skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His podcast is even scarier:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcas...

His predictions are so extreme I have a hard time taking it seriously. But that's the exact same thing that happened to him 1-2 years ago...
Friendship as media
How so? I fail to see your reasoning. Are you suggesting Facebook is going to die in the foreseeable future?
Widgetbox › MYOB Indonesia Community Widget
Interest rates were coming down, particularly since 2001. Given that people tend to size their house purchases to match the monthly payment they can afford, you would expect home prices to rise as interest rates fall.

Whether that's sustainable in the long term is another question.
"Large-scale neural simulations are difficult for computers because neural models do not map onto the Von Neumann architecture. "

Maybe they should use the Harvard Architecture?

That's half a joke and half serious - a lot of DSP-type applications still use Harvard Architecture.

(ps. One of my favourite textbooks is "Computer Architecture, A Quantative Approach" by Hennessey and Patterson).
Yeah they need to implement OAuth or something similar.
Yeah, except that Step 2 is super sketchy and arguably unscientific at this point.
Black-Scholes, eh? If I could identify those algorithms, I'd be a rich man indeed.
I suspect this is actually a very common issue. Unless you explicitly expire all sessions for a user when they change their password then this will happen.
IMO the times is trying, with their APIs, which are a good start. They're just a couple of years late. If you look at their tech side (open source libraries, great election map, etc), they have the people and tech to make it happen. It's a question of management will and understanding.
If the brain operated on the Von Neumann architecture, your thoughts would be processed tremendously slow while expending an enormous amount of energy.

Perhaps the long lost ancestors of the human had brains operating on this principle, but simply couldn't store enough energy to survive.

The brain fires off multiple synapses in multiple places in the brain at different times. If the brain worked like a Von Neumann machine, it could only fire one synapse at one place in the brain at one particular point in time.

The brain executes things in parallel while the Von Neumann is sequential. The brain is incredibly more efficient then the Von Neumann machine I'm using to type this comment on.

Also, why do you not buy this assessment?
Agreed, Titanium seems really useful. It bundles a lot of the modules that I usually use with CGI::Application and is logically put together.

I have about 12 years of Perl CGI stuff for different projects (most of which is still running) but I started to feel geek envy a few years ago when the world decided that you were not cool without AJAX. I looked into Java EE and realized I just was not an "enterprise" person and then at the different PHP frameworks before doing by first Rails app using Hobo. I have to say that was remarkably fun and easy to put together but I'm still not completely happy about having to run a cluster of mongrels and having to coordinate them with Apache. (That might not be the cool way to deploy Rails apps now, mea culpa.)

CGI::Appplication and Titanium (including modules like HTML::Template and HTML::FillInForm) are simple to use, work with all of the authentication stuff that I interface with, and scale perfectly for the number of users that I typically have.
Visualizing Facebook with the Hackathon project
There are two reasons I see for doing something like that:

- The person is dealing with business-to-business transactions and their position should indicate that they're able to make decisions for the company.

- They were selected specifically for an executive role, rather than simply being a buddy of one of the guys starting things. At lot of startups are built that way.
If I type and/or say the word founder ten times, it starts to mean "to fail or utterly collapse".
That's what I mean though. When you're used to having all of your styles in a simple, flexible text file, it's tedious at best to have to navigate a labyrinth of Windows dialogs.

And what's the deal with employers demanding Word docs? More than a couple times I've been told to re-submit a resume in .doc format when I provided a high-quality, preflighted PDF (which is a nice thing to have when you're applying for design positions: embeddable fonts). Dice.com only permits .doc uploads. This meant at least an hour trying to scrap together a suitable Word doc with similar layout and styling.

Hope it's a while before I have to worry about this stuff again :^)
It's more important to do what is right then what you love. Sometimes they're one in the same.
They use analog building blocks, not digital ones:

"Mead succeeded in mimicking ion-flow across a neuron's membrane with electron-flow through a transistor's channel.

This should not have come as a surprise: the same physical forces are at work in both cases!

A silicon neuron is an analog electronic circuit of transistors that mimic a real neuron's repertoire of ion-channels.

Instead of designing different electronic circuits to emulate each of a wide variety of ion-selective protein pores that stud neurons' membranes, as Mead did in his silicon retina, we came up with a versatile silicon model."

http://www.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/about.html
A few months ago I wrote a python script that built relation data from a database using only primary key data (all the PKs were GUIDs) to build a mapping of the actual relations from the database. This particular application had grown quite large and no relationships were ever really documented.

Then once the relationships were all mapped out, I wrote another Python script to shell out C# classes for all of the tables and their relations so that I had an easy way (data library + basic web forms) to explore the data.

All said and done I think it was a shade under a thousand lines and saved me weeks of exploration and hand coding.
This is a brilliant way to visualise how much you're getting out of a job vs. another.

Which begs the question... what else can be brilliantly visualised using radar charts like this?
There is no doubt that LaTeX produces way more beautiful documents than Microsoft Word, even if Word defaults settings are changed.

The thing is people need a word processor that comes out of the box with professional fonts, nice alignment parameters. They sure don't want a piece of software that begs them to download fuzzy fonts and paste text from a web page without reformatting all of this...

People don't want to learn a language for writing text either. They don't want to spend hours to find this package that would looks so great drawing a horizontal line under the header.

Apple Pages is a good alternative, it's my choice for creating professional documents (and believe me, I'm a real typomaniac) without losing time with LaTeX.
Monetizing a SMS Notification Application
I'm working on the finishing touches of an application that's main feature will be sending out real time SMS notifications. For the purposes of this question, I'll use the example of a sports score text message update service (Not my actual idea, but similar in function).

I'm planning on offering two different account options, one free, basic, and ad supported, one paid, customizable, and ad free.

The free service would only send messages like "the score is now 7 to 3" while the paid version will have options like sending a message saying "Manny Ramirez hit a double for 2 RBI's".

So my question is, what kind of monetization options are there for the free account? I've contacted www.movoxx.com, a company that embeds 40 character ads into every text you send, and that seems like a good option so long as they accept my idea and allow me to sign up. Does anyone have any experience with them?

The service should appeal to users who are looking for a good amount of SMS updates so there's a potential for sending out thousands of messages a day if the product catches on.

What other options are there for SMS message monetization?
My first thought was - the rating system itself creates a ceiling to the accuracy of the prediction. And it seems that every one knows that. (Netflix or the 30,000 hackers.)

Then why spend so much resource to improve 10% of the existing rating system instead of experiment with new kinds of rating system. (I'm sure someone can come up with something clever yet simple.) Yes it's costly to change the infrastructure. But if you don't do it, some startup will come out and beat them to it.

The worst part is that Netflix is paying people to think inside-of-the-box (the rating system).

I read about Bertoni a while ago and was inspired by his out-of-the-box approach (Behavioral Economics). Wouldn't that give Netflix a hint - "Yo Netflix, here's this dude who's getting the fastest-growing result by extracting more qualitative information out of the quantitative rating system. Maybe you should just design a new rating system that better orgnizes these qualitative information? Just Maybe."

Or maybe I'm missing the point here?
A Libertarian Defense of Social Conservatism
Common? Maybe.

Good? No.
I stopped reading links with less than 25 points :-/. Do we have negative points, 'cause we need them.
Ron Paul on fiscal conservatism and more
"Government can only tax its people so much before they say no. So the government expands the money supply when it has taxed and borrowed all it can. This inflation is a hidden tax that falls squarely on the middle class. Sound, honest money would go a great way towards reining in the big-spending politicians."
Ads are a good way of doing it, but I have never been a fan of the per message ad. I would suggest leaving the messages clean and then sending messages dedicated to an ad. Clearly full message ads will generate more revenue per and be less frequent.
A friendly reminder to the community
There has been a lot of talk lately (it seems to come in cycles) of the decay in community quality, as well as the proposal of several drastic measures to combat it. This post is just a friendly reminder that we've gone through phases of this before; while we should continually re-examine the tools we have for policing ourselves as a community, just keeping ourselves all on the same page ought to be sufficient for a community of this size. If you aren't sure what the community has collectively thought about any given action in the past, you might try looking at searchyc.com or at the posting guidelines at ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html; these resources have served us well in the past, and will hopefully do so in the future.
I'm developing a data analysis & visualization tool. I'm starting to really wish there was a nice way to separate out the math/statistical logic that I'm using on the backend from the logic I use to display the results in a pretty way.
So basically you guys are saying it's way faster, but not that it's not technically impossible to do in software on normal computers. I'm just not sure it's NOT cheaper and faster to prototype this stuff in software and then build it in hardware to make it faster once they figure it out. Prototyping in hardware seems slower and more expensive to me...

And FYI I am familiar with neural networks (and artificial neural networks, I've written a few) and I understand it's massively parallel and that neural networks the size of the human brain cannot be simulated on today's hardware but that's not the goal stated in this article. It just sounds like a bunch of guys that are really into hardware and so that's how they're going to do it, and there's nothing wrong with that. I just wanted to know if it's something that that isn't technically possible in software.
An important point that is lost on most politicians and tax-payers:

"Government can only tax its people so much before they say no. So the government expands the money supply when it has taxed and borrowed all it can. This inflation is a hidden tax that falls squarely on the middle class. Sound, honest money would go a great way towards reining in the big-spending politicians."
What is the Plural of 'Prius'? Pri-i? Prium? Priuseses?
And analog circuits cannot be built/modeled in software?
Did "Lazy Sunday" make YouTube's $1.5 billion sale possible?
I did this all the times,
so I don't waste my time to read awful articles.
Facebook Getting Serious About Classifieds; May Relaunch This Year
just because there are job listings, doesn't mean there are actual vacancies. Way too often companies have job listings just in case, so that they don't miss a top of the line candidate.

So you can have a company, which just laid off 40% of its work force, with dozens of job listings up for grabs.

Also you have to keep in mind, that even if there is a job there, the competition is that much worse now.
Microsoft To Rebrand Search. Will It Be Kumo?
I used this, although it was many moons ago when I was a junior developer. It was easy to grok from a development perspective, but I've not had to manage an installation.
Why PR doesn't work and how to fix it
sms messages have a built in monitization scheme: per txt and people are well conditioned to this IMHO. I'd be surprised if you tick anyone off by using it, and I'd heavily question any deviation from this.

I'd probably go for something like a free trial 10 messages, after that sign up and start paying. Just stick with the single paid account.
Absolute opposite. They're the only viable revenue stream, but most papers don't realize this, and don't focus on it.
Ruh?
Why Bad Physical Health Can Hurt Mental Sharpness and Entrepreneurial Ambitions
Why don't you either a) put all the math stuff in its own set of modules and/or b) have your backend do all the analysis and store it in a middle layer (e.g. DB) for the front end visualization?
"Get it all" is a nice/noble/useful/cool sentiment, but I think this usage overloads an established metaphor.

The whole point of the triangular metaphor (as a visualisation) is to communicate a compromise situation - e.g. I'm working on a project, you can have Quality, Cost, Time as dimensions - you can't max out one without compromising another.
CGI::Simple
SpaceX Tests Falcon 9 rocket, scares Texas
Bruce Lee Plays Ping Pong With Nunchuck... amazing.
At GitHub we call ourselves co-founders.
Kurzweil suggests that these technological improvements happen on an exponential scale -- that the gap from 0 to ant is greater than from ant to human.
Is it a case of a broken clock etc... or someone who always predicts downturns will eventually be right?

Hi seems pretty sensible in that other clip though. The US has to make and export "stuff" so that "other stuff" can be consumed from the rest of the world.
The claims made aren't all that falsifiable (like anything else in psychology, it isn't ever possible to know to what extent a person is lying to themselves), and the specificity of the claims is something of a red herring; when 90% of a list of specific claims appear to describe a subject to at least some extent, if they want to believe that the system works, they're going to ignore the other 10%. The medium-sized fraction of the audience who fit at least that closely into the categorization system trumpet it around as a success, making those who fit somewhat less well more inclined to accept the errors and inaccuracies of their classification. These effects, plus the handful of results related in a very obvious way to the original categorization (emotional coping resources are often defined in such a way that the INTP/ENTP result you mention is entirely obvious, for example), make it appear that the MBTI means much more than it actually does.

Much like an IQ test, used professionally, as part of a deeper analysis of a subject, the MBTI can help a psychologist or psychiatrist better understand a subject/patient. Used recreationally, such things lead to faulty generalizations unless treated as they are--glorified horoscopes geared toward looking at particular aspects of ourselves.
Online fraudsters 'steal £3.3bn'
This is going to sound incredibly assholish, but it's incredibly true.

FeedbackArmy.com is going to tank.
http://www.feedbackarmy.com/feedback.slp

1)That page is why. If someone has the capacity to produce (or have produced) a website, they have the capacity to create a form with two elements and garner feedback. It is incredibly lackluster, easy to replicate and certainly not worth $7 for 10 responses.

2) Based on the comments here people aren't sold on Usability Feedback on websites when the website you've created doesn't suit the needs people are coming to the site for in the first place.

3)The process lends itself quite easily for scammers and cons. There's almost no security measures in place, the design is inherently broken and doesn't provide any peace of mind from the process that you have to perform to get "feedback".

I'm not sold. This can be done about 50 ways better than what it is now; I really do not see myself paying any amount of money for the presentation you've put in front of me. It's an effort, I wont say good effort, I wont say bad effort. It's an effort made, and at this point I'm going to say no to this.
Startup executive summary for capital raising
Dragging tabs and margins around in Word seem like black magic to me. I never have any good intuition about how things will reflow. Or a good sense of what makes for a good layout in the first place, frankly.

The genius of LaTeX is you can crib someone else's style, and your output will look like it was created by a typesetting genius. Personally, I don't think I could ever fiddle around with Word long enough to get output that looks as good.

Another big win with LaTeX is it lets you use an editor that's not awful. Editing your actual text in Word is pretty painful if you're used to Emacs (or other program actually designed for editing text productively).
The template can be found here ~ http://www.pollenizer.com/files/Pollenizer_Executive_Summary... (.doc, 125Kb) and there is some follow-up discussion here ~ http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach-australia/brows...
Umm, is Nokia spamming HN?
Ask HN: Which revision control system?
For the past few years we've been using Perforce at the company I work for. For a number of reasons, we've been given the OK from management to switch to a free SCM system. This is supposed to be a big opportunity to improve our process and save us money, but we're having problems finding a good replacement.

Our must-have features include; ability to import our perforce history, easy/trivial branching and merging (preferably the ability to use an external merge tool), large file support, ability to pass changes from one workstation to another without affecting everyone, and ability to work with multiple gigs of binary files (most are roughly 500k, some are 100+megs). The binary files are mostly build artifacts, but for a large number of very good reasons we can't expect developers to generate them. Each developer having their own branch would be nice, but isn't critical.

Our products only run and compile on Windows, so decent windows support would be nice. We aren't exactly an MS house; our product works with the artifacts of programs that only run on Windows so it runs on Windows. Our products are very-much closed source, so things like Github are of no use to us.

Distributed systems like Git are compelling for the workstation to workstation support. Unfortunately Git chokes on our binary files (I get an out of memory error), and I'm afraid that the other DSCM projects will stagnate in favor of Git. Centralized systems like Subversions are in line with the way we've always done business, but they lack the ability to view/review/pull changes on another workstation and branching/merging isn't as easy.

I'm a big fan of Git, but if it can't work with large file it won't work for us. Subversion seems like a step backwards, but I could be wrong. Whatever we choose, we'll be with it for a long time and use it every day.

So, HN; what revision control system would you suggest?
I thought he had a good point, but then I realized his intro test was rigged: twice he said "say them out loud", so I tried to memorize the sound of the numbers.

But then I thought about how I remember passwords, PINs, and phone numbers, and I don't memorize any of these by the sound of their digits (perhaps because it would be so inefficient in English!).

I remember sequences of digits (or chars) by visualizing how I use them, i.e., spatially. In this case, I pretended the 7 digits made up a phone number and mentally placed them on a phone. Now I can't seem to forget 485-3976.
I don't know how movoxx works, but I can say I always get a really uneasy feeling when I think about my phone number being close to an advertiser's database. Even if they give you the ads and they never see the numbers, as your customer I can't be sure of that, and it would make me unhappy.
BBC - Einstein and Eddington
I don't believe that's true. I believe that you have to have a President, but not a CxO.
Unless you live in the UK, grab foxy proxy for firefox to get access to this very solid show.
For me it's a case of "we've discussed this stuff among friends, but housing kept going up so what do we know?" and then finding out some serious guy has the same opinion and we were right. I guess I could be a broken clock too. :)

All the stuff on the old video is fundamental economics stuff. It was also a heresy in that no one dared to think about it, much less talk. It makes sense and it did make sense to me back then. Of course I was also doubting my perception because everyone was like "Eehaw! Party!" for a few years.

Listen to the last video - what he says is outrageous. He is not talking about recession, he talks about the end of the American domaination by way of overspending. It's heresy of unimaginable magnitude. It also makes a lot sense. It's truly frightening.
I use Mercurial, but have been exploring Git a little because of what you noted -- the community momentum seems to be headed that way.
Two responses:

(1) Lyx is a cross-platform graphical editor that spits out LaTeX, has reasonable UI for many of the interesting things you'd do in a TeX document, and has a pretty good set of preferences and controls. I used to swear by it.

(2) LaTeX is very painful to edit in, no matter what people tell you. Yes, Word does a crappy job of typesetting. But LaTeX is very 1985. You can get similar results in a visual editor with a page layout program; this is why so many people used to rave about Framemaker over Word. On the Mac, iWork's Pages.app will do a passable job; far better than Word. I've ported Quark templates to it without a problem.
LaTeX makes it easy to make something clean out of a bunch of text.

But when graphics enter, I'm easily stuck loosing a lot of time. For now, i tend to use tikz and will learn Inkscape, after bad experiences with dia, metapost, etc. Sure under MacOS Omnigraffle produces great output...

Good documents are not only text...
That was actually my exact model before I found out what Movoxx was. I haven't gotten any actual CPM projections from them yet, but their service made it seem to me that it would make it easier to pick up more users because it would allow a long term free option for them.

But I originally had planned on 20 free alerts, then you would have to upgrade for something like $20 for 6 months.
Do you know of any other services that implement this advertising model successfully?

Before discovering Movoxx, this was how I pictured a successful advertising campaign operating through SMS messages...
I see what you're saying. From my first few emails with them, I have learned that they have an API for ad placement so I think all ads would be handled on my end. They did say they have a free SMS gateway though, which would obviously open up my phone number database to them, which would fall in line with your concerns...
Clickjacking iPhone Attack
Wow, they got me. not gonna lie. well done.
> I used to swear by [LyX].

If I might ask, what do you use now?