skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's say I wanted to solve a really big problem. Not something comparatively simple like "new kind of computing device", but really big. Global. Like the fact that we tear through so many natural resources because people go out and buy new equipment so often instead of getting old equipment repaired. That is a major ecological problem of the 21st Century right?

So I look into it and I discover that one of the main reasons that people replace a broken device is because it's really easy to go buy a new piece of gear (everyone wants to sell you one!), and much more trouble to track down someone who will repair an old one (properly!) and go deal with whatever's involved in getting it done.

OK, that's an interesting problem to solve, right? But if people are throwing away devices, how do you get everyone to change their behavior? That's really hard, especially for a startup with limited resources.

So what's a minimum viable product to get started with? Well, what if you started with a way to let people get their cars repaired more easily? People already get their cars repaired, and the user experience is terrible. Solve the part of the problem that people know they need solved first (car repair), then move on to convincing them they want other things repaired too. That they don't need a new gadget every two years, they just need an easy way for someone to help them keep their old one in good repair.

And if it works, that's tons (as a measurement of weight) of working devices that don't go into landfills, and tons of natural resources that aren't used up making devices to replace them. Is that ambitious enough for you?

(Note: I have no idea if this is what the founders are actually thinking or not. I just know that you can't judge the ambition of a startup from their first product.)
Witness failure: many people even 2 years ago said the co-CEO's need to either clean up shop or walk out... now that RIM's market is entirely ceded to Android/iOS... NOW they start shaking things up?

Chances are, RIM will never be great again - they lost their edge, then sat on their hands for years living off yesterday's big hits. Question is, do they have anything that a acquiring company might find worth purchasing?
Yea, well Im a little surprised they still have a executive team! Hmm...
Yeah, by far the best and just hilarious from beginning to end.
Castlewood Treatment Center
Briliant site... I love Castlewood.
Absolutely not; those persons that _may be_ making more than you probably have a more bast experience about their business than you. They are also investing much more time which (hopefully) you use in something that you consider more relevant.
Email Checklist
We think we're funny. Read the compensation:

http://denver.craigslist.org/cpg/2929545360.html
Not really. Linus isn't a Free Software zealot in the way that the FSF is. He's too pragmatic for that.

EDIT: Downvotes? Really? Linus isn't a Free Software advocate in the way that the FSF wants their people to be. He's a serious open source and GPLv2 advocate, but that's where it stops. He is not the kind of person that the FSF would give this award to.
Why can't the end-game be a profitable backup/storage company? I don't get it.
Or you can try this app, which Google appears to have removed today (cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3...) -- installed it, but haven't tried it yet... here's a backup of the .apk from my phone: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/32510284/N64%20Player%28Free%20N64%2...

It's also hosted on Github: https://github.com/emudeveloper/N64-Player--Mupen64plus-
"I’ve seen a lot of people go through and calculate the area of a polygon by breaking it up into separate triangles, carefully calculating the area of each, then sum and halve."

I doubt anyone do that. What was described seems a lot more work compared to searching the web for the right formula/algorithm/source-code -- at least in the modern days. A very minimal amount of research will reveal this algorithm mentioned by the author.

That said, it certainly is a very nice algorithm.
>Now thinking what I can do to stimulate even a fraction of this level of customer feedback in my startup...

giving your customers $150k is probably a good starting point.

kickstarter is another of those online businesses that challenges the traditional definition of customer and supplier. Ze Frank isn't really their customer in this instance, he's more like a supplier, providing a service worth a large amount of money to kickstarter's customers (the donors). that much feedback from standard customers isn't really something you can expect, but if your startup has any transactions of that scale it's not unreasonable to ask for a meeting to get very detailed feedback as part of your contract.
Goodbye HN. After repeatedly demonstrating your racism and sexism I just cannot take it anymore. It was nice knowing you.
Hey guys, remember: They make tools, not toys.

Too bad everyone else is busy buying phones that can do both.
Apple hit by China Foxconn factory report
The QWERTY effect
Site's down for me, but how does this compete with http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/skydrive/share-photos-fil... ?
Without looking at it very closely, it seems as though the wedge-product approach (to finding the area of convex polygons) is just asking for numerical errors. It's a classic case of finding small differences between large numbers. Most of the positive and negative contributions are supposed to cancel, but with finite-precision arithmetic, surely there'll be problems eventually-- for example, for small polygons far from the origin.

I suppose for application domains like games, you just want ballpark estimates quickly, and numerical errors aren't very important.
I really wish I could use DDG on iOS then I could fully replace google.
Additionally, you're not penalized for correct guesses.
Women in computing constantly feel like frauds.
My open source HTML5 puzzle game
This puts into words very clearly my feelings and experience. I have a friend (very smart) who graduated top of class MBA. He has a 'co-founder' with him working on their idea who is also an MBA. They are looking for a coder, and offered %5-%10 stake in the company for virtually building the whole app and everything with no salary. Completely warped view of an app/online service startup.

Of course they would have every right to give me no equity if they payed me the going rate of 100k year.
I seem to be acquiring points from both spurious and cheeky comments made years ago and answers, that haven't been expected. I thank those that participate, but I don't have the inclination to dedicate myself to the cause.
If you think solar or nuclear power will bring nigh infinite energy, say "solar/nuclear power will bring us nigh infinite energy." Using the words "asymptote" and "singularitarian" adds nothing to your highly dubious argument. I'm guessing you regret not finding a way to use the word "orthogonal" to mean "unrelated", too.
Ha, no I did not. I'm sure Eric Ries would be proud.
> I guess it's because of trying to support the capabilities of the actual sound chip?

This may be the case for some emulators -- such as the NES emulator in excitebike. However, (if I understand everything I've read correctly) the SNES didn't have a 'sound chip' in the same sense that the NES (or GameBoy, C64, etc.) did. The NES and all of Nintendo's other hardware used to synthesize its sound in real-time, but that changed with the SNES, which introduced sample-based audio instead. (Fun fact: some people suggest that the N64's sampled audio can meet -- or exceed -- CD quality!)

These pages know more about SNES audio than I do:

http://chipmusic.org/forums/topic/217/so-super-nintendo/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Nintendo_Entertainment_Sy...

I suspect issues with SNES emulation are simply that all of the SNES emulators we have are fairly poor in _all regards_, it's just that it's easier to notice in the sound than in things like timing.

Here are some examples of the other failings of many SNES emulators:

http://byuu.org/bsnes/accuracy
THQ fires 118 developers, shifts focus of Warhammer 40K MMO to single-player
Is It Fair To Say That Red Hat Is The First Billion Dollar Open Source Company?
Indeed, the mention of North Korea as an alternative only got under my skin owing to its proximity to the implication that there was only one alternative - I probably wouldn't have bothered grumbling if only that "the" had been an "any".

A market that was "as free as possible" would have no government regulation at all - there's one of those in Somalia. How's that for an example?
Not sure what uservoice is, but there is also an official trello board: https://trello.com/board/duckduckgo-open-source-plugins/4f08...
What I Do (eCommerce Fraud Detection).
Alternatively, just buy something with features like Aruba's "adaptive radio management" (ARM) that does things like this automagically: http://www.arubanetworks.com/products/arubaos/adaptive-radio...

(pretty sure Cisco has an equivalent but I forget its name...)

Postscript: They talk about HP buying Colubris, but don't think the Colubris-legacy equipment is current-HP stuff; they went and bought 3Com in 2010, and I think that's where most of their current offerings come from.
You make an excellent point, but I think it may be dangerous to conflate race and culture. I suspect for instance that a person of Japanese heritage that grew up in the US and spoke only English might have almost as much trouble with the Kanji characters as I would.
It's really not that simple. Racism never is - it is much more pervasive, and more insidious than the stereotypical examples of Klansmen with guns.

There is a third, and much more likely scenario:

3) The employers' perceptions of Arabs is subtly colored by popular opinion and stereotypes as exists in pop culture and media. Much of these depictions and stereotypes appear harmless, but cumulatively add up to something substantial. Many of these depictions in media and culture are meant to be harmless, but subtly color your judgment anyways.

The employer is not out to discriminate against anyone, but their perception is colored, and therefore they make subconsciously sub-optimal choices sorting the stack of resumes.

That is a far more likely scenario, it just isn't as black and white, and isn't as interesting due to a noticeable lack of Bad Guys(tm).

I'll also disagree on the "betting against them is a winning strategy" thing. Your theory seems to be that bigotry will collapse in upon itself because they're denying themselves the objectively optimal choices. This doesn't stand up to actual example in history - Blacks were systematically oppressed until direct action was taken. The racists and bigots never caved in on themselves by cutting themselves out of a skilled labor pool, they succeeded until directly toppled.
Think like a smart person - you obviously are one.

If you wanted to confirm or deny this "old trope," how would you do so? What evidence would prove or disprove it? If you wanted to identify such privileges, what would they look like? What about counter-privileges which offset them?

A fun thought-experiment, for instance, is imagining that "women, blacks etc." could sell whatever privileges they have to groups that I consider underprivileged, such as Asians. With some money changing hands, the Asian would become legally black and the black legally Asian, for all official purposes (educational, legal, etc).

What do you think the price of this transaction would be? And who would be paying whom?

And spreads the idea that all black people shouldn't be where they are in the company and are all tricksters who are rubbish at their job.

This is certainly the case for some black people, as it's certainly the case for some whites, Asians, Eskimos, etc. Perhaps we just differ in our estimated percentages.
Try Python with Django.

All the benefits of ROR, many fewer headaches.

Not knocking ROR, just saying I've been down this road and what I found was Python/Django was ultimately exactly what I was looking for.

Cheers!
Serious question: What viable options do they have besides being acquired?
> For many IQ tests there is a correlation between wealth and high IQ results [...] As a result if you have more, and better education and schooling, you more more likely to have a higher IQ.

But the causal link between parents' income and kid's academic success is small to non-existent[1] so even if there are factors influencing IQ, wealth doesn't seem to be one, at least not in this way.

[1] "Low Family Income Not a Major Reason For Poor Student Achievement" http://educationnext.org/low-family-income-not-a-major-reaso...
Yes, and in that ruling, as in my comment, the crucial part is that the IQ test is not necessary for the business. "The touchstone is business necessity. If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited."

IQ tests in general are not banned. IQ tests are not allowed when they disproportionately impact certain protected groups, and are not shown to be necessary for screening applicants. Sure, that means that IQ tests will have a lot of problems these days, because they are not very specific for particular business needs.

But if today, you were to invent an entirely new field of work, and needed to hire people who had an aptitude for grasping something new and solving abstract problems without being able to depend in prior training or experience, then an IQ test might very well be relevant.

The key is whether there is a business necessity for this test or other requirement. It sounds like general intelligence test was necessary in hiring people in a completely new, and intellectually demanding field, where there were no other educational, training, or experience qualifications you could rely on. It is not necessary when hiring firefighters or workers at a power plant. From the article you link to: "It was found that White people who had been working at the firm for some time, but met neither of the requirements, performed their jobs as well as those that did meet the requirements."
100k+ (159 to be precise). I've been very active for 2 years, but lately I have a little less time.

A couple of months ago I shared my SO experience in this post http://techblog.bozho.net/?p=658
Your fingers don't have that kind of accuracy either. What you do have is precision in your finger/hand/arm system. Moment arm dynamics are far more important in precise drawings than addressable accuracy. The best digital drawing tools I've found make use of stroke dynamics rather than sensor sampling to produce precise and high quality strokes.
Jim Balsillie and 2 execs leaving RIM
Happstack 7
When Google wants to put these into the market, they should run ads with video of the cars in extremely dangerous situations.

Imagine watching a video of a robot car navigating coolly and safely, with split-second timing in the midst of a snowy 12 car pileup involving an 18-wheeler. That'd sell the things as a public good.
They later changed all the APs back to full power, "to penetrate walls".
Google reverses your solution. By default, you use less words to get what it thinks you want. If you type more words, you get what you actually want. So 99% of the time, I get the Java results. If I want a Ruby result, I type "ruby" in the query dialog and now all the results are relevant.

Most people are not power users and only type a single word into the search box. Learning means that Google gives even novice users great results.
patents? i'm sure apple could do with their push email patents.

they make a nice keyboard based phone. a version of android on their hardware might do well. i have heard and seen blackberries take a lot of punishment and keep going.

when they were at their height in the usa i only ever saw one customer with one here in ireland. though i saw them every day on public transport and in use on dublin streets. since they started to decline i've seen a few kids replace iphones with blackberries on prepay. mostly for texting purposes. that's a real market the touchscreen phones aren't addressing.
Or a fascist, possibly? Which is worse - a racist, or a fascist? Discuss.

I'll give you my standard deal - I'll admit to being a fascist, if you'll admit to being a communist. I haven't gotten any takers yet but I'm looking forward to the first.
I wonder if they'll spin out QNX.
It seems like RIM needs to get worse (in order to shake off all their dead wood) in order to eventually get better, since their board clearly has no clue, no care for their fiduciary responsibility, etc. I wonder if that can happen, then BB 10 launch, saving them from doom, before Android, Windows Phone, or iOS win the enterprise market.

I'd be willing to bet on low-end Android or WP devices taking the non-corporate blackberry market away (BB were the cheapest smartphones in the third world), leaving just the corporate/security/managed devices market up for grabs. This still belongs to RIM but is fast moving to other devices.
We should also be worried about reading in details to the story that weren't expressly said.

> They tried various other questions, questions from other tests, questions they used for more advanced candidates. Gwen answered as best she could. The men were amazed. To their credit, once they became convinced that she hadn’t faked her results, they knew she would be a great hire.

The story says nothing about whether or not she got all of the followup questions right or not. I think even someone in the 85th percentile should be able to demonstrate they're in the 85th percentile with enough questions--in fact, it might even be easier than for the 99th percentile person because you're assuming that the difference between 85 and 99 is how many hard questions are answered. The first rule of cheating is: never go for 100% accuracy, it makes you stand out.
We never asked that. The question you're probably thinking of is:

Tell us in one or two sentences something about
each founder that shows he or she is an "animal,"
in the sense described in How to Start a Startup.
Oh... that does change things.
Your first sentence has nothing to do with my point, and your second sentence has a false premise; Rails was never a mini-framework.
Rick Mercer's bit on RIM:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm0gqBjDmg8
The weed thing didn't seem to add much to the app at all (and could have been quite negative), but good to keep the theme going in the pitch video:

"It's spreading like a weed"..."It's already been extremely sticky"
I guess culture is the main point - if you live in China, you probably get better at telling apart Chinese faces. And vice versa - I can only guess that telling apart western faces might be hard for people from other cultures, too.
I should add that I live in Europe, I think in the US there is a higher mix of people from different backgrounds, so my example is perhaps not as convincing.
76 pages in 8 hours? If it were dense as a textbook it wouldn't half that long.
I couldn't find "support the major operating system platforms".

That means my ten year supported version of Red Hat or Windows.
Building their own index is only worthwhile if they can build a good ranking algorithm to go along with it. And they're at a huge disdvantage in doing so because they don't track users to improve quality whereas Bing does.
SnapGuide: The Pocket Reference for The Universe
The ultimate toy would be a printer that prints the feed live to the toilepaper...
So maybe their next move is to buy Evernote, or build their own. As someone already mentioned, build a suite of document viewers/editors that go hand in hand with managing the files. Go from just allowing you to post a public folder to becoming your personal web presence. Manage cross-social-network personal information so that it always stays in sync.

There are a lot of possibilities if you think past the files.
A lot of founders pay themselves $50-80k/yr once they raise their seed round, and raise funding during YC. Assuming you could survive on 80k/yr salary (which is surprisingly hard in the Bay Area, if you have kids; marry a doctor seems to be a good solution here), I don't see why it should be a problem.

80k/yr plus 30-80% equity in a company, given that YC boosts the valuation, increases odds of success, etc., seems like a decent tradeoff for a mid-career person. The exception might be someone who has a time-limited alternative income source. If I were making $10-20mm/yr as a starting quarterback, I'd probably wait until I got injured or too old to throw a ball to do YC.
95% of AT&T’s IP Relay revenue from fraudulent abuse
Pesticides linked to honeybee decline
It's important to verify your intuitions, and it doesn't have to be a grand science experiment or a research project. If your intuition is that there are a lot of silver cars, a good place to start would be remembering the last time you saw silver cars. Or you could pay attention to the silver cars you see and take notes about the details that you feel are relevant. If it's worth it, then you can do a more in-depth analysis.

Now that said, there's not really much wrong with making broad assertions about the number of silver cars you're seeing without a more in-depth analysis. Chances are, nobody will care if you're wrong. There is something wrong with making a broad claim about things other people are doing without at least a little bit of evidence to support what you're doing. Just giving a list of search results and expecting others to find their own evidence isn't the best way to go about doing that.
Hugh's books
They're tools - git, gems, all those things.

I don't presume to come into a car repair shop, expecting to be capable of using all the tools there - I mean, if you put me in front of a wheel alignment visualizer, you'd get a blank stare. What the hell is a spark coil, a brake test, a jack, a compression, and all the essential parts of a car? Why do they all require impossibly finicky install mechanisms? We don't need more car mechanics, more high priests of all that stuff. It's easy to use, it should be easy to set up, right?

I guess I could start learning the tools, bit by bit. For any other profession, expecting a DWIMsuperTool which Does What I Mean, automatically, correctly and efficiently, would be seen as extreme sci-fi. Why would you expect it in this profession?

(oh, and if you plan to run the code server-side, you can get a pre-installed environment for a reasonable price, too)

And BTW, writing code is easy. Writing good, efficient, maintainable code, which won't take your program down in flames just because the month has rolled over, now that is hard. (NP-hard, you might even say. ;))
AirFiber -- game changing last mile?
Seriously interesting technology -- 1.4Gbit/s LOS PTP throughput using 24ghz unlicensed spectrum. If it functions as well as they claim, we could see serious benefits to communication deployments in rural areas.
Always Pull Branches When Merging
Because we all know how pervasive anti-Arab, anti-black, etc, stereotypes are in "pop culture and media." As is well known, Hollywood is full of corporate racist fascist pigs. Which is why we see so many films promoting racism and fascism. I'm sure it's just the same in France.

Yes, that was satire. Another possibility - improbable, I know - is that there are actually statistical differences between Frenchmen and Arabs. As a smart guy, you might enjoy this essay on pattern recognition:

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2010/10/war-on-pattern-recognitio...

Someone else posted George Akerlof's paper on asymmetric information:

http://web.usal.es/~emmam/Docencia/Modelizacion/papers/The%2...