skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you really want to end up interviewing a co-founder? Like, they show up, you spend a few hours / days with them and then you know if you want to live and work and spend most of your time every day with them for the next few years?

Have you really tried to think though everyone you've known for longer?

Make sure you discuss with this person what happens when and if you start not getting along a couple months in. I've made analogies between co-founding and marriage before. I wouldn't get married with somebody after a good week. ;-)
My first thought is that encouraging people to make their own highly inexpensive plastic objects and to spread the ability to their neighbors could lead to a significant increase in disposable plastic usage. In general, plastic doesn't really go away. Anyone know if the plastic used here is recyclable, biodegradable or otherwise mitigates the long term (granted, I mean, really long term) concern of flooding landfills?
I've been following the slides up through the 4th class - they are excellent. Makes me wonder why I'd bother buying any books at all about this.
Here is the shuttle driver's (Prasher) original publication:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1347277
(which is the first GFP publication)

Here's a Science article 2 years later (with Prasher and one of the actual Nobel Prize winners - Chalfie):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8303295

And another in that same year with Prasher and a different prize winner (Tsien):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7809066

...crazy... why didn't Prasher get it too?
It goes like this:

Say Facebook charged US $1/month/user.

$1 is more for someone living in Argentina than in the US, and less for someone living in Europe. That seems bad -- you want to get people to pay what they're willing, and no less (price discrimination). Europeans would pay more, Argentines less, in USD.

Now, say you charge local prices. What's to stop someone from the US changing their network to Zimbabwe or whatever?

Once you start charging you start distorting how your users behave. Since Facebook rests on network effects any small change in user behavior has a huge impact across the network.

I think getting users to pay Facebook directly makes sense, but they have to be careful about it.
these guys are great! a very friendly mailing list too, and neat projects to say the least
Bug: It doesn't correctly handle sites on different ports than 80 (I'm guessing). http://packagedepends.homelinux.org:8080 returns a page for the University of Southhampton, not my (very) simple webapp.

Great app though.
That is true, though it's a shame that our brain chemistry, and all that mumbo jumbo, interferes with this.
I bet I heard he took out $40M in cash after selling some of his equity a year or so ago.
Facebook was hell-bent to become the new google and built an organization to match. In fact, the hype was promoting facebook as the successor in the ibm->microsoft->google line. Thing is, google did not begin to be 'the new' anything. And with the downturn setting in, Facebook may have to get its focus back or we may be talking about it as 'remember that website that had tons of users and no revenue' in a few years.
Yes, employees could be a subset of shareholders, but again I specifically believe this letter was sent to non-employee shareholders. Here are quotes illustrating why:

>> Dear Autodesk Shareholder,

>> This is the time to neglect your job.

>> This is the time to take that leave of absence from the foundry and work for Autodesk.

>> If you have skills as a programmer, use them...machines... will be provided.

>> If you have management skills, offer to take over AutoCAD project management tasks...

>> If your skills are in general management, finish our business plan...

>> Move to Mill Valley for a month (all expenses paid). Spend a week in the center of the cyclone at 150 Shoreline.

>> The full time people in this company are working at or beyond capacity. We need help, your help, or we will fail.

This is not a letter to the employees like the submission title misrepresents, and other posters seem to believe... This is clearly something way cooler. This is something that's been talked about in reference to choosing your investors wisely, but this is the first application of those intangibles that I ever remember reading about--a letter calling on your (non-employee) shareholders to use their skills and connections to fill in the missing pieces and grow the company, with the other alternative being insolvency.

Assuming autodesk favored investors with technological understanding and expertise, this demonstrates that having investors who can help you in ways other than with money is very important.
Building a Company from the Ground Up (Video) - Seth Berger, Founder, AND 1
Typically, there are free tools, and premium tools available to those who pay. They could work on some new features, and only release them to premium users. Ideally, the features are only interesting to those that care a lot about their profile. Analytics are a good option.

They should become a media company though.
Facebook should compete with TicketMaster. Allow Admins to sell tickets to Events and charge a service fee.
I thought the documents described in point 2, while common, never have any legal force.
How Porsche fleeced hedge funds and roiled the world’s financial markets
I use BerkleyDB. Performance is really good. But note that it is Key-Val oriented.
You can spend all the effort you want on a crappy idea, but it will still fail miserably. Luckily, many people adapt accordingly.
That sounds a lot like classic "Chinese marketing" that a lot of companies first tried when China opened up for foreign business. There are a billion people in China, so all we have to do is sign up 1% of them as paying customers and we'll be rich! Anyone can get 1% market share, right?

Of course it turns out that didn't actually work for most of the companies who tried. There has to be some kind of specific value proposition or you won't get even 1% of any market.
Maybe you were rejected precisely because YC wouldn't help you. I mean, if you don't need YC's money or YC's network, then what good is YC for you? They're not a long-term investor that will carry you for years. They're a short-term, get you off and moving investor. It's a great thing (wouldn't be on here if I thought otherwise), but if you've been able to get 6 customers on board without YC, what would YC give you?

I'm not trying to play down the importance of YC, it's just that its importance is specific - startups where the founders need a little capital to get their idea off the ground and not starve as they're not in a traditional job.
Lots of Facebook's man power is in customer support (which also involves community moderation). When you have more than a hundred million users worldwide, there's a lot of work to go around in that area. And I guess they're not outsourcing much of it.
If they charged people for any custom applications they wanted to put on their profiles, and then gave some of that money to the app developers, I could see both a dramatic decrease in crud, and a dramatic increase in the quality of apps in use (cause, y'know, they're paying for 'em.)
Someone please tell me what is Facebook's USP?
FTA: "No, they don’t even try to mask their collective stupidity."

This kind of behavior, being conscious of and proud of one's own mediocrity, is something that has baffled me time and time again. Can someone please explain the thought process that leads to this? "People usually expect a certain level of decency and self-respect and I'm a unique, cool rebel so I'll do the opposite"?
The Call of Cthubuntu
I wonder who has more customer support problems/issues to deal with: Craigslist vs Wikipedia vs Facebook?
I have no illusions about knowing someone down to the bone after a week. Yet, I think that you can get a good feel for people after a week, if you do the right things and ask the right questions, get references.

This is a pretty good related post:
http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/99/Important-Quest...
WiFi thermostat puts power (and cooling) at your fingertips
Difference being that Google recognizes that one of their strongest growth areas is capitalizing on innovative ideas. Gmail, Apps, Gtalk, Chrome... all innovations that build the company.

I'm not sure what facebook has done, or whether this should really be what the focus on, to be honest.
Patrick, any other resources you'd recommend?
CD Baby made Sivers 20 Mill with No Stress
The method is definitely lossy - it should be off but consistently off. i.e. the mapping is not perfect but if two colors look close to each other in our lossy mapping then they'll be close to each other in the perfect version. I'll probably update it soon anyway.
Excellent hack. I don't get a good perspective on why the hedge funds didn't see it coming, though.
Platitudes coming from a rich successful guy are still platitudes.
I'm late reading about this coin but I'm going to the Post Office tomorrow to see if they have any left. Do you want me to get an extra one?
Yeap.

"Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way... you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions."

Aristotle

Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)
1 Strong Against "Whence"
I just noticed that "whence" is used a GET argument for HN voting.

This will not stand. Whence is not an argument.

Here's an example of a way you would use whence:

“…from whence has this buxom cherub descended?”

Well, on second thought....maybe it is appropriate for HN, after all.
Put a good rich text editor in your site. Here's a few good ones:

http://bulletproofbox.com/web-based-rich-text-editors-compar...
“They may struggle to sell 911s to hedge-fund managers for years and years to come,” says one investor.

Because they'll all be eating Top Ramen for the next 20 years.

I think it's interesting how many different types of failures of transparency we've seen in the financial markets over the last few years; it seems like the system is so complex that very few people, if anyone, can understand it. Lawmakers are going to be expected to "do something" about the financial system. I'm loathe to think of the typical elected person, often so because of their people skills or personality, debating an issue of this type.
what is it? don't feel like reading that whole weird story
"They may struggle to sell 911s to hedge-fund managers for years and years to come," says one investor.

Or now a 911 is even more required, to claim that you did not get fleeced by them. Appearance is far more important than fact, right?
CaliSolar raises $102 million
> Inherently most vehicles are non-patentable as they all serve an identical purpose and relatively few are at all inventive.

I would guess Lamborghini is one of the few that does. Look up "design patent" in wikipedia: "a patent granted on the ornamental design of a functional item". If the shape and components of a top sports car don't meet this description, it's hard to imagine what would.

In fact, it's not too hard to find automobile patents, e.g., http://www.google.com/patents?id=XR87AAAAEBAJ (DeLorean) or http://www.google.com/patents?id=TvZ7AAAAEBAJ (Lotus?) -- but these patents seem to have a 14-year term, so even if Lamborghini did patent this shape, the patent (at least in the USA) has probably expired by now.
It is a pretty big pain in the ass most of the time, but I don't have as much a problem with it as most people do. The glare is only troublesome if you focus on it, I just "filter it out" and I don't really have an issue with it. Granted, a lot of my MBP coding is done on a couch in my batcave-like living room so I don't have much glare to begin with.

While on campus and in class though, the fluorescent lights do make the glare an issue and I was able to see the kid behind me staring at me through my screen the whole class. But on the upside, now I will never get stabbed from behind.
The main plastics used are ABS and HDPE. HDPE is commonly used in milk jugs, so you could recycle your own milk jugs and make stuff at the same time.

Obviously, since all they are doing is melting a thermoplastic and extruding it, it is trivial to recycle the product: just grind it up and make something else.
whenceforth this malcontent stems return it forthwith

good DAY sir.
Why is technology so dull?
I wouldnt pay for facebook either, linkedin maybe.
I find it hard to believe that he had no stress. Startups are stress engines. Things go wrong, usually under deadline. And that causes stress. The stress can be managed and "evolved" people don't let it control them, but stress exists for a reason. Without it, we would probably not be here as a species.

What about, for example, the time he spent many months rewriting his site in Rails and then, after traveling far down that road, decided to scrap the rewrite and go back to PHP? If that didn't cause he any stress, then he must be more robot than man. ;-)
I would not say they are arbitrageurs as much as they are parasites.
OLED Screen So Flexible and Thin it Blows in the Wind
I was about to make almost exactly the same comment -- good to see that I'm not the only person left in the world who has a basic understanding of English grammar. :-)

... and apparently the comment which I didn't make just got deleted. That's weird.
Sysadmin debugging: Many years ago I had the responsibility of maintaing a qmail setup for SMTP. We had around 1500 accounts and a mail-feed of some 80-90k mails a day. We were happily chewing off a 400mhz P-II with some 256Mb of RAM. Suddenly, the performance of the system began dropping. We only served 2 mails every 2-5 seconds. Tuning up the number of sending qmail processes did not help anything.

At this point, your mail spool begins to fill quickly. You can't process mails and get rid of them in the spool and with 80-90k mails a day combined with qmails primitive handling of bodies, your disk is going low quickly.

The key observation was that the qmail disk-log service used plenty of CPU-time. Restarting it didn't help. At this point, the next key observation is that most of the time is spent in the kernel. strace(1)! We are using blocking disk-writes to sync log changes to disk. Hmmm. It turned out that the log file was so big that many indirections in the inodes were needed. Qmail logs an insane number of lines per mail, so this combined with a hefty disk fragmentation killed the system. rotating the log file made the system jump to 20 processes sending again and we cleared the some 400k mails in the queue in a matter of 80 minutes.
Over 80, It's Anyone's Race
In most cases you still need to pay money to the songs author to legally be a cover band. The way things are setup he probably broke the law in such a way that he can get away with it. (AKA, they are not going to sue because it's good press and they might sell logos / parts to other people doing this.)
Please try again. should be fixed now.
A valid point. However, I would take greed and risk over fear and surrender any day. Then again, I'm in the middle of a risky venture and I could care less. I have to try pretty hard to keep from making it any riskier. A one-way ticket to another country sounds really fun right now, and I have a laptop so it could work...

No! Bad Tom!
We use the TimePlot charting library for our systems data analytics graphs. It's mind-bendingly awesome. Really easy to use, as well, though we have to massage the data a little bit before serving it out (because it can't handle quite the density of data our tools gather).
Halloween Costumes You Might Be Wearing in Ten Years
I suppose it depends what you mean by poor tolerances. In the beginning their stuff was pretty bad, but recently it has gotten a lot better.

Here's some pictures of stuff they made a few months ago (large):
(jar and lid) http://tinyurl.com/6z2ha8
(coat hook) http://tinyurl.com/5lkhcz
(x carriage pieces) http://tinyurl.com/5uq88g

They obviously aren't injection-mold quality, but very usable.

The main problem that the reprap has is dribbling when they are moving the extruder head from place to place. This has become less of a problem lately, as they've made some better valves. Also, getting the right settings for temperature, extrusion rate, and lateral speed have taken time.

At least the reprap community is vibrant, and interested in improving the tool, as compared with the stagnant fab@home.

It will probably never reach "self-replication." You can always come up with another level of "self-sufficiency" that it will not meet. It will however, become a useful tool capable of making some of it's own parts cheaply, and assisting in bootstrapping slightly better versions of itself.
Buxom cherubs --- sounds like great startup web site potential! (albeit in the porn area) Also a good name for a band.

As a side note, I've always thought with the power of some of these startup ideas, if they we combined with porn? Amazing.

Imagine twitter where you hear of sexual escapades happening realtime in your local area. Or BoobBook instead of FaceBook -- one can imagine the types of material presented there. Or RateAChick app for your cellphone where you can take pictures of girls as you meet them for instant peer reviews.

Sorry -- just got back from Halloween party and a little tipsy. Apologies for the silliness.
This sort of stock market manipulation is illegal in US. Nothing to be proud of. Germany already started criminal investigation. Hope that people directly responsible for it will go to jail.
Well, Wikipedia has an army of rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth volunteer deletionists, so I don't think they need much staff to moderate...
Database systems are already optimized for disk i/o that has blazing fast sequential reads and a high penalty for seeking. SSD's put the seeking penalty to zero, but with worse sequential read speed compared to your typical raided disks.

Which is the long way of saying, it's an expensive option that is unlikely (at least right now) to improve database performance that much.
Advanced Information Visualization using JavaScript: Graph Operations
I would open up the window and say "It's my money, and I need it NOW!".

Okay, that was horrible, and I'm sorry. Apparently, I've been watching too many crappy TV ads: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX0fIi3H-es
It goes the other way round. Whoever has the responsibility is in control.

Take the blame to take the lead.
I think the point was merely that pg has spent a lot of time thinking about the problem of spam (it's one of the things he's famous for), he also wrote the software that runs HN, and when those two facts combine you end up with software that has many mechanisms for automatically preventing spam. It's just that being involved in the fight against spam means his site probably makes use of more cutting edge techniques than sites built by folks who have never dealt with spam before. HN probably also has a much higher "editor to submitter" ratio than most sites, and so a human that has privileges needed to kill spam usually sees it long before it hits the front page.
9 top tech flops
NCQ was first introduced in SATA disk drives to prioritize disk read/write operations based on the current location of the head, and therefore eliminate superfluous revolutions and head movement.

Actually, SCSI (and SAS) had it first, and still beats SATA's implementation in terms of queue length. (256 entries vs 32 I think)

EDIT: It's called Tagged Command Queueing (TCQ) on SCSI, and the 256 entries are a limitation by most SCSI disks/controllers, the system can handle way more.
HTC Touch P3452 Smartphone
The HTC P3452 Touch Smartphone unlocked phone is specially optimized for entertainment and the special HTC Touch feature of this phone allows you to enjoy your favorite music as well as movie clips no matter where you are.
How so? I think it's rather fitting to be honest, especially if you consider information "food for the brain".
As far as I know no (German) laws were broken.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0a0edf02-a621-11dd-9d26-000077b076...
Awesome. We can change our national flag to a video loop of 'Deal or No Deal' highlights.
White House 2: Crowdsourcing priorities for the next President
Just a quick note: The amount of work or effort which went into producing a work is not legally relevant to its status under copyright. This, for instance, is why mere lists of facts are not copyrightable. In Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Tel... ) the "sweat of the brow" doctrine was soundly dismissed.
The Best Equity is Sweat Equity
Watch out; that's a different controller than the X25.
Chapter 20, "Programming Multicore CPUs", in Joe Armstrong's book, he says "If you want your application to run faster on a multicore CPU, you'll have to make sure that it has lots of processes, that the processes don't interfere with each other, and that you have no sequential bottlenecks in you program."
The marginal cost of an information good is usually zero or quite low, food costs something. Food is not easy to replicate, information goods are super easy to copy and distribute. 37signals' products are used worldwide; Beppe's Trattoria is really only available to people within a short distance.
Reverse Trick-or-Treating
P2P driftnet fishing returns to Europe, Scottish couple snagged
I get a feeling that it's complex on purpose and the whole finance world could be simplified greatly. Kind of like many telecom provider's marketing strategies.
I think it's a Halloween special...
Exploring Clojure (Lisp on the JVM) - Part 5: Clojure Documentation using FreeMind
There are lots of patents on car parts, for example intermittent wipers or a way of connecting the door to the frame of the car. I'm pretty sure Lamborghini has a few patents like that around.
Envy Casts Releases Rails 2.2 Screencast and PDF
Not in CA, anyway. Other states I believe they still do.
Unlike Wikipedia and Craigslist, Facebook has zero moderation by the actual users. In fact, I think the only time they've asked users to do anything for them was the translation effort. Given the success of that, maybe they'll move to more moderation by the community in the future. It's certainly cheaper...
Yeah, but you could still go bankrupt defending the patent case to test the ruling!
When it comes to market manipulation it's very hard to say what's legal and what's not, that's why investment banks have huge compliance departments who have immense expertise in these areas. It's unlikely Porsche had that kind of legal advice so could have accidently broken the law. The brokerage/advisory firms they used could also be liable, as regulated firms have an obligation to inform the regulator if they believe a client is commiting market manipulation.
Although it is a bit different, this shows you should proofread your email before you hit SEND.
The moment Facebook does this, I'm starting a Facebook knock-off and stealing every single one of their customers.