skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the binary nature of the VC model is a big part of the problem. I don't know what the alternative's going to look like (crowd-funding?) but right now we have a two-caste system. There are "the funded" and the cold and hungry. The inside and the outside. Losers and winners selected before a single one of either side has had an opportunity to accomplish much of anything. There are a lot of things that could be said about this model, but I think it's pretty clear that it's not good for technology. As we see, most of this bubble is in "social media" VC darlings with mediocre leadership and MBA culture... and still little investment is going into Real Technology startups founded by actual engineers.

A VC cash infusion puts someone from one category into the other immediately. Someone goes from being (in terms of VC-istan social status) a beggar to a baronet in an afternoon. It's really an all-or-nothing game being played. Making it a million times worse is that VCs usually talk to each other about the deals they're making, which means that one VC's opinion influences the multitude. If there were more independence among VC decisions, we'd see an order of magnitude more good startups getting funded.

I think VCs tend to get distracted by their kingmaking powers as well. It's no longer about delivering the best returns for their client. It's about using that magic wand to be "cool" and minting the right baronets, the ones who will use the press access and social status they get from being Funded to make that VC (individually) seem more stylish. Like Tyrion Lannister, they just (::sniff::) want to be loved.
Show HN: ClipChoose, video polls made easy
Sorry but this argument is some combination of naive, inane and/or b.s. VCs are financial investors and their investors (the LPs like Kaufmann) who give them money are expecting a return. Discovery, social good, changing the world and other euphemisms don't cut it for them as that is not what they are sold. They are sold a story of high risk, high reward, and per these #s, that was not what was generated.

TL;DR: Until pension funds and endowments are happy to be compensated in rainbows and hugs, returns are the only thing that matter.
One of the other nice things about Postgres is the pretty much annual release of a new version. 9.2 should apparently hit beta in the next week or so, which will bring some cool new features : http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2012-05/msg0034... .
Over the past year I've had so many different ideas floating around in my head, and read many books, but never actually implemented anything.
I had a week break between terms in school, so I decided to code up something simple and actually deploy to a live environment for once.

Not expecting millions of users to come flooding to my webapp, this was just my way of getting a foot in the door of this apps/startups/entrepreneurship world.
I've learned a lot over the process of building and deploying this project, and hopefully it will spark me to stop daydreaming and start doing.

There are a lot of poll sites out there, but I haven't found a good one that incorporated videos easily.
I wondered why there weren't such sites, and thought it could be that no one finds a use for them.
So this is my attempt at an MVP, just testing to see if people would make use of video polling.
I'd love any suggestions, comments or criticism as this is still a work in progress.
> While our team here is going to give Gumshow a face lift and $7mil makes me feel good that Gumroad is sure to stay in the game, I'm just not sure where the explosive growth is going to come from

I respect you alot, but shouldn't that be something you just don't simply say, especially after raising that kind of money? Further, are you saying "nobody at Gumroad knows", or rather "hey, I don't know I am just an engineer/owner, but we are raising this money, some guys with other-than-tech skills will come aboard and they will know where we going".
psst... i was just being sarcastic... why down vote?
Because many of us believe that universal health care is a human right. In a state which claims to be democratic and progressive it becomes the responsibility of the state.
Has slowness of SELECT COUNT() on large datasets been addressed in any way? Last time I checked it was responded with "it's slow because of how we do things here" and if you want to count records fast "you count them yourself" (not actual quotes from anyone, just tl;dr of some answers I've seen).
...where k is the number of FFT coefficients computed, and n is the time series length.

Has anyone else been turned off by the sensationalism of MIT TR articles?
The same claim you have to public funds raised via taxes?

The conversation in my country is not about "claims on others' money" or other such matters of pure principle, but rather what produces humane outcomes. Having a medical safety net for everyone is kind of taken for granted here - a poor-to-middling option, but far preferable to a you're-(mostly)-on-your-own system like in the US.

One principle from an ethics class in school comes back to me: before we were born, while we were behind the "veil of ignorance", if we didn't know what sort of family we'd be born in, what rules would we prefer in life? If you didn't know what sort of family background or medical conditions you'd have in your life, would you prefer social insurance or take your chances? I'd definitely prefer insurance for everyone, because then I'd have a fighting chance if I were born to poor parents.

> But everyone dies, regardless of how much they deserve it.
So why shouldn't we try to reduce it happening?

Your comment seems to be saying this state of affairs is somehow more desirable than the alternative...that it's better that the guy died than other people be forced to pay taxes to insure him. That kind of boggles my mind, to be honest.
Talk about a nice user experience! :)

In all seriousness, fixed. Thanks!
Purely impersonal criticism, but I'm getting 'beautiful' fatigue from Show HN submissions.

'Beautiful' and 'amazing' in the same paragraph once sounded impressive, but now it's kind of tiresome.

Like I said, this is nothing against you, it's more a general trend that I'm tired of seeing. Not everything on the web needs to be 'beautiful'.
In my experience, every institution that has any connection whatsoever to the Nobel Laureate claims him or her. Undergrad, graduate school, research location, even high school (one local high school claims multiple Nobel Laureates -- unusual, but I don't know if it's unique).
Note folks, Judge states infringement one ONE LINE OF CODE out of what millions..

The key question is did Judge goof on reserving SSO issue to resolve at end of phase one. Google's point is that yes that as a major goof up on law and process basis.
It's a great idea, and i was actually working on something similar before. I've said it before, but what scares me to death is when folks start selling copyrighted material. There is nothing to protect against it and the whole things pretty much revolves around good user behavior.
Constructors, I would assume, but that's not a very attractive alternative in my opinion.
Interested to know if you have data to support this. Thanks.
Awesome.

It'll sure be nifty when 2029 rolls around and the patent expires, so applications can actually use the algorithm. (No, I don't have any information that an sFFT patent has been filed, but this would be standard practice at MIT).

Tornado/fountain codes are a similar case. Pardon my bitterness, but it's an interesting question to wonder whether, by funding researchers to invent algorithms of this type and lock them away behind a patent-wall for two decades, USG is advancing the progress of technology or in fact retarding it.
Probably that is where the VC investment and connections come into play, to get those partnerships in place. These are certain advantages of having VC as a stakeholder in business than just being a profitable completely bootstrapped startup.
well, if Gumroad is first of its kind, or the biggest one, and will not turn out a rip-off, don't you think that people who recommend it would be a "network effect" ?
Good iOS tutorial to recommend for a 14 year old?
Not everything needs to be beautiful, but we wanted to Kandan to be. We had a prototype of Kandan we called Kogo initially, but it was pretty ugly. We went out of our way to make sure that Kandan was as pleasant to use as possible, visually and functionally.
Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow
Hah, found #6 very true ("If you listen to foreign music, it distracts you less."). Works for me with studying and coding.
not biased as Groklaw does not promote one future outcome over another in court rulings unlike that MS and Oracle paid FRAND clown
If you mean, "have other major database vendors, such as MySQL, become slower in most of the same ways", then "yes, and for the same reasons ;P"; the one place PostgreSQL could be better on that is that it can't use a covering index currently (which would let it get the count of a filtered query only with a scan of the index, without needing to read and validate the table rows), but that is being addressed in 9.2.
If (API Copyrightable) = False THEN Google Not Guilty

If (Google Violated Copyright) = False THEN Google Not Guilty

If Google has Fair Use THEN Google Not Guilty

Google Guilty

The judge needs to rule on the first statement, the jury came back on the second statement, but the jury could not decide on the third statement.

(Edit: Wording)
Sorry, I meant specifically, as in a specific field/project jopt would sacrifice a weekend for.

Working weekends seems like a good way to not get fully paid for doing what you love to do.
It is poorly stated in the write up. Fair use is what they call an Affirmative defense, you have to have done it before you can claim fair use as a mitigating circumstance to avoid punishment. It is kind of like using self defense as a reason to beat a murder charge. You have to claim to have killed the person before you can claim to have done it in self defense.
I didn't get Evernote for the longest time but then it made way more sense to me when I bought a tiny double sided scanner and started scanning and shredding all my paper, bills, documents. Then I started forwarding all emails with attachments to my Evernote account. Then I started sharing my folders with my wife and using the mobile app. Now it's the central hub for all my information. Since it's all OCR'd I find anything instantly. Of course I had to upgrade to the paid version but at 1GB of NEW storage per month it's a pretty good deal.

The one feature I miss from MS OneNote is the ability to have audio synced to the text of a note which is fricken awesome for taking meeting minutes.
Just some quick feedback about your pricing. I think you need to accommodate your pricing model better for the AppStore where many apps have millions of users, especially free apps.
Read "The Hedge Fund Mirage" by Simon Lack
I found it takes some investment before it really becomes useful. I didn't get it at the start but now being able to search through notes and clippings I made years ago is really helpful. They have also made great improvements in notebook organisation which I love. I find it a bit unsettling that I'm storing so much data with one company (not that I don't trust them but that at some point they might go away) but they seem to me like a great company who would make it easy to get all your data out if they were ever shutting down.
We at Shoply.com share a vision with Gumroad about simplifying and democratizing ecommerce. We too started out as a pure widget play with the idea being sellers would leverage their existing networks to drive sales.

It turns out 'average joe' doesn't have twitter/facebook networks anywhere near sufficient size to generate decent level of sales. Just like they need help with tech aspects of selling online, so they need help with the marketing/sales and traffic elements.

We at Shoply dealt with this by aggregating products from all our sellers together into a centralised marketplace. Doing so allows us to help them by providing them an ongoing in-built sales channel too, alongside a quick and easy way to list products for sale and take payment

I expect Gumroad will experience a similar situation where sellers look to them to help boost distribution and ultimately sales.
seems like the Theil Fellowship gives participants a harvard quality social network (if not better)

http://www.thielfellowship.org/

down market, something like http://codeacademy.org/ might give you a state university qaulity network for a fraction of the cost
Mixins: A refactoring anti-pattern
Parent was asking about No. 3, you just explained No. 4?
Not really. There's a couple things hedge funds have to deal with that VCs don't - generally, it's easier to track the market value of their portfolios, so they have to show performance on a quarterly or annual basis. Also, the lockups for investors are much shorter (~2 years) so you can get out of an underperforming fund, whereas with a VC you're generally locked in from the start to the end of the fund. (Secondary markets do exist, but at a large discount.)
Firebase Scoble Interview
Dining on Data: How APIs Are Transforming The Way We Eat
I'm not so sure it is a bad initial result. It looks more neutral to me.

Given the judge's instructions on SSO copyright and APIs and the realities of re-implementing an API, I don't see how a jury could have reasonably concluded there was no potentially infringing copying. If so, the real question in play was the fair use analysis and that's where the jury deadlocked. Not as good as Google would have liked, but not as bad as it could have been, either.
Discussion from the initial announcement in January:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3480016
Now that you say all that, I seem to recall that level of openness being mentioned in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Bitcoin Funded Debit Cards
The VC market is one where the buyers of VC funds (LPs such as Kaufmann) have a lot less information than the sellers (the VCs themselves) - a market with a high degree of information asymmetry. In "a market where sellers have more information than buyers about product quality can contract into an adverse selection of low-quality products."

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2...
I'm not saying that hedge funds are great either. I'm just saying you can't swap one for the other - they're different beasts.
I can really appreciate this extension and the fact you've open sourced it. Thank you for that.

I think a successful modification to the HN feed would leave the same vertical spacing, but somehow make links more easily browsable. Zebra striping perhaps? Eliminating the number on the left or make it smaller?

I like the Share option. That's super helpful.

I'm not really liking the large links or their color.

The hidden filter that only shows on hover should be hinted at, at least, by making it slightly visible.

I think you've abandoned the HN brand. I believe a successful modification to the feed layout would be subtle enough that it wouldn't be immediately noticeable but, rather, generally easier to read.
Conversational Hacks:  "No Blocking"
If your usage is covered by fair use, it doesn't require the approval of the rights holder and can't constitute a copyright violation.

But this is arguing semantics, the problematic word being copyright violation. It goes against my intuition (and I suspect I'm not alone) to say that a violation of copyright has taken place when a usage is legal within the rules instituted by copyright.

I suppose people who associate a different set of semantics with copyright violation would have to talk about legal copyright violation versus illegal copyright violation. To me, the former is contradicting and the latter is a tautology.
Music Bundle Pack
Collection of 5 vector packs with 52 music elements ready for download.
Google 'infringed' Oracle's Java in split trial result
See discussion from a couple of days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3930668
For those interested, this has been discussed previously here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3930668
If the jury rules that Google violated copyright law, does it imply that there was an accepted copyright on the API? Anyone who understands law know what this ruling indicates as far as the bigger issue of API Copyright is concerned?
Are you compiling this for your blog, or just for a HN post?
I was thinking more along the lines that without the eye, the idea of light being projected in any direction at all has no meaning =) And then we could get started on the concepts of time and ordering.

But since I'm no longer a third year physicist contemplating the nature of existence, I just simulate light statistically. And sometimes that means doing things like "Photon Mapping", which is precisely raytracing, but the kind of raytracing you get when you know how to optimize an algorithm implemented as a computer program.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment#Delayed_...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mech...
The github link is broken for me as well. Here is the direct link to the github project for anyone else looking for it https://github.com/cloudfuji/kandan
I would imagine that most of the real magic will lie in making it work, and work well, as an input method - the video makes it look painfully awkward to use. Even Kinect which works relatively precisely is extremely annoying for anything else than kicking balls around on a screen. Even without interruptions like your children walking in front of the TV, getting Kinect to register an interaction correctly is a process of carefully performing some strange gesture like a wizard executing a spell while on LSD, and then doing it 5 more times until Kinect deems it precise enough.
Personally I don't imagine this becoming more precise in the near future than to be useful for perhaps turning pages on a reader or tablet.
Reduce what happening? Dying? I'm pretty sure the death rate will remain 100% even if you were willing to spend $1B to "prevent" it. Everyone dies.

I'm not saying that the guy should die instead of using other people's money to postpone death. I'm saying that he has no more right to that money than those other people do. You're talking as if there is an infinite amount of money to be spent on this one person. But spending money on this guy takes it away from other people. The world doesn't revolve around this one guy, you know?

Someone has to make the decision: how much money is it worth to postpone my death for a while? And if I arbitrarily decide that one more breath is worth all the money in the world, that doesn't automatically mean that I now get to spend all the money in the world on it. Even with "universal health care" there are limits.

Also, all the money that gets paid out by the state has to be paid in first by taxpayers. Moving responsibility to the state doesn't magically make health care cheaper, or free. On average, the taxpayers are still paying for all their health care.
A food iPhone app that doesn't suck
Today, my startup Munchery launches its iPhone app. With it, you can:

1. Get push notification of daily changing menus

2. Browse high quality food photos of the exact meal you are purchasing (or just browse around because you like pretty food photos)

3. Order with just a few taps. If you have ordered before, then it probably will take you less time to place an order than the time it takes to read this sentence.

To celebrate the launch, if you live/work in SF, we're giving you a fantastic discount on the first order that you place from the iPhone app.

Additional details about how our app is different from other delivery apps, as well as the promo code you'll need to save money on your next order, can be found on our company blog: http://blog.munchery.com/from-phone-to-fork
Some artists are realizing that they can expand their online presence by using other apps to create digital art while publishing into Instagram's ecosystem.

I'm never going to print out a 612 x 612 image to hang on my wall. I will contact an artist to ask for a higher resolution image to purchase and display.
Does -134% operating margin count as a "line-of-sight to break-even?"
Why? You might as well say that food is a human right, but feeding the population is not the responsibility of the state.
You can fix that with a "report this" link.
This headline and the terse article behind it leave it out enormously important aspects of today's events.

Mush more nuanced analysis here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3940322
And I actually posted my extension also called 'Hacker News Enhancement Suite' yesterday but no one saw/cared.

https://github.com/etcet/HNES
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3933090

I cannot say how angry/sad/confused this makes me :(
EDIT: why am I being down voted?

Oracle has a pretty strong case against Google.

To address the issue of fair use and if APIs can be copyrightable:

1. Judge Alsup told Google's counsel that Google had to address the Johnson Controls decision with a view to the Java APIs.

On October 3, 1989, the Ninth Circuit held the following in Johnson Controls v. Phoenix Control Systems:

"A computer program is made up of several different components, including the source and object code, the structure, sequence and/or organization of the program, the user interface, and the function, or purpose, of the program. Whether a particular component of a program is protected by a copyright depends on whether it qualifies as an 'expression' of an idea, rather than the idea itself."

On to paragraph 13:

"Here, the district court found that the structure, sequence and organization of the JC-5000S was expression, and thus subject to protection. [...] This issue will no doubt be revisited at trial, but at this stage of the proceedings we cannot say that the district court clearly erred."

http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/886/...

http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/05/oracle-v-google-cant-make...

2. the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
LPs commit money to new funds before the first investment is ever made. What type of information does the seller (VC) have that the buyer (LP) does not?
GoogleGuilty = APICopyrightable && GoogleViolatedCopyright && !GoogleHasFairUse

optimized (and corrected, because in your flow Google is always guilty since everything drops through to that anyway).
"does it imply...?"

No. The judge has yet to decide this (much more important) issue.

More info here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3940322
Looking 4 ways to find app developer 4 prototype
Looking for ideas on finding an app developer to do a basic prototype. The prototype is to secure a contract and more substantive work could follow.

App is essentially 5 screens taking user through a transaction and would use potential client's graphics to minimize design work:

Screens:
(1) Potential Client's Icon (2) Choose product (3) Choose product delivery method (4) Opt out of additional product features (5) Capture user selections in a 2d barcode capable of being scanned off a cellphone screen.

I think this is straightforward but am not an expert so I could be missing something.

If anyone has ideas, referrals or is personally interested pls contact me at projectmail7@gmail.com

Thank you so much!

Dan
He probably meant composition.