skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
what is the incentive for highway planners? Isn't how many companies are in the area a little indirect of an incentive? How does it impact their individual wellbeing?

An indirect political incentive is a very weak incentive. There is more direct incentive to do nothing innovative.
Key detail: this does not refer to the successful Kickstarter campaign by the original creators of LSL (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1451923705/make-leisure-...), but to an entirely different Kickstarter campaign that just started (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1787675232/sam-suedetm-i...).
So what can I use this for? It's not obvious from the docs on github, and I had a quick look at the doc for statsd as well and it doesn't shed much light either. (and shouldn't it be ratsd? :)
"You should aim to hit 100 million active users"

Wouldn't it just be easier to sell something at a profit?
Releasing multiple gems from one repository
How to Secure Microsoft SQL Server for Shared Environment
Go after the problems you're interested in working on (like NLP). Masters degree or not, having something interesting to show beyond a degree will not only let you develop your skill set in an area that fascinates you, it will bring you more job opportunities in the long run.
Is there a reason this is not the default?
The Etsy blog post that introduced StatsD is helpful:

http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-meas...
Personally, the iPad book reading experience drives me crazy. The frills are utterly maddening, and the pointless detailing seems amateur-hour. Reminds me of the old Microsoft, where they used to tell designers that every portion of a screen had to have "information"--so they dinged a project made for their retail stores by a buddy of mine who created an animation of a shark coming through pitch-black water. So they made it blue and ripply instead.
>is often critical of current trends

I'm seeing more and more of this kind of article on HN recently. Solid blogger or not, if I had a penny for every "$current_trend sucks" screed posted here and frontpaged, I'd be retiring by now.

Honestly, it gets old hearing people complain about everything under the sun after a while. (And I say this as someone who complains a hell of a lot on his own blog, but then again I've never been posted here..)

Did we really need a breathless blog article to tell us that some infographics suck? Stop the presses!
I would suggest joining an early stage startup. They pay really good money as well as give you equity making it a sweet deal. Some that are funded have sweet perks as well. Sounds like that will give you some experience to eventually work on your own idea.
Great comment: ...are doing something so trivial that nobody is willing to pay money for it.

I have had many conversations with inspiring entrepreneurs that thought building a relatively simple product/service "supported" by advertising would instantly generate millions (or "gazillions").

I'm curious, though, what is your company's business model? Is it an ad-supported business?
A ponzi scheme requires intentional fraud. You have to believe you are investing in something real, not simply paying back someone else.

Social security is very clear what is going on. It also has mandatory new participants which keeps it from collapsing as well as well understood economic increases. The same thing happens with corporate pension plans, interest on treasury bills and any number of other systems that require future growth in order to pay back debt.

It is clearly not a ponzi scheme.
An important lesson here: It takes forever and ever for a brand to recover credibility. One sufficiently bad experience and protomyth will probably never even consider a VW again.
YEAAAAAAAAH!
Will follow-up with you...
Nice writeup, but I would think watching Chelsea win the Champions League is the exact opposite of "an emotionally traumatic experience".
MEKA and SRI are their two other partners and are no slouches.

They have a difficult problem space that they're working in - it will be very interesting to see if they can pull it off.
Make that N=2. This post is very, very similar to my own experience after launching my "startup on the side" last year (http://www.limelightapp.com/) and the advice closely parallels what I'd give to others as well.

>> Get your spouse or SO's buy-in. Until that happens, I'd suggest not going forward.

Agree completely. I think one key to gaining my wife's incredible support was the understanding we both had that Limelight came after her and the kids. Once we had that discussion, she made time for me to work on it once the kids were in bed.

>> Something has to give, and it's usually your hobbies.

I miss Japanese. :-(
"In the game of thrones, you either win, or you die!" Apple is king of the world (the bit of it that isn't Chinese and has lots of money), it collects taxes, makes laws, executes peasants (you app store developer, you). Facebook, Microsoft, Google, these are rich noble families... they want to be king, they want to live, standing still is not an option - talk to RIM, Yahoo! or MySpace. This is a bid to break the tax monopoly that Apple has which Facebook needs to access to monetize mobile.

One small problem - making phones is hard, making phone operating systems is very hard. However there are 4 options that Facebook has : WebOS, Maemo, Blackberry 10 and.. Windows Mobile 8.

Hardware - well it is bloody hard, unless you have a lot of cash (errr) in which case - go thee, go thee to China. There are some very, very, very clever engineers in China (gee dad?) who if you will give them the volumes, will give you the kit you want.

The trick isn't going to be making a good phone, the trick will be selling it.

In the Game of Thrones no one gets what they want, but everyone gets something.
I'm 27. I stopped getting mad at popular things around 22, when I realized popularity is just a side-effect of the target market appeal of a thing and does not in itself constitute something negative.

However, when you have a site with completely user-generated and user-upvoted content, the product is made by the people. So if the product is crap, it's actually because the people are crap. Combine this with the idea that this website was supposed to be a 'front page' for anyone on the internet to land on and peruse and I get a little sad. Not because someone might enjoy this crap - if you enjoy something, do it and be happy.

But the idea that a 10 year old kid might land on this site and dedicate a huge chunk of the rest of his or her childhood to generating new memes and learning to troll, when instead they could have been developing a skill, learning new exciting things or having fun with their friends... that's kind of depressing to me. But i'm probably just projecting.
So for reference, when I left Sun in '95 I joined a startup named 'Golfweb' as their 'technology' guy. Golfweb was an online magazine about Golf, entirely digital, no print. They had partnered with Golf Digest (print only) because GD didn't know if this 'Internet thing' was a fad or not. Personally I think our agreement was with some nerdy kid in the mailroom but I digress.

Anyway, we tried to sell companies like Ping Golf on banner ads. These guys were paying $10K - $40K per color page in Golf Digest so maybe $250K an issue and we were asking them to pay us $40K to have all the ads on our web site during the Masters Tournament. It was a hard sell even though at the time we were one of exactly two professional sites covering golf on the Internet.

The challenge wasn't that Ping didn't understand advertising, what they didn't know yet was how effective it would be. They measured everything and without data they didn't know if it was more or less valuable than print. Because of that they were unwilling to spend any money.

As it turned out that campaign was pretty wildly successful for them. Because of it they were way ahead of their competitors in exploiting the Internet for ads. Once they were in, their competitors followed, and that created a market model for costing golf advertising.

So this is the same issue with mobility monetization today. Since there isn't a huge amount of experience out there it is not easy to justify spending a lot on it vs web moneitization which is by now a 'proven' channel. But over time the data will come in and people will then be able to make reasoned choices about what they are willing to pay to be on some potential customer's phone at some given time.

In her presentation, Meeks proposed that mobile monetization should at least equal web monetization and probably exceed it. I've seen other people get there by reasoning about how people use their phone to find nearby places that can service some immediate need like food, car service, gas, Etc. As a contrived, but plausible, example consider a world with multiple Uber type livery services, and a user finds a nearby place on their phone's map application. You can sell the rights to a button that says "Pick me up here and take me there." to a company like Uber very effectively. As an 'advertisement' that is worth probably $1 - $3 a click depending on what the fare is going to be if its taken.

Now is that exactly an ad? I don't know. It is a convenient pairing of service provider offering at a probabilistically determined 'good' time to offer. That any individual doesn't click on the offer is fine, as long as some percentage (even a small percent) do.
http://spencerfry.com/whats-a-non-programmer-to-do

http://generalassemb.ly/start/fundamentals-of-entrepreneursh...

Oh, and ordering groceries and mocking up all kinds of zany product ideas.
Stabilizing Couchbase Server 2.0
The Future of Startup Accelerators
Tech Videos delivered at your Facebook
I don't think that has much to do with F1; any system with synchronous cross-datacenter replication will have that kind of write latency. Presumably if you ran in one datacenter it would be lower latency and just as scalable.
>It also kills me that when talking about ways one makes money he mentions Stripe, Boku, and Kickstarter in the same breath with ad networks. Those are not business models. They are just ways that money travels. It's like saying one's business model is accepting checks.

I came here to post this. Kickstarter's intent is to assist with bootstrapping a product. It's not monetization. It's a way to get the capital to produce something. They answer the question "It's going to cost $100,000 to make a batch of our widgets/books/etc. Is there enough of a market to actually sell that number?"

Stripe, Amazon Payments, Google Checkout, etc. are payment processors. Again, they're not monetization. They're there to get money from customers hands into your hands. They're the answer to "We want to sell this, how can we get our customer's money?"

But even if you're using those methods to provide answers to those questions, the fundamental question still remains: "What are you selling, and how do you sell it?"

THAT is where the business model comes in. If you cannot answer that question, I seriously question your entire startup.
You don't have to be as good as everyone else
- The full methodology isn't actually published anywhere.

- The rankings are creating by combining a lot of different factors that don't have anything to do with each other, e.g. by combining harm to the user with harm to society. This means that drugs like coffee end up being more dangerous than drugs like heroin, simply because more people use coffee than heroin so the total social costs are greater.

- The harms for drugs are measured as they are typically used, rather than correcting for things like differences in demographic and route of administration. This leads to drugs like heroin looking more dangerous than they are, because people who have drug abuse problems tend to gravitate toward drugs like heroin. (Whereas people who use, say, Khat tend not to be the worst of the worst as drug abusers go.)

- The harms of the drugs caused by prohibition are not accounted for. (E.g. they are counting people using dirty needles and impure/unknown/fake drugs as being a harm that stems from heroin, but they aren't counting using dirty needles and fake Starbucks as being a harm that stems from drinking coffee.)

- They're not accounting for the benefits of drug use, only the harms.

I could keep going, but I think I've sufficiently proven my point and then some.
(I work for 37signals and wrote batsd)

This is really just one piece in a bigger set of things to track performance, usage, etc.

You can think of it as:
Emitters --> Statsd (or in this case, Batsd) --> dashboards, alerts, etc.

We have emitters coming from Nginx, HAproxy, bluepill, postfix, etc. log files, a gem within all of our Rails apps, and a variety of other scripts that gather data. Those all point to batsd, which aggregates and stores them. We then extract the data into graphs on our dashboard, and use it extensively for Nagios alerting as well. There's a basic sample client included in this repository that we use for those purposes, though you're right, it just gets you raw numbers out of the box.

We're planning on releasing more of both the "emitters" that gather data, as well as a major part of our graphing/dashboard interface "soon".

And point well taken about making it more obvious how to get started and what you can use it for. I'll work on improving the documentation.
The Psychology of Immoral (and Illegal) Behavior
I was fairly certain that the infringing material was Sam Suede, which was the Wisecrack game...not Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded, which is the Replay game.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1787675232/sam-suedetm-i...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/leisuresuitlarry/make-le...
US Spec TDI is a bit closer to the GTD. Engine is only 140HP, and we don't get the fancy trim bits, but we DO get the sport suspension, which is a big part of why it's fun to drive. I think it's softened slightly from GTI/GTD spec, but not by much.

I'd love to have had the option of getting a GTD though...but it's kind of insane how poorly the Golf sells here... only sell about 15k of them a year, in the whole US. As of right now about 60% of those are TDIs.

NB: That's not counting GTI or Golf R sales...in the US VW treats those as separate models, not trim levels.
I've some reservations with regards to your pricing model. Say when I go from 3 user to 4 users I pay 33% extra. At basically no extra cost for you as a supplier ... (the operational cost difference between 3 or 4 users is in the case of a CRM system negligible). That simply doesn't feel right.
We don't use the same backend as Etsy's original implementation, but you should be able to take any script, etc. that emits statsd measurements for use with the original implementation and point it at Batsd. This means that the 50+ statsd clients that are out there, as well as lots of custom instrumentation, should "just work", even though it's stored and accessed in different ways after it's received.
Java WORA Defences Spent?
They use a game in their JS documentation! And as they wrote it it's totally vulnerable to the user incrementing their own score.

It's not just games, either. As soon as a client-server solution gets beyond utterly trivial it becomes hard to see how you'd do it without server logic.

Take another example described in lacker's link -- a messageboard post: the ACL defines whether or not a user can make a new post, but what controls the content of that post? What forces HTML tags to be dropped, or limits the number of images in a post, or the size of the post, or checks the domains of links, or prevents xss, or rate-limits a user?

Some of this you can do by treating your entire database as "dirty" and sanitising things on the way out, too, but that doesn't come close to squaring the circle.
I will say... I've had lots of success with some of the visualization projects I've worked on (TOOT TOOT!)... but none had ads and I had no service to sell... so that makes things a lot less complicated.
I was on the edge of my seat for the entire 2nd leg vs. Barcelona, and the final was draining. It's "how" they won it that was traumatic.
Is it just me or does the non-technical co-founder really get killed by most blogs?

I have been approached a couple of times by friends with 'ideas', they just need a programmer to build it for them. I respectfully declined each time and remain friends with these people.

None of them ever got anywhere with their ideas. They never quit their day jobs, they never read the right blogs and books (even if I suggested, and in some cases bought copies of the books for them), they never raised funding, they never talked to customers, and they never found another programmer. They had absolutely no idea where to even begin on the business side of things, much less the engineering side.

I think programmers get all hot and bothered by the idea of a 'non-technical' co-founder undervaluing their contribution and so we all love these posts. But really, most of the people saying they are 'looking for a technical co-founder' aren't just lacking the ability to code. They are lacking the ability to do a startup.

Calling them 'non-technical co-founders' really is giving them a free pass. Most aren't ready to be co-founders, technical or not.

It also really belittles a good business cofounder (lets not term it around what they can't do, but what they can do). A good business cofounder goes out and talks to customers, has a handle on the market, probably has a contact list full of potential partners or employees, can pitch, do some PR, and hopefully secure some funding. That is very valuable to a young startup, and most of the people with an idea and no coder aren't up to that level.
I don't think the premise is undeserved. SQL IS the center of the database universe. If we use SQL to mean the general concept of relational databases, then it is true across even more dimensions of the universe.

Relational databases and sql should be considered the pride and joy of computer science AND software engineering (with logic and math being the grand parents in this increasingly confused and mixed metaphor).
Part of it is hardware costs, part of it is human nature. Many robot hobbyists I know fall into the "That part is $X? I can build it for $X/N!!!"

Soon they have no robot, and half a part.
I'm no expert in compression, so its no surprise that I've never heard of xz. What are it's strengths compared to gzip, or b2z? Efficiency? Convention?
I haven't looked at their claims, but strictly speaking it isn't impossible that adding cargo increases efficiency. How? Well, if the cargo is added in a location that moves the aircraft's center of gravity closer to the aircraft's neutral point (the center of lift for the entire aircraft), then less trim force from the elevator will be necessary for level flight, resulting in reduced trim drag.

I'm not saying that their claims are correct, just that added weight can potentially result in improved performance, depending on how much weight it is and where the weight is placed.

Also, regarding scaling results to model aircraft, the subject is called "dynamic scaling," and it's actually a complex task to scale the various model parameters to get good results. Take a look here: http://adg.stanford.edu/aa208/dynamics/nondimen.html, under section 2.3.4, for the punchline. Also, an interesting history of dynamically scaled models can be found here: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/601262main_ModelingFlight-ebook.pdf
I think Google Places was also called Google Hot Pot at some point. Then, for a while, Google Hot Pot was just a different interface for viewing your reviews.

Edit: It appears that they've dropped Hot Pot entirely. google.com/hotpot redirects to maps.google.com
RIM's impending collapse: By the numbers
> This is why it irks me when people try to sort others into "technical" and "non-technical". Being technical isn't about technology, it's about technique. Techné. Skill in something.

This line should be taught and repeated many times in every startup book, school or accelerator. It's amazing how many people don't understand this.

It's widely accepted that you probably shouldn't be trying to build a new food company when you know nothing about food. Why do some people think it's a good idea to build a new technology when you know absolutely nothing about technology? It's not that technology itself has something magically exclusive in it. It's just that you're choosing to build something that highly depends on understanding technology to make business decisions. So it's just smart to understand technology to be able to make smart business decisions.

I can't count how many times I've heard "but it's just not my area, I'm a business/marketing/idea guy". Well, guess what, 90% of the things that are crucial for the success of your startup are not any one single person's area. You could either choose to not care and hope you're lucky, or you could actually get out of your comfort zone and do some learning like we all do.

If you're a pure hacker starting a company that highly depends on a good sales team, you should probably go learn something about sales. If you're a salesman starting an education startup, you should probably go look to learn something about education. If you're whatever and you're looking to build a tech startup, it's probably a good idea to look to learn technology. It's that simple. You have to realize that no matter what area you are on, if you're starting a new company, you are probably gonna have to do a lot of learning of new things that are completely out of your comfort zone.
Use RES and filter all these subs:
fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu, pics, gaming, funny, gifs, wtf, AdviceAnimals, trees, aww, atheism, skyrim, starcraft, Minecraft, pokemon, doctorwho, circlejerk, nba, lolcats, gameofthrones, reactiongifs, humor, community, gonewild, shittyaskscience, TheLastAirbender, cats, dogs, StarWars, PrettyGirls, diablo3, mylittlepony, leagueoflegends, dota2, Boobies, Diablo, 4chan, gentlemanboners, realgirls .
You'd be surprised by the change.
Yahoo Time Traveler App
>You kind of lost me when you started telling me that I should consider useless the same things you consider useless.

Well, other people sometimes are in the right on telling you to consider useless what they consider useless. For example, if someone tells you to consider "creationism" useless, they would be right. It's not like everything is a matter of personal choice --or that they just say it to impose their arbitrary opinion.

Same here, it's not like anybody else would have found the "url/title mismatch as a reason NOT to read an article" reasonable.

(We've ventured too far off into off-topic land, but what the hell)

>I'm just glad that the OP gave an actual answer... rather than just ridicule me.

And doesn't he being that kind make you regret suggesting people drop his article for a trivial typo?
Charge politicians by the word for submitted bills?
I think it's a fair thing to bring up, given that the F1 abstract comes across as claiming your-cake-and-eating-it-too:

"With F1, we have built a novel hybrid system that combines the scalability, fault tolerance, transparent sharding, and cost beneﬁts so far available only in “NoSQL” systems with the usability, familiarity, and transactional guarantees expected from an RDBMS."

In other words: sure, you can build a distributed, transactional system by making all writes synchronous... but most (all?) NoSQL systems prefer to optimize for low-latency operations over transactionality. As an author of one of those systems, I think that low latency is a more useful property in general, but the fact remains that it's a tradeoff, and it's a shame that the F1 authors deliberately gloss over that.
"SQL IS the center of the database universe."

Politically, yes. SQL/relational wins the popularity contest. But so what?

Technically, no, it's not the center. It's merely the most popular, for the time being. This is a temporary state of affairs.
Taylor Wilson: The Boy Who Played With Fusion