skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I fear this might be too much a tangent...

The price for oil is affected by supply and demand but also by speculation. People invest in oil, and people speculate in oil. More so, the price for oil includes a substantial degree of risk assessment. If buyers and sellers both agree that the future of oil production (due to geopolitical instability, for example) is at risk and could lead to oil shortages tomorrow then they will settle on higher oil prices today.

The same sort of effects don't enter into the price of, say, Aluminum which is much less entertwined in complex geopolitical situations.
How much of it is luck depends heavily on where you place the plateau of what "everybody knows".

For example, it is a skill to use the heuristic that one should not place the robber near one's own towns, or that one should try and build additional towns and roads. If that is considered something that not everybody knows, the skill factor likely is over 50%.
this reminded me of http://web.me.com/agueniot/Data/Flash/cven.html
The hashing won't let them do partial name matches and other 'fuzzy' matching where there isn't an exact text match but strong signals to indicate a match.
Indie Game Music Bundle 2
Free Valentine's Design Patterns
All or something… BUT. Bad Advice
A very good source on fair use:

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/...

Note the "four factors" in fair use:

* The extent to which the use transforms the original work

* The nature of the work being used

* The amount and substantiality of the use

* The effect of the use on the market

I'm pretty sure soundtracking your resume with almost the entirety of a signed band's most popular track flunks all these tests --- charming though that resume is.

I'm actually not at all concerned about musical resumes --- seriously, does Britt Daniel care about resumes? Of course he doesn't --- so much as the mentality at startups that this stuff is always going to be kosher. Not so. HN just got finished shellacking a different YC company over this exact issue.

Be careful about music, is all I'm really saying.
How to Open Source Your Technology
Oh, I know he's anti-electric, anti-environment, pro-seal clubbing, etc. That doesn't detract from the fact, however, that he has a point about charge times.

Also, Tesla complained about that episode, and Top Gear responded that everything shown was an accurate portrayal of how it went. Who you choose to believe, I suspect, has a great deal to do with the distance between one's home and SV. As for me, I imagine the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Top Gear regularly embellishes for the purposes of entertainment, but I find it highly unlikely that they would flat-out make shit up just to slag a particular company.
Eating Your Way Through Pinterest
The difficulties in opening science
Researchers Develop Smart Phone Technology To Sense Depression
Why before what.

It's usually inappropriate. For a blog, the feature I want to see is interesting or useful information presented clearly and efficiently. Adding other stuff usually just elevates the noise floor for no benefit. Ditto for unfocused writing.

The initial "why" is often "I want them to come back to my site" (often contributing to other goals like conversion). You don't need some ridiculous badge system for this. The best and first callback for a blog is good, relevant content and the promise of more.
And on a Mac? Linux?
UN.org Hacked by Casi
Why ABC
Remember that both of you are running this app to meet using it, so you're already on the same page with "found with your phone". That's less creepy than tapping the shoulder of the guy in the next restaurant booth and asking "hey, are you interested in obscure topics X, Y or Z? ...sorry, just asking..." Even an amicable "just struck up a conversation" may very well not touch on topics which are rarely shared but are of great interest if known ("you took a course from Jeff Cooper too? [hours of intense chatting ensues]").
1. Base Model S is $50k after subsidies.
2. I have driven a roadster for three years/12k miles and never had a range issue. It gets 200-240 miles per charge. Very, very few folks break 200.
2b. The Model S has a 300 mile range version.
3. The Model S is better than any sedan in the market in terms of storage because it doesn't have all the parts of a carbon car.
4. they are cheaper to operate in my experience. i can go 200 miles on a $2 charge. of course, the roadster is an expensive up front cost. They will have a $30k cars in five year I'm certain.
5. i drive the Roadster because it's as fast as a lambo/ferrari/corvette, is super sexy and because it say F-U to the human right violating middle east. The environment is way down my list..... i'm for getting off middle east oil and human right way before being green.
doesn't that make your data less accessible/queryable?
The underdog holds that distinction I think. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1hZVDLkJDc

Spoon is the only existing band I don't hate.
I was more impressed by the content than the presentation.

I guess that's why I and my local marketing organisation don't always see eye-to-eye.
Figure 3-6 months. I'm always amazed at how long it takes.
Programming Language Rankings: February 2012 Update
Or, more to the point, American culture finds sex far more obscene than violence, racism, or anti-semitism.
Apple is now worth more than Microsoft and Google combined (or GDP of Sweden)
I laughed, but this is exactly how many of the answers here sound to me.

Answers like this (even though I'm assuming yours was sarcastic) exemplify everything that I outlined above.

The "you" stated below is in the general form, not you specifically. It is the "you" intended to represent people who would seriously respond to a question like this.

You don't even know if a database is our bottleneck (it's not), you don't know what database/datastore we're using (it might be redis), you represent no experience in our problem domain, you have no detailed information about our current performance, but you have no hesitation about positing an answer.

Sorry to be so blunt, but uh... "Get off my lawn, you damn kids!" :)
You are a victim of the apparently common misconception that everyone smart thinks exactly the same way that you do. I don't work the way that you think I should and I don't want to. I often just write a little bit of code to get my brain primed, with no intention to keep even one byte of that code in my final program. It may even be utterly wrong, but that doesn't matter--it helps me get started. Or, I might just stare at the wall for ten minutes until inspiration hits me. Or I may decide to go do something else entirely and let my subconscious mind work on the problem. Then the answer often just comes to me in the middle of something else. Sometimes the answer comes to me, literally, while I am sleeping.

When you would ask me how I came to the answer, I wouldn't be able to tell you: I primed my brain and then eventually a lightbulb turned on.

But doesn't this just show that I'd never come up with a timely answer? Not at all. I took many tests as an MIT student in which I got A's and which I worked in precisely this manner. I didn't know how to solve a certain question, so I moved onto another question and then came back to the unsolved question. Often by the time I did, I just now knew the answer. On other problems, I'd do work and then cross it off and start over.

I could work this way because I didn't have someone staring over my goddamn shoulder asking me what I'm thinking every goddamn step of the way. If I have to explain myself constantly, I just get flustered when I realize that I said something completely stupid, and then I can't continue with my natural thought processes.

I cannot assert strongly enough, that the process that you claim that anyone smart should be good at, does not work for me.
GitHub have a fantastic Mac App which makes git significantly easier to use for those less technically inclined.
I have two children too. They are the only non-artificial responsibility.
As a third year law student and fairly experienced web programmer, I feel like I can maybe weigh in on this: What seems boring to one person is the other person's reason to live! I'm surprised by how thrilled many lawyers are with their practice areas (that I find boring) but they probably feel the same about the areas I've found most interesting in law.

Both are filled with intellectual challenge. People who like problems are attracted to each. Although people who like problems and money might be more attracted to law!
Startup dudes: Cut the sexist crap
Gilt Groupe's Business Model
3 Little Kindles for an iPad
And then the guy who stocked up on ammunition instead of gold points a gun at you and says "thanks for the gold", then leaves.
I say if the majority of your revenue, or traffic, comes through the content you create on your website, then you should focus on creating the content rather than running the technical aspects of a blogging platform or server.

Especially if the blog generates the required revenue, then for sure, stop spending time keeping the server(s) alive. Pay somebody else to do, and focus on creating great content.
You do know it's illegal to work in Thailand without a work permit? Even planning a startup is likely to be classed as working.

This may sound stringent but people have gotten into trouble for more trivial activities such as karaoke.

I hope you've cleared this with immigration or everybody attending could face deportation.
The web is dead, It's all about mobile
As these devices get smaller, I can imagine morse code returning to fashion. Seriously: is there any better way to input text to a wristwatch? I'd much rather a morse key than the text entry systems dumb phones have today.
It would be nice to have an absolute scale so one could compare adjacent areas in different counties.
Grab a machete and hack down your own path
...yet. I fully expect Gmail and Search to decline in popularity, and with it Google's profitability and viability. Users are starting to revolt, and switch to alternatives like DDG. I don't know of any good Gmail alternatives yet, but the timing is really right for some startup to come along with a better email solution.

Google may appear an unstoppable juggernaut, but they most certainly are not. I think their business is very seriously threatened because of the type of business model they've chosen.
> Be very good at off-the-cuff 80% solutions to topcoder problems on a whiteboard, which I am. So much so, that when they told me to use whatever sort algorithm I wanted to, I used bubblesort on purpose, to prove a point, and got away with it.

You should have gone with bogo sort to really stick it to them :) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogosort)
Facebook Details Bonuses for Top Executives
Whenever I suspect that politicians might be writing a "power-grab" law, the one sure way I know to confirm it, is to start looking for immunity clauses. They know they are doing something bad that would require the "immunity" or else they wouldn't preemptively put it there.
So they pay streaming license fees to ASCAP / BMI on behalf of their users?

Public attribution does nothing to make it kosher, only reporting it so the royalties get doled out to the appropriate artists does that.
Nvidia Builds A Dream Machine
And because they're using Apache where, due to a combination of the still-common forking process model and KeepAlive, they get exciting OOM events if 20 people click on a link simultaneously.
> A bigger issue is variance in less dense areas. It looks like what you're doing today is simple counts whereas for areas with lower crime rates, more history might provide a more stable crime rate. It might also be useful to weight against a demographic prediction of crime or at least average the crime rate over the period that the demographic prediction is stable.

The purpose of this tool seems to be to decide where to live. Since the demographics of cities change over the years, what is the advantage of looking at more-past demographics?

Second, demographic instability is a very real attribute of neighborhoods, and it may be correlated with higher crime. I imagine you're trying to reduce that visibility. Why? Again, the goal is to give a current view of the crime in the area, not what the crime will look like when things calm down.

In all, I think it's good how it is, as it represents exactly what I would be looking for when I examine crime/local facilities/housing prices.
Whenever I suspect that politicians might be writing a "power-grab" law, the one sure way I know to confirm it

A second way to detect it is to look for the word "bipartisan". If politicians on both sides support it, there's a very good chance that the group being screwed is the public.
I would strongly discourage this sort of thinking.

First, there are third-party "game mechanics" solutions; I think YC even funded one. Second, reposting my own comments:

"Game mechanics" is the new "Web 2.0" as far as misapplied buzzwords go, but "gamification" still comes out of "video games" and "psychology," both of which have been around longer than the web, and the web likes slapping a new term on something and thinking it invented it.

To truly take advantage of game mechanics properly, you really need to know a lot about both video games and psychology. Like anything else, you may have to design with gamification in mind from the get-go, and you'll probably get it wrong the first few times out, which means you'll need to practice (or have betas).

Instead of completely retooling your software or process or "healthcare issue," perhaps instead you can add a meta-game on top: Office Hero was a game added atop Microsoft Word by Lost Garden writer danc: http://www.officelabs.com/ribbonhero && http://www.lostgarden.com/2010/01/ribbon-hero-turns-learning...

You'll never be able to "let's just add badges!" just like you can't "let's use gradients and glossy buttons!" to move the needle.

There's even the notion that video games and traditional UI interaction design are incompatible: IxD is about making things easy, but video games are about intentionally challenging the user. If your users aren't expecting a game, they may end up incredibly frustrated instead.

I did a workshop on adding game mechanics to an existing product (a calendar/dayplanner) and the results varied wildly. One group (Ray and Nicole) integrated social game mechanics into the application really well. Another group (Cecy and Brody) treated each mechanic as a feature, and by the end of the discussion I felt like it was "missing something." You can read the write-up of the workshop here: http://vi.to/workshop/20100426/

My notes include a lot of references, as well as images of the handouts and my own distillation of these principles: http://vi.to/gmnotes
This is the old "working harder vs. smarter" dilemma. When you're looking who to fund/hire, or what kind of culture to build, you can either attract people who work smarter or work harder, or both.

Working smarter is like finding an algorithm with a better time complexity. I was recently on a project where we could do it using The Architecture Going Forward That Is Always The Right Answer To Every Question, or the pragmatic way. I argued for the pragmatic way, but lost. February is the 1 year anniversary of this project. It has fallen far short of our goals, and we're now undoing the Grand Architecture way and implementing the pragmatic way, which is almost done and would have only taken 3-4 months, to achieve better software performance.

Working harder is like improving the constant: if you spend 80 hours instead of 40 hours, maybe you can get 20-40% more done.

Of course, it's great if you can get both. Working harder AND smarter. And there are a handful of people who do that. But not many, and you can't build a company full of them. Also, once people have had a lot more experience, and gained the ability to see the pitfalls before they step in them, they tend to want different things out of life, like, not working crazy hours. So you really have to choose.

My favourite movie of all time is Kurasawa's The Seven Samurai. In the movie, a very experienced Samurai has to put together a team quickly, so the "job interview" starts with the candidate walking to a room where someone tries to hit him with a pole. The first candidate is inexperienced but very talented. He parries the blow. The second candidate, as he's walking up to the room and before he could possibly see the assailant, somehow senses him and avoids the situation entirely.

I'd pick the second guy over the first guy any day.
Officially went live last week.
The URL slug says it all: awwwwwwwww
At MIT I did almost no coding on paper. For programming classes, most of the grade was always determined by very substantial coding projects and problem sets.

There was the occasional exam with some coding, but the coding was typically rather easy (i.e., to demonstrate a CS concept that you would have been recently taught, and practiced on a problem set) and not time pressured. There was also certainly no one staring over my shoulder.
Texas Jury Strikes Down Patent Trolls’ Claim To Own the Interactive Web
Thanks. For the year we had a total of $2,243 in billable ad revenue but since we didn't collect any of it except for Google AdSense, it's not being counted. Every ad company that we use has 60 day terms.

As far as traffic 2011 total traffic was 670,587 unique and 1,013,611 page views. For the longest time we had only 3 ads per page then upped that to 4.

That total revenue is not for just ad impressions but paid placement. On average our CPM for ads is only $0.50.

We could be making more with pop-ups/unders and full page ads but we don't want to be that type of site.

We know nothing about the online advertising game except it feels like we should be making more. Right now we are working with a pretty large ad network to hopefully bring us more ad revenue for 2012. Our goal is to be able to work for the site full time which means at least $15,000/month in ad revenue is needed.
I think compatibility WooThemes & friends is, in fact, a huge concern for the majority of bloggers.
Good point.

Another issue that might be how integrated the version control system could be into the graphics app. Github will never aim to integrate itself deeply into Photoshop, so designers would be forced to visit a browser to see changes.

Something like OS X Lion's file versioning system might actually be perfect for this.
You're correct that this would fail a fair-use test. Once it went up on a blog it's akin to a public performance, and use of the master recording should be licensed.

It is improbable that someone is going to issue a DMCA letter because of this, but it does (to your point) outline a couple of problems in S.V., one of which is the misconception that "It's not stealing if you attribute the artist" is widespread. And incorrect, at least for anything (c)All Rights Reserved.

If in doubt, it's a good idea for startups to consult their attorney (and not the PM, or lead engineer, or friend-in-a-band) when in doubt when using music, art, or what-have-you in public fora.
The gaming audience on windows is still far bigger than osx.
Four ways to promote your app without falling foul of Apple’s crackdown
There's a lot of apps that already hack Google into a drive, Gladinet, Syncdocs, Insync
Five top tips to improve your email marketing
Scala Monads: Declutter Your Code With Monadic Desing
I'm unsure how this comment is helpful. The conversation goes like this:

Person 1: Microsoft SkyDrive doesn't have shell
support. It's browser-only.
Person 2: Sure it has shell support, but it's
Windows-only.
Person 3: But it's not *CROSS-PLATFORM* shell
support!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
Google's Screenwise Project Will Give You Money If You Give Up Your Privacy
Correct.

However, I don't thing the main problem is uploading/syncing data from your PC. Sooner or latter, the PCs will not be the main source of information / storage of information. For some small and distributed companies that is already the case.

The data which needs to be in GDocs is actually somewhere else: in your Basecamp, in your Evernote, in Dropbox, etc.

Anyway - shameless plug at the end - this is the reason I quit my job and started http://cloudHQ.net : to help companies and individuals to continuously replicate and synchronize data between cloud services. We are bootstrapped and the feedback is more than welcome.
Quantum Computing is the ultimate bounty for mastering the atom, and the quantum world.
Startup companies can come in all forms, but the phrase "startup company" is often associated with high growth, technology oriented companies. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_company

This seems to be a reasonably good description of what the word means and what it is commonly associated with. You can call practically any young firm a startup, but it does most commonly refer to PG's definition. Like DHH said in the post, "starting a business" just does not have the near-mythical connotations "startup" has, but those connotations are result of the stories that typical startup culture provides. I don't think there's a way to make "starting a sustainable business" sound sexy because it's not a very sexy idea. And perhaps people with a spouse and kids shouldn't worry too much about how sexy an idea is, but rather how valuable it is.
Yes I found some ideas about dentistry and oral surgery but already said, they are not revolutionary ideas. They can be small startups, but not next dropbox.
Typical Google waste-of-probably-a-decent-engineer. A javascript coder getting asked sorting algorithm questions and Big-Oh notation. What a waste of time. Google just doesn't get it.

I know all you fanboys out there will say "you need to know this stuff to be a generalist software engineer" but c'mon, hire experts in sorting algorithms if you need that for some obscure bigtable ultra-performant section of code and leave it at that.

Need another example of wasting everyone's time: "She told me they primarily hire strong C++ and Java developers, something which I have very little experience with." Gee, Google, glad you still brought him in when he clearly has no interest or background in that.
Standardizing Incompatibilities
No, but you can hash on guarantee to be unique keys, like phone numbers. Just normalise all phone numbers, hash em, and upload them. Phone numbers are guaranteed to not have transposed characters or abbrevations.
I think this is more of a case of Microsoft validating these ideas from open source (X11 dialogs are not exactly "Linux"), rather than "stealing" or "borrowing" them. Wow, extent-based filesystems not exactly the most resilient... the real question here is why Cutler and Co. "borrowed" ODS-11/Files-11 wholesale?

In a larger sense, the article has a clickbait title, and I fell for it. If it had read "Microsoft validates a few open source software choices", hardly anyone would have bothered reading it, I guess.
Ice is "Track Changes" in JavaScript
Have you tried using Cloud9 IDE as a means to modify the content. In the case of static site generators like Jekyll, one could just host the content files on github and use Cloud9 or a similar web-based editor to edit the content.

You can also setup post-hooks in Github such that a push will automatically re-generate the static site for you and update the site. That is how I have setup my personal blog.
It also ignores the fact that leaders need to employ different attitudes with different people. Some people are needy and not comfortable with the vagueness of autonomy. Others need a more hands-off approach for best results. Servant leadership strikes me as optimizing for the latter.
if I try to think as a typical Windows sysadmin, I would just use Windows. For those guys, ReactOS is not bringing any benefit, and they will for sure work with a product that they know already. They would only see ReactOS as a source of unpredictable problems and costs.
It is possible that BMI will send a bill, eventually, if they notice. Note that this is separate from paying for a license to use the master (the recording).