skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't mean to be defending or attacking the validity of the study, and this is of course completely anecdotal, but my own personal experience would lead me to agree with the results.
I wonder how long they can continue to do that. With all of the varying fees for baggage, 2 extra inches of legroom, early boarding, a sandwich, excessive fatness, excessive flatulence, etc.-- it's getting difficult to figure out how much the fare is going to be.
Poll: Are user reviews on the Web trustworthy or tainted?
Your post is premised on the stock market being a zero-sum game; for every winner there must be a loser. That is a false premise. Public ownership is a way for companies to raise needed capital in exchange for a share of their future. That's win-win. If you try to beat the market, then your success requires someone else's failure.

So just buy an index fund, and hold on. You will make more money long-term than you would in just about any other asset class.
You might have to answer to the custom (trading tariff?) once this business get big. (I'm guessing here.)

Great idea nevertheless.
I really enjoy using sass with compass... it makes css much more bearable...
Summary: Knol remains a mess of questionable content, still inferior to Wikipedia on several levels.
The docs he linked to are the Series AA docs we commissioned for YC alumni to use to when raising money from later stage investors. They're not the docs YC itself uses.

In our agreement the clause about change of control is more limited. We only have a veto over selling the company for less than 3x the valuation we invest at. The point of that kind of clause is not to ensure returns (on average, a 3x exit would make us the massive sum of $35k) but to prevent abuse-- e.g. someone selling the company to his brother for $1. Any subscription agreement will have at least that kind of restriction in it.
Damn, i would have loved to make it but I'm still recovering from surgery. Maybe next time...

Do any of you guys go to the NY Tech Meetup? Or other good local meetups?
All the arguments are good. Automated system, stuff happens, out of their control, etc. The result is still absurd.

I need to cancel my return trip because the plane you put me on crashed. A human being looked at a computer screen and said, "I'm sorry sir, there's a $90 cancellation fee for not returning on the scheduled flight."

But, but it crashed. I had to swim to a ferry boat in the frikkin' Hudson!

If I really felt like I had to say that to this man on the phone, I'd just hang it up, get my stuff and walk out. The cognitive dissonance generated by that level of absurdity would seriously threaten my grip on sanity. If I was lucky, I'd make it before collapsing into a quivering heap, reciting Dr. Suess books endlessly...
In Haskell you can just put your parens like you would in Lisp.
I do find it curious that MS would actually take delivery, and I also suspect they are trying to minimize the damage of buying at $130/barrel. Sorry about my comment being a little sarcastic...I am constantly amazed at the amount of money that has been swallowed by the derivatives black hole, and I like to poke fun at what I perceive as the flotsam in it's wake.
I think Knol is an interesting proof of the importance of critical mass and that critical mass is achieved with a combination a fantastic product/idea, a vibrant seed community, and a bit of dumb luck. It also suggests that brand recognition is not a significant factor in achieving critical mass for new services.
Richard East is at heart a strategic business developer
As owner of several million-dollar companies employing more than 200 people, Richard East certainly has lots to be proud of and could easily rest on his laurels. But what makes Richard so vibrant is his refusal to accept the status quo. His constant search for a better way to market businesses and to deliver what the customer wants. Richard is at heart a strategic business developer, a trainer extraordinaire and a loving husband and father.
Social Graphing Models used in the Social Networks
The major flaw in Knol, that I see, is that it has contrary goals. To the extent that Wikipedia does work its success is created by the "wisdom of the crowds" mentality where something is monitored by so many people that bad entries eventually get weeded out. Knol’s attempt to just use "qualified writers" prevents the Wikipedia-esque crowd oversight while at the same time limiting the people who contribute at all. This means less oversight and fewer contributors which is a double wammy.

Related to that Knol is clearly a "me too" project for Google. So while a startup or other focused competitor might see the problems that are hindering the service and rush to correct them Knol’s issues go unaddressed which is why it’s so stagnant now.

At this point, with Google tightening it’s purse strings a little, I expect Knol will be put out to pasture before too long (which sadly will come as a major blow to those fighting the scourge of horniness)
Mobile Web Development in Japan: A Tag Soup Tale
its only briefly mentioned in the graphic to the article, but Sealand has a fascinating history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand
To Undo or not to Undo
this is awesome. fun, and at first glance reveals interesting data (though not more than analytics, which is actually a good way to check validity).
New York Outdoor Adventure Camp, New York Summer Camp
Risk of theft, fire and cost of storage.

(Might still be a good idea.)
His post is very valuable for those apps where value is not derived from how many friends you have using the service with you.
One thing about most? university education, is that the good places have you doing. Homework is more than just busywork. It's to get you actively working in the system you're learning. Same with labs and projects.

Some of the troubles with applying some things (like calculus or physics) is that to apply them in a meaningful way, you need a whole other course's worth of background. So you do little things like calculate how many calories a person burns/hr, or what the unit normal acceleration is.
The History of Python: Python's Design Philosophy
As if gold was an investment with a rate of return.. And he isn't going to hide that 2k$ under his pillow.
My dad had a comment about this. When buying hard drives for work (a university), they would switch to whichever one didn't have a large failure.

They exhausted the space of the industry reasonably quickly. Just goes to show that for the (reputable) companies, major failures are pretty much random (although it might be nice to see some statistics?) and thus it's a wash.
On a tangent, does anyone know how to perform recovery on a HDD that is not detected by the bios (e.g. due to defect/damage on the pcb)?

I have a 500GB IDE Hitachi Deskstar drive (was originally in an external USB caddy, but now taken out) that I think has suffered overvoltage. Even though there are no visible burn marks on the PCB, when connected directly via IDE to any PC I try, the PC will not powerup let alone POST, which indicate some short-circuit perhaps? This happens even if IDE cable not connected, which leads me to think of overvoltage damage (could be wrong).

Replacing the PCB with one from an identical drive does not work due to the fact on most modern drives the PCB microcode is unique to the specific unit itself (swapping PCB with an identical unit [make, model, batch, MLC, all same] results in drive spinning but no detection in BIOS or even by the manufacturers own drive fitness tools).
The tools to check your drive are windows only.

Use hdparm -i /dev/hd* for ide internal

or

check /proc/scsi/usb-storage for external to see if you're affected in linux.

The article explains how to check in OS X using "About this mac". Sadly, you will need windows to actually update the firmware.
Counter factuals are experiments we all wish we could run.
" I'm programming. I'm not wrestling with markup; that's for computers to do. I get the same pleasure out of using HAML."

Anecdotal counterpoint:

I'm one of those who has the opposite experience with Haml. It's a constant fight. OTOH, XML/HTML is stupid easy; my editor takes care of the annoying parts, and I never fight with cryptic errors. It's easy to cut-n-paste for assorted sources, and use WYSIWYG editors if and when I want to.

I think I could live with Haml (I'm sort of compelled to deal with it since I took over an abandoned Rails project) if it did not use significant indentation. It works ok for small chunks of text, utter pain when there's much nesting going on.

The application of the description "terse" is quite on the money. It's not a feature.
There was advice to read the "Intelligent Investor" written by Ben Graham, Buffet's mentor.
I realise this is an older article, but today was the first time I'd seen it and I found it very interesting. Is it bad form to post older articles? (I realise this is Hacker News, but I was assuming it's more important that it be interesting than new...)

Thanks for the updates. That video was awesome.
They only shut down new registrations.
As they stated, they will continue to allow previous users to use the service "indefinitely".
Linux KDE 4.2 RC1 screenshots
I agree.

The nav bar is too cluttered and too close to the content. There doesn't really need to be any lines between the text of the buttons, just make them look like buttons on roll over. Additionally, the bottom of that column is loaded with noise.

The content could use some more whitespace, particularly around headings and between paragraphs.
Dubai’s Great Britain-shaped island sells for $63.3mn
David,

I do agree with you that there are win-win opportunities in the stock market. Investing in index funds (though plain vanilla they might be) is indeed better than having one's money rotting in a checkings account.

A few friends of mine decided to invest in small caps when they were still in college. In the first couple of months they doubled their money. Then they lost it all. If one does have a genuine passion for trading and investing then, by all means, keep trading and investing!!! If one is looking for fast cash, there are easier ways of making money... and there are more fun ways of going thru college than looking at stock quotes on a bunch of LCD screens.
One question is if it is as simple as that. The human genome is immensely complex; much like raw object code (and compacted and self-modifying at that). The number of active genes are far too small for the amount of variation, so maybe she just got a bad run of genes. Unfortunately, that would make Reinhoff's search useless, because he would never find that one misplaced gene, and missing the four or ten that acted in concert to bring this about.
It seems that, as with YAML, examples tend to be quite short, with limited indentation.
I would delete my comment, but the option is not there.
A Seasoned Linuxer Switches to the Dark Side
Who uses Yammer here?

I tried it for less than a day and got too lazy to keep it up to date, the rest of my founders did not try at all.
Here is the RIAA's position:

"Online piracy is the unauthorized uploading of a copyrighted sound recording and making it available to the public, or downloading a sound recording from an Internet site, even if the recording isn't resold. Online piracy can now also include certain uses of "streaming" technologies from the Internet. Because of the nature of the theft, the damage is not always easy to calculate but not hard to envision."

Source:
http://www.riaa.com/physicalpiracy.php?content_selector=pira...
The only way to win in stocks is to invest in value and hold long. I would suggest just going in on a leveraged index ETF and just forget about for 5 years. I bet you'll get around a 20% return.
My path to Clojure
This article has already been submitted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441314
I killed it for you and gave you back the 11 karma points. Now can this thread be over?
I think the rigid support is a symptom and the malady is corporate bureaucracy. In order to fix this I think you'd have to find a company worth fixing and attack it from the top down.

If someone was really passionate about this it might be possible to fix it in one large company and use that as a halo case to sell their services to additional companies.
There are way too many hedge funds building trading systems. Some know what they are doing, but many don't. Trading algorithms are important, but choosing a financial instrument which one understands well and other people understand not-so-well is also critical.

Personally, I think that stocks are too simple. Many people understand them reasonably well. Microsoft's stock is not that different from GM's stock, though Microsoft builds software and GM builds cars. Bonds are more complex. Commodities are even more complex: trading crude oil is not the same as trading sugar or corn. Structured products are probably the most complex of all (not even the banks know how to price them), which leaves room for the small guys to dream of making a profit.

Quoting Paul Graham ( http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html ):

"Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him."

In my most humble opinion, this applies not only in the start-up arena, but also for small investors up against the big banks and hedge funds. Banks are famous for excruciatingly painful bureaucracy, which makes them slow to react to the market sometimes. Banks typically trade large volumes, which works against them. If there's an edge one can exploit is to trade instruments which one understands very well with people who do not understand them all that well.
> "The interesting issues are social and legal," says Mikolaj Habryn, a site reliability engineer at Google. "You'll get slavery. You'll get drug dealing. Maybe there'll be polygamous Mormons. The first people involved will inevitably be those who want to do things they can't do on land, and we have to deal with that."

Is total laissez-faire at all desirable?
I bought 200GB Seagate Baraccuda a couple years ago and have since gone through 2 RMAs. Though the hard drives fail, the RMA process is one of the most fluid and painless RMAs I have encountered.
I figure that if you take VC money you believe you can build a company worth $100 million.

Granted VC David Hornik in the following video is referring to revenue potential, I still think that what he says implies that VC's are looking for investments with potential exits far greater than $100 million.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epdTQf0ZhPE

"Billion dollar companies? We like those, but we really prefer $100 billion companies." -David Hornik, August Capital
Ask HN: beautiful Haskell books?
Can any of you recommend any 'beautiful' Haskell books? I'm not looking for tutorial texts such as Real World Haskell or the Haskell School of Expression, but rather things which present interesting, language agnostic topics and ideas - much like SICP and PAIP do - using Haskell as the medium for their expression.

Browsing Amazon yields possibilities such as "The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming", but in general there do not seem to be a great number of books along these lines.

What are your favorites?
Lifestyle business? Google or Microsoft could eat your lunch
HN is sagging under the load of new users. Sometimes, in the middle of the day, it serves up blank pages. Also, since the edit limit is one hour, if one clicks the edit button at 59 minutes (i.e. right before it disappears), the response might be something like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=440702
To clarify I meant that as a lower bound. In other words, don't take VC money unless you believe you can create a company worth at _least_ $100 million.
Summary: He likes his MacBook Air.
Seasteading is one way to find out.
Richard East strategies
Richard East strategies that reduce attrition and increase retention to its maximum capacity. Richard East responsibilities as a business owner understands his clients "life cycle". We need to optimize this relationship, both in terms of overall margin, as well as overall value delivered to the client.
If the grocer was suing the thief in civil court for restitution, that's exactly the kind of calculation the court would have to do.

However, in our court system, thieves are generally tried in criminal court, not sued for restitution. That's why copyright cases (usually civil) are so different from real theft cases (usually criminal).
The way the system works now, is if some large business interest says you're infringing, you won't have the power or money to fight them.

Great system we got going here.
HTML is nothing more than a syntax that represents a tree of nodes with attributes, that's it, and there are other syntaxes that can also represent that same structure just as good.

When you have a language who's syntax is directly capable of representing that structure natively, it's a huge programmatic boon to simply write the markup directly in the host language.

In Seaside for example, since HTML is written in Smalltalk directly, I can use all of Smalltalk's automated refactoring tools on it, extracting methods, renaming things, pushing methods up and down the class hierarchy, etc. You can slice and dice pages in a way not possible with text files.

This is a huge advantage over raw HTML templates for the programmer. Seaside firmly insists that the programmer, not the designer, should be generating the proper markup; the designer has CSS. If this fits your work style, or if you're both the designer and the programmer, this style will benefit you and is much more enjoyable that raw HTML.
This is a naked money grab by Comcast, but geared more to the future than now.

Now, most people won’t use 250GB a month.

In the future — say 10 or 12 years — most people will use ten times that. This gambit is just to get people used to metered, limited internet so they can charge much more in the future when bandwidth usage is far higher. As a cynical, Machiavellian profit strategy, it is a good one. Most will say, “Oh, 250GB! I’ll never use that!”

And then in three or four or six years, they will. And then they’ll get the $500 internet bill in the mail. Comcast's bandwidth costs have done nothing but go down over the years. I can get 250GB+ transfer from a hosting company for $10 a month these days.

I will never use Comcast, and I urge everyone else to do the same. You will get screwed over if you let them continue this backwards-looking strategy of un-commoditization.
Yes. Buy an arduino kit like this one I got for Christmas: http://www.adafruit.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&... . Work through the tutorials and as many more as you can find until you're comfortable with the hardware.

Round up as many interesting RSS feeds for hardware hacking as possible. As a first exercise, learn how to read spec sheets for components in order to select suitable devices (everything from passive and simple active discrete components to CPUs and displays).

I've never done what you're asking to do but electronics are surprisingly modular these days, so the next steps should be pretty obvious once you get rolling.
Cloud computing: Threat or Menace?
As long as large conglomerates with oodles of cash and lawyers control the debate, the system will get worse.

How to change that? I haven't a clue.
Facebook Grader For The Sad, Sad People Out There
Why? You only need to get into weird "sharding" schemes if you need to workaround sucky concurrent write performance of individual instances. You can do thousands of commits/sec on a single instance of a serious RDBMS on off-the-shelf kit.
Wasn't quite ready for this attention, but so it goes.

You win some, you lose some.
The key point is the rate of growth. Knol reached 100,000 articles in 6 months and now gets over 140K unique visitors a month. While that's small potatoes for Google, that's pretty good as a measure of a trend.

I work at HubPages, a start up that's similar to Google Knol. From my view, the idea of crowdsourced articles is really taking off. We're getting over 9.4M unique visitors a month at HubPages.

If Google can build a community around knol, it will really be a force. That, after all, is the secret sauce behind Wikipedia: its enthusiastic core, community.
SkyBox: Microsoft's MobileMe, But for All Phones?
Good thing I have a backup drive ... which is ALSO Seagate.
http://jungledisk.com (not affiliated at all)
Actually, this was useful on an the Apple II series where you didn't have {} characters on the keyboard and wanted to program in C.
Reputation as Property in Virtual Economies
Stanford undergrad as well. Do you have a way to contact you?
If it's out there, it's fair game. But that said, you have nothing to be ashamed of: it's a nifty little app, and any press is good press.
However, in our court system, thieves are generally tried in criminal court, not sued for restitution.

Restitution is a normal part of criminal sentencing. http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/restitution

In criminal law restitution is a regular feature in the sentences of criminal defendants. Restitution in the criminal arena refers to an affirmative performance by the defendant that benefits either the victim of the crime or the general public. If a victim can be identified, a judge will order the defendant to make restitution to the victim. For example, if a defendant is convicted of stealing a person's stereo, the defendant may be sentenced to reimburse the victim for the value of the stereo, in addition to punishment such as jail time and monetary fines.
I'm a little tired of this 'file sharing is theft' argument. It's not a physical item, and it doesn't compare to taking such a thing from a store.

What's being taken is the opportunity to make a transaction. It's more like blocking the entrance to a store. The problem with that analogy is that we don't have some traditional method for accounting that loss. If you did that in real life, you'd be prosecuted for trespassing or something similar.

Which is the point -- there isn't a traditional method for accounting of that loss, and any analogy that enables one is wrong. In the case of file sharing, the prevention of sales is the only crime being committed, and people hate doing the math/research on something like that.
Nokia 7100 Supernova (Unlocked) US Version 
The Nokia 7100 Supernova is a phone geared for style and entertainment. This sleek handset delivers great features in a design that is easy to use. The slide mechanic works without a problem and offers seamless access to the keypad.
What computer graphics were in 1984: Unboxing an Atari touch tablet
The Wired Presidency: Can Obama Really Reboot the White House?
Very interesting way of putting it, something I've always known but never considered comparing to other jobs. Then again you still need to pay the bills while unemployed :) A plumer may have more luck doing 'perk' jobs.
It's Michael Arrington. The guy has no class, tact, taste, or off switch.
Here's a Wikipedia article on the 1997 Albanian Crisis that was initiated by a ponzi scheme:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_unrest_in_Albania
I had not read the article, so I thank the original poster for it, even if it is "old". Well written, not too gonzo, classic wired.
I have to commend the father for such a valiant effort.

However, shouldn't he have been able to automate part of the process, if he was manually comparing printouts to the Ensembl reference genome?

The job was daunting: The printouts contained data for approximately 20,000 base pairs, and there was no feasible way to automate the hunt for variants. After putting in a full day of consulting and then getting the kids to bed, Rienhoff would retire to his attic and spend hours checking Beatrice's adenines (A), thymines (T), guanines (G), and cytosines (C) against the Ensembl reference genome.