skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another major difference is that unemployment benefits are much better in places like France and Holland and it encourages people to stay unemployed. Though we're not immune from this problem either. I recently met a lady who was, "on fun-employment," as she called it. "I get a card from New York City every two weeks that gives me cash from most ATM's. My rent also gets paid. I'm moving in with my future husband at his apt in the Hamptons but we're keeping my place in the city in case we want to come party for a w/e." When I asked how long things would go like that she said, "Another 15 weeks to be sure, but if I fill out some paper work I could stretch it to 40 weeks, and I hear that Obama wants to add another 9 weeks, so all it all it's about a year."

Anyone ever use fun-employment to bootstrap as startup? :)
Individually wrapped sunscreen wipes are already in most pharmacies.
I actually had a company like Semco in mind, but certainly with firing people, especially for reasons of under-performance. How do you change the way compensation is allocated so that people who management usually decides to fire end up deciding to leave because of the structure itself?
more reason to keep the login info secret. Sure they can figure out the account by multiple ips...but that takes a little bit more effort.

Honestly, I think the user side portion is a bigger problem. Its all the psychology, people change the login info so that noone else would be able to do the same thing and prevent their access.
One Death is a Tragedy; a Million is a Statistic
I disagree as well. I have used 99designs before and was very happy with the results.

I know that designers don't like these sites anymore then coders like elance or anything, but if it works... people will use it
I forgot to mention something in my last post. It isn't so much the assumption of liquidity, but the assumption that given the particular kind of liquidity, the efficiency (in terms of opportunity cost) can be the same.

When I said liquidity of human capital, I did not want to mean person P moves from company X to company Y. I wanted to mean person P's production power (in terms of output, factoring in creativity, and the myriad of other factors), within the system (which also factors in P's capacity to induce disruptive changes) gets transferred seamlessly from X to Y. Again, this does not seem at all possible. Neither does this factor in effects of people spontaneously regrouping (i.e. forming startups). Having people in stable structures inherently slows down regrouping quickly, and you cannot assume that capital (money, enticement, whatever) can induce it to become efficient, simply because transfer of resources takes time and distance.

Of course, with the ideal assumptions of perfect information and instantaneous transfer of all resources, this would seem to work, but these are the same assumptions that ground many economic models permanently in theoretical territory.

Now, is there still a good reason to think the systems can be the same?
Don't reveal the fact that they are calling today and you have no idea what you are going to tell them.
I wish the iPhone plan was $30/month. It's actually $70/month minimum.
FTA:

"The week that Tim actually works a four-hour work week will be a cold week in hell."
That's the thing - unless you're in Japan, you can't rely on timetables. Otherwise this idea wouldn't make much sense (it would still be cool to amaze your friends with it while waiting for the bus though ;)).
A look at the language shootout (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...) shouldn't make this so surprising. OCaml is faster than Ruby (about 24x faster which, incidentally, is pretty close to the 22x greater requests served).

But as someone who has done a lot of web applications and as many of you I'm sure feel: it doesn't matter how fast your web application runs. What matters is whether your database layer and the schema you're using scales.

I guess the only arena that I really care about performance in is the database/datastore arena. Plus, Ruby is getting better optimized. Ruby 1.9 should be a huge leap forward and while it won't beat OCaml, it will be much, much better. So, I guess I can't get too worried about a performance problem that's easily taken care of - unlike database performance problems which are a complete PITA!
In my view this is actually good for developers, the more that the technology will be fragmented the more work we will have.
MAC address can be changed.
If you dropped the part about never seeing an ad there again, you could probably get display Ad companies to pay you for each explosion as a click, because if a user exploded it, then they saw the ad. Then, you'd LOVE ads!
Unless that wage also includes health care, loans you transportation (in this case, Bikes, but its better than nothing), and lets you attend English classes, which could translate to a valuable job skill.

(I'm not saying that migrants/immigrants can't survive in our culture without English, but being able to speak English well might allow them to find careers they otherwise couldn't.)

Also, keep in mind that workers get paid for any ideas they come up with that save the company money or create a new product. They'll also get paid if they're used a model. So there are side-opportunities.

In the end, it boils down to treatment. Sure, its not a great, glamorous job -- making clothing -- but they're treated well compared to their contemporaries in the industry. At the end of the day, a 50K job coding is a 50K job coding, but I think we'd all rather work at the place that has free back massages and a ball pit.
Baby selected to be free of cancer gene
This thread (with some excellent ideas in it) reminds me of the half bakery: http://www.halfbakery.com/

The half bakery has some good idea, some mediocre ideas, and some very entertaining bad ones.

Already submitted here it seems but evidently didn't get voted up at the time - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135677
"Smaller new tools emerge around the fringe of the market every day."

Isn't that how all new tools emerge?

I'm not going to disagree with the main premise which is that real innovation on the scale of the invention of the transistor are slowing significantly. Judy Estrin's book details this trend painfully, and lays down good evidence that it started around the 80s.

That said, I think it's useful us for to pin down what revolutionary "new tools" are, and where they come from, yes? I feel that this is an important nitpick because it is hard to say where "new tools" come from. They do certainly seem to loosely and randomly come from academia (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_molecular_biology) and sometimes from tinkering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile). However, these advances were always on the fringes.

What will the next jump be? Quantum computing maybe? It seems neglected and pushed to the fringes now so it's quite possible that that will indeed be it. After all, it seems that it's hard for people to seriously innovate in the limelight.
Try my new app: Social Music Charts on Facebook Connect
I started this project during the Christmas season so I could try out Facebook Connect. Please tell me what you think!
We don’t pay you to work here
1. go to the funded.com and do some research on them.
2. find out if you are talking to an associate or a partner. I wouldnt reveal much to an associate as they are almost definetly doing research. Either way, ask them up front what their intentions are
3. Decide ahead of time what you want to tell them. I would think about a couple of interesting tidbits that might hook them into taking a meeting with you.

Good luck!
A twitter-like feed that sends text messages to cell phones that let first responders like police and ambulance folks recruit helpful bystanders to assist in managing emergencies.

For instance - I need an entrance ramp blocked so no more cars get on this highway - is there someone nearby who can park their car to block it and wave people around?

Or - how many people are stranded on the other side of this flooded road - can someone nearby give me an estimate?

There should be some well-known way to subscribe to the feed, and it should be able to recognize your physical location.
I would only tell them your business model plans and that you're planning to make X amount this year (or that you made X last year). Don't go too far into your plans for 2009 unless they're public knowledge. New customers can be explained by $ amounts, not names. Only discuss your technology if it's common knowledge again (or if it doesn't matter to you that your competitors know). Be frank you'd love to go down the possibilities of an investment but you're not giving them an open door into your company until after there is a signed contract for the investment.
GitHub vs. BitBucket
See also "Debunking Daniel Tammet"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=412355
Windows 7 Beta goes public
All trains in Norway to stop for 2 minutes to protest Gaza invasion
What is scoble smoking lately?
Developing a Mac-based installer for Copilot
Keep Teens Safe from Porn on the Go | TechJaws
plentyoffish is one of the worst websites I've tried, dating or not, the style of it is like something from 1999. Random technical problems that if you ask about go unanswered or you're told to shut up, if not the thread is deleted.

The forums are a mess too, bickering and thread closures I mentioned seem to happen all the time. I left when I got tired of witnessing personal attacks on members...by the moderators!
Seriously, if you don't think they want to fund you, then cancel the call.
I hate it when people quote the $70/mo. Do you not pay for a regular cell service? If you actually look at the numbers, the pricing is exactly the standard AT&T plans + $30/mo unlimited data plan. (If you can get regular AT&T at a discounted rate, even better!)
It reminds me of many of the insights I had on life at 18. :)
Just because they've routed calls over the internet up until now doesn't mean this is the only way to do it. There are probably quite a few reasons for not using the data connection. A couple that come to mind are possible call quality issues and wanting to stay on the good side of carriers. We can gripe all we want about how much the carriers and their policies suck, but can you really blame someone for trying to avoid having to battle one of them?

This still covers users who primarily use Skype for international calls and maintains a high level of quality. The data connections on mobile phones can be spotty at times and this way you have a reliable connection to a relay point which in turn uses a more reliable internet connection. I used a VOIP service a while back that worked like this and it was great.

For all we know, they tried VOIP calls directly from the handset only to find out it's unreliable. I use StreamFurious on my handset and I'm disconnected every few minutes so this isn't so far fetched. Or maybe their market research revealed that most users are interested in international calls in which case it's an easy decision to go in this direction to avoid trouble with carriers. We really don't know. It's possible there's a good reason for it.

In any case, they're not being deceptive about it, and for the most part, the result is pretty much the same despite the varying methods. The only ones who are really left out here are the people who want to buy a handset with a data connection and make most or all of their calls for free over the internet. The reality is that they probably make up a small portion of Skype users. Sure, it would be nice, but when the companies building and controlling the networks are still in the business of selling phone calls this is a pipe dream. Maybe one day they'll just provide access to the network but we're not there yet.

I'm not aware of any terms of service that prohibit using the data connection for VOIP calls so someone is always free to create an application that does this. The best part about Android and the G1 is that you can install whatever you want on there whether you have permission from a carrier or not.
Lua (the impl) is awesome, Lua (the language) is very pleasent, but the arrays using position instead of offset (start at 1, not 0) thing...

I still love it :-)
Um, while a product is still vapor (hasn't shipped yet, genius) its a little hard to declare it a winner. How many concept cars has GM made that would own ALL other cars out there, only to have them produce a Pontiac Sun Fire with a different body kit? (Original re-make of the GTO, I'm looking at you.)

(Disclaimer: Some of my friends from college work at Palm now. If you're reading this this, Matt, good job, I think your product kicked ass.)
Not sure I agree; I think people are already using ad hoc methods to "price" karma; for instance, I have used such methods to "price" a Hacker News karma point as 1,000,000 reddit points.

The side effect of the market would be to rank discussion systems by credibility, or signal/noise, in real time.

It's also geeky enough that I think you could keep liquidity, even though there's no dollar value to karma.
(C-c-C-v-driven development)

I like to refer to this kind of programming as the successor to spaghetti code: copypasta.
Would you help build it?

I'd really like to eradicate blog comments.
So I guess in 2007 he could have claimed that Apple would take, uh, \lim_{x -> pi/2^(-)} \tan(x) years to surpass Palm's market share? (please excuse the bastardized TeX, but \frac is too verbose for ASCII)
99.999% of people who steal hardware aren't smart enough to do this. Also, 99.9999999% of people who use stolen hardware have bought it (off eBay for instance) and won't scrub it, but will plug it in somewhere that's monitoring.

I think this is a really good idea.
My home country was under single party rule in the 90's and has now emerged as a vibrant democracy with economic power on par with Australia thanks to such tearing down.

Polite requests were not sufficient to bring about change. It took confrontational, attacking arguments as well.
Patent that wipe in sealed package idea and take it to huggies/pampers. See what happens!
Good point. If they do all this by themselves, it would be much cheaper to pay a PR firm.
He's not saying that, he's saying that you should be living his parenthood vicariously through Facebook. I agree: you should.
San Francisco uses http://www.nextbus.com/

I love this service. Very useful.
PowerShell ABC's - O is for Output
I want blogs to look like Usenet, so that best affordance for a response is another blog post, not a comment. Comments are evil.

There's enough structure in blogs (blogrolls, tags, date, author, backlinks) --- especially if you mine comments --- to do take a stab at this.
That could backfire the PC guy is fighting daemons while the Mac guy is playing on the Wii. ;-)
There are constant adjustments made by the dozens of motors in the legs and torso to keep balance, based upon sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes. That's not preprogrammed.

My point about a reasonably controlled environment is that in the real world, even on a "flat" stage for a show, there are enough irregularities to make complete preprogramming hopeless.

I don't know enough control theory, but it could be stated that an open loop controller will be doomed to fail for a biped.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-loop_controller

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-loop_controller

Higher level, there are sequences of commands that yield a step forward or to the side. That is almost certainly preprogrammed. When you own an asimo, the api they expose is actually really limited. For example, to lift the arm from the side to the air will only have a few states in between, and you choose which one you want. This is not low level control at all. They do this because they know Asimo is a marketing machine, not a real robot, and they don't want grad students making it fall over on youtube.
Four billion and 1.
Good point, but the headline is linkbait.
"Having people in stable structures inherently slows down regrouping quickly, and you cannot assume that capital (money, enticement, whatever) can induce it to become efficient, simply because transfer of resources takes time and distance."

So you argue that having some people unemployed will in the long run prove more profitable for the economy?
Then inevitable a market will evolve around this and someone will come around and pay people to remain unemployed (possibly requiring a fee when they finally take a job).

"Of course, with the ideal assumptions of perfect information and instantaneous transfer of all resources, this would seem to work, but these are the same assumptions that ground many economic models permanently in theoretical territory."

If you're strictly talking about the real world, then I agree that unemployment will never reach zero and that it may be true that having unemployment may lead to more economic growth. But it may also lead to less growth. We can't be sure. Therefore we have to assume some kind of ideal model.
American cows are fair game.
Read it as if he's evaluating the product on the merits, not as if he's predicting the market. The iPhone is going to crush this thing, but it's still a nice looking device.
I hope so. As a Sprint customer, I've been waiting for such a device. As a general consumer, I'm glad that others are challenging Apple. I love Apple, but I also like others to be able to challenge them. In my opinion, no one was able to match the iPod for ease of use and size. The Palm pre is at least dimensionally competitive at a mere 2grams heavier and only 15% greater volume (a real keyboard takes up some space).

It's nice to see someone who hasn't decided, "we can make it kinda appear to be an iPhone" in the way that the G1 disappointed with its lack of multi-touch capabilities.

Hopefully Palm will pull it off!
There are still some outstanding questions. They comprise these list of items:

1. Limit set of rules and events.
2. Reduce cyclic triggering of rules and events.
3. Testing.
4. Tools.
5. Utilization of system as soon as possible.
6. Abstraction.
I have written a lot of XSL code which seems to be a pure functional language. (Can't change values once assigned, but you can do math an call functions etc.) I wonder how many other domain specific languages are functional?
He states in the book that the '4 hour of work' is just an arbitrary number. The title was used because his publisher was against his original title of 'Selling Drugs for Fun and Profit' and being such a self promoter he figured that working only 4 hours is something that would grab attention.
Am I the only one who remembers the first Web 2.0 companies, before the 2.0 buzz word was around?

I'm talking about Flickr, the early Flickr, how lean and neat was that!

Can we now look forward to more creative and lean things? At least until Web 3.0 rises to drown it all in money and unoriginality, again.
What is your point? That "living with a roommate" == "dickensian living conditions"?

The only changes to my lifestyle now that I have a real job is a) no roommates and b) I drink outside more than in, and pay less attention to happy hour.
I currently have T-Mobile prepaid and average about $10/month. I really want the iPhone, and can easily justify spending $200 for the device, but I don't want to be locked into a 2-year contract paying $70/month (totaling $1680) when my needs are met with a much more modest price.
Ask HN: Who do you follow on Twitter?
Business/Tech related(obviously)
I was going to type a long list of things to do, but it really boiled down to this: what can this call get you?

Who is calling? Is it someone who can put a term sheet in your hand next week? Or is it an associate out to impress the higher-ups at the firm? How good is the firm itself? World-class? Mid-level? etc.

Know who you're talking to and what they can possibly give you. If you're giving them something, get something in return.

And keep in mind you don't have to take this call if you don't want to. Ask them what the call is about and if it doesn't sound sincere just back out gracefully.
I haven't looked at the client portion of SLIME in a while, but wouldn't there be some changes needed to deal with languages where statements and expression are different from each other?

Getting Perl code into an s-exp would be fairly difficult actually (as opposed to getting an s-exp from a Perl complex hash -- which would be really easily) - generally (with Perl5) the consensus is anything that can parse Perl, is Perl. Python, Ruby and Perl6 (which effectively is a Lisp, complete with macros in forms of first-order primitives for CFGs) would, I am sure, be easier a lot easier.
Microvision's tiny video projector wows Macworld attendees
not to mention that Flickr was profitable, and could have actually turned into a big business on its own, and possibly into a traded company, too.
That's okay, as long that effect is roughly equal in every period of increasing unemployment. This and many other factors make it meaningless to treat unemployment additively, e.g. to say that 8% unemployment is "twice as bad" as 4%, but it doesn't diminish the number's comparative value, telling us whether we're better or worse off than before.
What you say is "marketing," I think is author creativity. Knowing the authors, the titles sound like their writing. For example, being a power broker is probably the main theme of the book about Robert Moses. The term is used several times, there's a chapter entitled that, and the central theme of the book is how Moses came to respect, acquire and wield power.

Similarly for The Coldest Winter, the author (David Halberstam) stresses the cold as a perennial problem for the infantry, and most of the events occur during a particular winter. I've read several of his books, and it's very much in line with his writing style.

Same with Shake Hands With the Devil. The author (Romeo Dallaire) uses that phrase in the introduction and at a turning point of the book to express how he felt about his position - he literally shook hands with perpetrators of genocide.

I agree that non-fiction books often have a kicker in the title to clarify the subject matter. But I think the pretty, poetical title is usually written by the author. At least I think it is for the books I read.
Ask HN: SEO for web apps
Can anyone point me to a resource of good information for SEO as it specifically relates to a web app? Like a typical app, my site has a landing page which provides an overview of the site and allows you to login or sign-up, a "learn more" section with a more detailed write-up of what the site offers as well as FAQ and About Us pages. After that, its just the app. Aside from looking for a good resource for information (webpage, book) my questions are:

1. Is the landing page the only one I need to focus on for SEO purposes? (I'm thinking yes, because this is the page that will have all the linkbacks)

2. Should I use robots.txt to block the crawler from the URLs that lead directly to the app (which you need to login to use). Should I block anything else, like the images directory?

3. Should I try to point people to http://www.mysite.com or www.mysite.com or mysite.com? Should I try to pick the form that most of my linkbacks are in?

4. Is a Sitemap necessary for such a simple page structure?

btw, I've read this HN tread(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=119986), however the site that seemed to come off best costs $100/month. Looking to learn and do this myself.

Thanks.
Deleting cookies is also an effective weight loss method!
Paper: Sharding with Oracle Database
Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design