better than we do in education.

I think the internet is wonderful, but the US will lag in broadband over densely populated, urban nations. The US has a huge rural population and I really do hope that wireless broadband improves our ability to serve them, but sometimes there are limitations.

Plus, I don't actually think the statistics show the US as having a bad adoption rate. (http://www.internetworldstats.com/dsl.htm) That's what I found quickly searching. The US comes out on top of Germany and Japan (both countries that are very urban and densely populated). I think one of the keys is also that we are decently close to the leadership. It's not like the leaders (1-12) have 70% adoption and then there's a steep drop off to us at 20% adoption.

I'd bet that this is more of a state by state issue. Densely populated states like NJ, RI, and MA probably have broadband adoption rates that would be much better than the country as a whole - and seeing as though many of the countries doing better than the US are the geographic size of (or have a populated center the geographic size of) one of our smaller states, that might make for a better comparison. Out of the 18 countries beating the US, only Canada, the UK and France are of any size. Comparing the US to a country like Denmark isn't really fair. We're talking about comparing 31 people per km^2 to 127 people per km^2. And the countries that have lower population densities often have the majority of their population in a few urban centers.

Lastly, there's a methodology problem. We're comparing broadband connections to the number of people. That doesn't tell us what percentage of people have broadband. I live with several other people and we have one broadband connection for the house. We all have access, but it will look like we have a 25% adoption rate. As European families usually have fewer children, that might create a bias in tabulating. With a US family averaging over 25% more children than a Swedish family, there might be an uncorrected bias that skews results against the US. Of course, if the US has more split families, that could skew in the US' favor.

I just think this is one of those cases where a politician is grandstanding without facts being behind them. OMG IT'S UNACCEPTABLE!!! No, it's pretty acceptable. Yeah, we should improve, but you can't expect the US as a whole to be able to match a country with a much denser population and a much smaller geographic area to cover. We're doing really well that we're so close.

Stop making everything unacceptable! It just means that people don't listen to you because you've shown an ineptitude at interpreting data.
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True, that is what really annoys me about 1984.

But independent of the message, I have always found the image of the scene following Harrison's entrance to be rather awesome.
Don't super computers have shared direct memory access of all the memory for all CPUs?

Perhaps it is time for home desktops to adopt the super computer architecture!
I have met companies that did outsource sales, and the results were disastrous. Rather than looking at sales, you should be looking at Customer Development: http://venturehacks.com/articles/customer-development
Times Co. to borrow against building
And sometimes it makes it better.
Well, judging by the lack of replies this seems like a sensitive issue with the nerds (geeks?).
>I think that if you made something that made Mac OS X look like one or the other, very few people would bite.

Only the absolute minority of people make their Windows or Linux machines to look like Mac OS X either - you're looking at a minority of enthusiasts using the fringes of operating system functionality and you're pointing to that as definitive proof that something is better. To me, that's outright flawed, especially when there are core software limitations that prevent you from imitating the Windows or GNOME UIs in Mac OS X.

You can have a top-menu and a dock in Linux - there's pre-built tools that let you do that (e.g. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/global_menu, activate the MacStyle menu setting in KDE, combine them with a dock app like Avant Window Navigator). Only an small minority of people use them and it's not very well supported because of it, but it's certainly possible. The Linux desktop is incredibly configurable.

Note that I haven't actually stated my personal opinion on the matter at all so far. I think you're suffering from a case of self-confirmation bias.
Carr diagnoses the economy: How irrational are we?
It's bad to back up your opinions with facts because reality has a well known liberal bias... or errr... our facts are some times wrong... or I'm sick of being proven wrong, my opinion is just as good as anyone else's, stop using facts against me!
you missed a new cool one: http://qifang.cn China education loans. They just were recognized as a World Economic Forum 2009 Technology Pioneer.

Its not my company, but I keep a close eye on them and they have good things happening.

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/dec2008/gb2008...
Related techniques could be utilized for creating non-photorealistic/stylized renderings of an existing/reference image. There has been some work on this.
Searching for real estate gets a facelift
Fans bid Farewell to Polaroid Film
It depends on what you're selling and how you're selling it.

A lot of the startups on HN are web-based companies, and if your pitch is tight and concise, you can outsoruce some of the early (tele)sales pretty effectively. There are lots of companies that specialize in outbound/telesales. If you can bring them good qualified leads (like through a web signup form, or other self-selected method) then sales outsourcing in that scenario can be very effective.

If your sales cycle is long, complex, or otherwise requires more face-to-face time, then outsourced sales are unlikely to be very cost effective for you.

Early sales people can be found on a commission basis, but you need to really know your target price and market pretty well. Base vs. commissions, recoverable draws, over-plan accelerators and such all need to be thought through somewhat carefully to make sure you don't end up in a regrettable situation.

Without more info on your company, product, market, etc. it's hard to give more finite advice.
The US is not a small country. The economics of broadband penetration are different.

It is not the job of the federal government to pick a winner in methods of distributing TCP/IP packets.
Caffeine has caused much worse, including death:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Overuse
Genetic Algorithm building a little car
When I was first beginning to work on the startup project I'm now working on, I considered some similar ideas about interactive advertising, although more focused specifically on how the technology I'm working with could be applicable.

While interactive advertising does exist, there is really no market for it. Advertising is basically synonymous with Adsense and Adwords, with some brand advertising in the case of large, brand-based businesses.
Confusion is the result of giving two different things (being playful and being hurtful) the same name (teasing).
RightScale gets $13M funding for cloud management
Actually, I take that back. Casual gaming is an existing market that in some cases is basically interactive advertising. But that market has considerably different rules and expectations than, say, search-based advertising.
a frame by frame video of that would be awesome (and I assume incredibly long - 904314 frames to be exact?) Assuming that it takes 24 frames for one second of film I guess it would be (904314/24)/60 = 627 hours of film so maybe it ought to be a little bit time lapsed.. Seriously though I could imagine such cool film/game effects.
The High Cost of Washington's Price Manipulation Policy
I spent ten years running various types of sales organizations and have never had a positive experience in outsourcing sales. I have hired outside consultants with experience selling in certain areas to make warm introductions to companies in their rolodex. But, in these cases, me or my team always handled the sales process. The consultant simply received a spiff if one of their warm leads turned into a sale. Sales is just too core of a function to be trusted to outsiders. Also, early on, the sales process is your best source of constructive feedback on the product, pricing, etc. You need to hear that directly- an outsider won't be able to communicate that effectively.
Interview with Malcom Gladwell
There's significant gray area there, and plenty of room for confusion.
At the moment, I don't want to raise money from anybody.

This isn't to say that I couldn't find useful ways to spend money; but the downsides of raising money -- the paperwork involved, along with needing to explain myself to whoever provided the funding -- far outweigh any benefits to having spare capital.
I think the bigger issue is the lack of choice/competition.
Government in general is really inefficient. Way less efficient than, say, Comcast, Microsoft, or Fedex. So unless there is some good reason it must be Government solving a problem, why not have someone (anyone) else do it?

Having Government do our broadband is very dangerous. Besides "fiber optic cables to nowhere", and outages and delays in major cities, there is the possibility of "packet shaping", blocking access to certain websites (e.g. The Pirate Bay), listening to our conversations (in case we're terrorists), requiring the installation of DRM software to go with internet access, and not allowing the use of cryptographic protocols granting anonymity or privacy. Why should we trust the Government to do those things less than companies that at least need paying customers and have less power?
I'm writing an agile project tracking tool, AgileWizard (www.AgileWizard.com)

E-Mail me if you'd like to hear about some of my competitors. Not sure which one you're talking about.
Are we talking flash games (i.e. Auditorium http://playauditorium.com/) or "text-based" browser games (i.e. Kingdom of Loathing http://www.kingdomofloathing.com/)?
that's a good soundbite, but it's nonsense.

AI hasn't lived up to the promises made a few decades ago.

* 1958, H. A. Simon and Allen Newell: "within ten years a digital computer will be the world's chess champion" and "within ten years a digital computer will discover and prove an important new mathematical theorem."[53]

* 1965, H. A. Simon: "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do."[54]

* 1967, Marvin Minsky: "Within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved."[55]

* 1970, Marvin Minsky (in Life Magazine): "In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being."[56]
Interesting article. I particularly liked this comment towards the end:

We must remember, though, that teasing, like so many things, gets better with age. Starting at around 11 or 12, children become much more sophisticated in their ability to hold contradictory propositions about the world — they move from Manichaean either-or, black-or-white reasoning to a more ironic, complex understanding. As a result, as any chagrined parent will tell you, they add irony and sarcasm to their social repertory. And it is at this age that you begin to see a precipitous drop in the reported incidences of bullying. As children learn the subtleties of teasing, their teasing is less often experienced as damaging.
That's an off-label usage. Not saying that it's illegal or bad in any sense, just that the drug wasn't approved for such usage.

Also, I was on medication for about 2 months. Then I threw away the prescription -- it left me soulless. How is it treating you?
Flash cards don't have thousands of years of history behind them.
Cybersecurity report offers Obama some far-reaching recommendations
Can't really call them victims if they go into it with knowledge of the drug and it's effects.

Now if deregulation also resulted in drug companies actively concealing negative side effects, and thus duping consumers, then they would have been victimized.
I will be so happy when these shits finally go out of business.
Cool-looking, but I'm not quite sure what's going on. Explanations?
The adoption rate may be okay but even in large cities what we call "broadband" is no comparison to what they have in, say, Korea. Our tubes just aren't as big.

And no, it's not that they're compensating for something, get your mind out of the gutter.