skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/nov/...

If a number seems hard to believe, it probably is. Think it through--how many hours do you spend doing your taxes each year? A few hours? How many hours do you spend showering and brushing your teeth each year?

Maybe it's businesses--but the entire US legal sector is only about $150 billion.
A few days ago,i stumbled on Newton's Principia in my college library, and i could not help noticing how accessible he was relative to his pupils.On the very first page,he gives only one rule for finding derivatives that applies in ALL cases plus worked out examples on how it works.I felt like i had wasted too much of my time in college reading too many useless tomes.
I think that fluid dynamics serves as an appropriate analogy for understanding social networking. Companies like facebook interact with a force that's very similar to fluid flow and equally subject to the conservation laws. As with fluids, it's convenient to view your community as a continuum of users whose desires are well-defined individually, but vary continuously between each other because of socialization.

From this, it logically follows that changing one aspect of the system could cause ``unforeseeable'' consequences in another. I hesitate to say ``unforeseeable,'' because really it's a complete failure by the decision makers to understand their community's intra-member interactions. So, claiming that facebook isn't going anywhere is flawed, because as soon as the users' needs change, altering one service could be like closing a release valve and increasing the temperature of water in a pipe: eventually, there'll be an explosion.
However, I'm sure they'll prove to be untouchable.

That remains to be seen. The New York Times reporting points out that the FDA administrators spied on correspondence with members of Congress of both parties, who are appalled that that spying happens. That's a dangerous mistake to make in an agency funded by appropriations from Congress.
Because I like to be able to use graphical tools and VNC etc feel laggy.
It's a substantial improvement, and if you graph it over time, it's heading down after decades of going up:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Household_Debt_Relati...

That downward trend is the opposite of appalling.
Great, everyone thinks I'm crazy and my pants are falling down.
It doesn't list the weight of the screen on there...
Ask HN: What's the best live blogging/etherpad-like service?
I've got a research team of three that makes live notes for me in a "ticker" (google doc) to inform my angel investing. They basically profile startups and product information for me, and from that I select startups to meet with it. I'd like to share the real-time ticker with the public, but Google Docs is a just a dog when you invite more than 25 people to it. I'm wondering if there is a live blogging style platform out there that can handle like 10,000 folks watching my researchers type. Thoughts? Etherpad wasn't stable enough sadly.
That assumes LinkedIn helps companies/workers fill positions/get jobs 1 year sooner than they otherwise would have (if the pay stays the same).
Texas to Ban Critical Thinking Skills?
2013 Nissan Pathfinder release date
Scribble Live
I don't think FB is going out of business anytime soon, but as time passes, I think that it's core value is more like its original vision -- i.e., a social directory. Seems like it'll become a repository of all your social contacts and your virtual passport when signing up for other sites and will cease to be the place where you spend all your time communicating with friends and discovering new things.
Funny thing. The only time my Lumia crashed it was because I really messed up with the app I was developing.

About space inefficience, with Metro I can see at a glance the most important things. You know, less information density -> more focus.

For me, the best features are fluidness (I still see last generation Android phones which are laggy), the live tiles are great to have all the information at a glance, and I really love the Metro design. Also, the deep integration with Twitter and Facebook makes it a really good system.
Did the NYTimes article change its title? The HN article reads "F.D.A. Surveillance of Scientists Spread to Outside Critics", but the NYTimes article's title is "F.D.A. Spied on Its Scientists' E-Mails in Bid to Cut Criticism".

The new title seems more accurate. It's still no good at all (obviously), but it doesn't appear that they monitored any computers except their own employees' computers. Of course, that ends up intercepting both sides of any conversation, which may often include non-employees; but that's generally the case when any employer monitors their employees' email (as many do). The questionable part would be whether this violated whistleblower protections, i.e. it was done in retaliation for a complaint.

(I'm more generally wary of employers reading their employees' email, but afaict it's widespread and legal, if not done in some kind of prohibited retaliatory manner. At least, that's the case in the U.S.; I believe some other countries may have privacy laws that restrict what employers can read.)
Can anyone please post the source of Getspool bookmarklet code somewhere (e.g. pastebin) ? I was not able to find it anywhere.
This is a thoughtful response, and shows that we're actually pretty close. The science is mixed on whether humanity is better off I think - there are winners and losers for sure. However, despeciation gets me most as it seems most irreversible, that and whether or not there are other feedback loops that we're not thinking about.

I agree that it's overhyped, but the question here in on the margin. If we could take the insurance payment and put it towards alt./nuclear energy research we'd be killing a few birds.

I don't see how our economy would be crippled by the "insurance" even at $1T in debt funding (remember how big TARP and the Treasury's loans were). Currently, we're putting far far more than this into overspend on the military ($1.5T/year) - which is defending resource and shipping interests far more than anything else. Couldn't we just solve those problems with similar funding?
You really have to wonder though: Why dont our doctors have access to a "social doctor network" as robust and salable as Facebook? Why cant our doctors share medical records as easily and with as user friendly of an interface as instagram? etc. It might be hard to say "HEY, all doctors, you must USE THIS SPECIFIC SYSTEM" but if we could just agree on that, why cant we put the Facebook engineers to work on revolutionizing the way doctors share information?
I think to add to you second point. It isn't that the problems are hard/expensive in themselves; it is that they require lots of change.

"The need to change has to be greater than the luxury of staying the same."

Change is difficult. Change needs to be embraceable.

Change needs to be proposed as well though. Change does need big minds.
I certainly see the point they are trying to convey, but this is a bad analogy.

The Red Cross receives funding through donations and/or government subsidies. The donuts really are not their core product, if anything they would be more akin to a retail 'loss leader'.

The average web startup only has one core product, at least it gets to the Facebook scale of having thread its way into multiple aspects of your life. These startups are only getting their money through venture investors, who most certainly do not view their checks as 'donations'. So, there is a basic requirement to transition from free to revenue generation in some fashion.

The troops most likely saw the donuts as a small token offering from the Red Cross, and also felt they had done something to earn these free donuts. While there is a lot of feelings of entitlement among some customers of free services, I think the bulk of the users understand the company has to make money somehow.

In many cases the 'freemium' model appears to work well, as long as the paid versions offer obvious value. I wouldn't recommend for most people to not offer some free version of the product, but I also wouldnt warn them against charging for their products via a story about Red Cross donuts.
Not the exact thing you're talking about:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/30/why-kik-loves-windows-phone...

From the post: Kik, a developer of cross-platform mobile communication apps, says something really strange happened when they launched their Windows Phone 7 application last June: user growth across the iOS and Android platform both accelerated significantly.
I would buy a van and drive around offering virus removal services. I think that could really be successful in the right market.
Progress and innovation are often built upon a series of "small conveniences" that, when added together, make our lives immeasurably better, or enable other innovations which do.

That said, you're clearly too emotional about this to have a reasonable discussion.
Umm I'm not part of the Toshl team. I only know some of the guys. And the give full disclosure: my company is working with Toshl's parent company on some totally unrelated projects.
I see. Thank you!

I disabled the limits for unconfirmed users and will create a merged form as soon as possible.

The development flow looks like this to me right now: First I built a strictly REST/model-centered back-end, and now I have to smooth the corners between user-friendliness and those standards. Interesting observation.

(Also, if anyone is curious what I'm building, it's https://artistsnclients.com/)
It appears pH is only one part of the problem.
Even as I'm writing this I'm at a hacknight in Bangalore, a over night even on BigData. We are hacking away to learn and make a lot of things.

One thing that I observed today was an old friend and colleague sitting next to me. He sort of wrote a Perl program to analyze a weeks worth of tweets in India and draw real cool visualization out of it. The thing is script was not really big and was full of functional programming stuff.

As I was reading the script with another friend, My friend was like 'Oh! I though SQL is unpopular these days, or Perl was dead, or no one uses functional programming these days'. I soon realized- For each of these cries, some one is still sitting and doing awesome stuff with things and using the most simplest and basic tools.

Vast majority of awesome guys don't blog or tweet or harp about every bit of tiny things they have achieved on the Cyber space. But your everyday guy is vastly influenced by ranting, blogging and tweeting and takes them to be holy! And anything other thing than that- which produces results is generally a 'black swan' event to him.

So when something unpopular is used to get the job done, its often difficult to the everyday guy to understand this.
Show HN: PriceFlurry, the service that helps you save money
The Last Psychiatrist: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/
Only managed the first paragraph before the bubble-o-meter went off the fucking scale.

- Crap buzzword filled domain name. Check.

- All encompassing vague idea. Check.

- Young computer whizzkids. Check.

- 1 millllion dollars. Check.
Hey Jason have you heard of Spoken Layer (spokenlayer.com)?
> It looks like a blanket license, which isn't a bad thing if Microsoft has something other companies want.

"Not getting sued" should not need to be a product.

> My understanding is that patent-related legal services are extremely expensive. A few dollars per device is easier to deal with than months of patent research every time a manufacturer wants to change something.

As I said, I don't want to grade on a curve. Both of those options suck.
True, but it's the future. Eventually no distro will ship i686 code anymore, just as they don't ship i386 code anymore.
Nvidia or the hackers? ;-)
At the very least its heavily reliant on reinforcing cultural stereotypes that likely have no bearing on actual gender differences.
A New Course - Tomorrow's Copyright Model
A market without the Internet would probably not be the right one. :-)
I have to agree. Just because these companies made succesful products does not mean they are geniuses. Just because you work for facebook doesnt mean you're the greatest mind of a generation. You just got lucky. People have been throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks for a long time. Some get lucky, some dont. I dont think Mark Zuckerburg "engineer'd facebooks success" mindfully. He was just in the right place and the right time with the right connections and enough money. Its all about who you know.
Why I don't like factory_girl
Check out hackpad.
I'd set up the world's largest local area network.
Thanks. I didn't know that "Leader" meant "Editorial."

The linked article is much more what I would expect.
"We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (...) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."

Obviously we can't have children questioning authority or the fairy tales they're fed in Sunday School. That would be anarchy!
Github suffers the same issue. What about Bitbucket, Google Code, and Sourceforge?
While I've never seen a hiring manager looking at the code actually committed to open source projects, I've certainly been asked in interviews about the contributions to well known projects I list on my CV.

Other interviewers haven't mentioned the contributions at all. So I guess it depends on the interviewer.
Comparing my Lumia 900 to my old Evo (HTC):

I greatly prefer the look of the tiles to the widgets/apps mismatch on the home page. And the ability to be able to pin so many different things to the home page from inside of apps, instead of going to a separate "add widgets" section, is very useful... I don't have to think about "oh I should see if this app has a widget I can pin."

I've found the Skydrive Office integration to work much better than the Google Docs app Google provided for Android. Faster loading, better controls, and the ability to pin stuff to the start page with ease. OneNote is also the best note management app on a phone I've ever used.

I really like how they did the "people hub" thing of centralizing all the info/connections you have about someone in one place. (Though it's annoying that the messaging app doesn't support FB "messages", just FB "chat", so I also have the FB app installed in case someone sends me one of those.)

The overal design language is great. (For a good example of a third party app getting it, compare the Android Weatherbug app's UI with the WP7 version.)

I really prefer the use of vertical scrolling on the home page to swiping left/right to get to other home pages—I always forgot about stuff that wasn't on the home page with Android, and find a quick flick to scroll down my whole home page a much better way of seeing everything I want in front of me.

And in my case, it's been far more stable than my Evo ever was.

My biggest complaint is that the gmail client isn't as good.
Show HN: Social Gravity - A new and organic way to analyze your Twitter network
http://www.whatdoesyourstartupdo.com
"A lot of other problems in the fields of machine learning, bioinformatics, etc are largely just software problems."

Speaking as someone who has been pretty far down this road, the "inexpensive" part of bioinformatics is relatively unimportant. You don't get anywhere real without lab work, and that's as expensive as ever.

I'd love to see the web2.0 moguls funnel their money into antibiotics research or hydrogen-generating bacteria, but make no mistake: that kind of work takes a lot of cash.
There've been a few comments explaining the "More" behavior. And pg has significantly tweaked it at least once. (If/As I recall, to keep it from tying up so much memory and bogging down the server.)

The last I knew, HN was still running on a single box. And maintained by a small set of people. That seems to be pretty damned efficient, overall, and I'm willing to accept a few compromises.

One workaround is to load up the linked "More" pages immediately, into new tabs or in one or another other fashion. (Sometimes, a "hack" isn't about code, per se. But please don't overdo this and create needless server load.)

Anyhoo, there's some more detail and history in past HN comments, for anyone caring to dig -- through them, as opposed to the Arc source code.
The problem is that the algorithm is using a definition of "most likely" that doesn't help you answer questions about the real scene captured in the image.

For example, if what you're really trying to do is decode text, this algorithm will lose every time to one that knows the prior probabilities of natural human languages. ("ONLY" is much more probable than "QNLY", but this algorithm does't know that).
As a kickstarter backer I think the most important thing to figure out is what is in it for the people that back your projects. It isn't tax deductible charity that they can feel good about, and no matter how great you think your project is they won't do it just because you are passionate.

I backed light table because I wanted to play with it, I backed penny arcade because I want them to do more projects and instead of work for hire, I often back books that wont get published unless there is a campaign. In every case there is a sense of camaraderie that I do not experience buying something on Amazon, it is personal, however in every case I also get some piece of content that benefits me.

* I am assuming you mean a kickstarter style project, if you mean something completely different then ignore the above. You may also not be getting answers because you didn't share any details about what you are trying to do.
The authors specifically allow their work to be republished with attribution.
There is a Firefox extension similar to this.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/instantfox/
Well the troops are the ones holding a decades long grudge against the Red Cross for a decision made not by them but by the Secretary of War...
I'd start a business that would have offices in the top 20 major commercial cities in the world and would trade physical commodities taking advantages of the price differences between these locations. My business would use telephone or telegraph.

The presence of the internet and ensuing information exchange reduces these price differences to make such a business nonviable.
There wont be much change, besides chatting in #ai, #machinelearning and #lug-bremen, browsing the web for lol cats, and the like.

My startup is applying machine learning to industrial processes - and guess what - most factories, power plants, chemical plants or oil fields don't have internet.
This is ridiculous. I actually started reading with a really positive mind, but Richard Branson is never going to see any of that $1M.

- Scott... got the idea when his computer crashed and he lost a spreadsheet containing all his usernames and passwords.

Using this as a story to explain his startup is awful. So, you are running a tool to manage passwords, where you previously stored everything in a spreadsheet? This guy obviously knows a lot about security. Where can I sign up?
Test this if you're curious what it will be like for YOUR application, YOUR audience, and YOUR demo implementation.

To the extent I am capable of commenting publicly on this, I have not ever seen solid numbers which make gradual engagement (technical term for what you're talking about) look like a big win for the company, and to the extent I have seen numbers on gradual engagement, it has been the opposite of a win.

The only numbers I can comment on publicly are the gradual engagement test for BCC. That was my worst Product idea ever, hands down. It 10xed customer support costs because users expected their accounts to magically work (even when, e.g., accessing from home and school and why did your computer delete my cards you just ruined Halloween for my class you monster). The conversion rate for guest accounts to paying accounts was 2. Not two percent. Two accounts ever, in six months, actually saved their email addresses and then, some time later, paid for the software. (This was at least partially because I did not roadblock users at any point and e.g. ask for an email address with a greyed-out Skip option, which is a virtual necessity to get gradual engagement to work. #microUXtip) I have no email addresses for guest accounts nor permission to contact them, something which I have in abundance for trial accounts, and I can tell you that is worth a good deal of money over the long run.

Optimizely and Stripe are, indeed, the two YC companies that I can think of which do gradual engagement. The mafia are very generous with what they know, have an active mailing list, and are universally capable of knocking out a gradual-engagement enabled account system within a week or two. What does this suggest to you as to internal sentiments regarding gradual engagement?

If you want to do something like this, use a post-signup fully capable account for a product tour. Product tours, as compared to gradual engagement, have a) vastly easier UX problems to resolve and b) empirically are full of win. That video I have about the first run experience explains this in a lot of detail.

P.S. Global endorsement of everything btilly says on this thread.
> I think it's quite a bit more sinister than this. As a patent lawyer confided to me once: The most valuable patents are the obvious ones (as other folks will likely think of it themselves) and that his job is to mask the fact that a patent is in fact obvious.

That lawyer should be disbarred. Obvious inventions (from the perspective of a person having ordinary skill in the art) are per se unpatentable, and merely masking this obviousness using an obtuse independent claim spawning many dependent claims is one reason why we're in this mess. I really think that a foreseeability or causation test should be used to measure obviousness, or better still, that obviousness should be a question of fact that the jury determines.
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No, but I do think it's a very cool idea. Downloading the app right now from iTunes.
Ask HN-Microsoft:Bing results ‘more relevant’ than Google’s, are you serious?
doesn't seem to work for this function. I need something really lightweight. i think i might have to build it. If there's a developer out there who wants to work on a live ticker CMS with me please ping me jason AT calacanis.com
The authors explained the chart, it only works because it looks across the whole chart for similar parts and recreates the smaller characters using the data it finds in the larger ones. So you would need a couple larger images of the licence plate too.

Information cannot be created from nothing, the algorithm sees that the chart seems to be repeating a similar image over and over, so it guesses the best fit for those images on the bottom lines. They might even be completely wrong, for example, is it really a D and not an O?
we tested etherpad, which hackpad is built on (and google docs is) and it's just not super stable if you have 50+ folks on it.
Gotta love the social media "experts" who the journos talk to for these articles. Digg's problem was real simple. They made fundamental changes, the community hated these changes, but Digg didn't row back. Whoever was running the place should be mopping a floor right now.
Encyclopedia sales or a travel agency
Last semester I did a big group project using Google Docs but we kept running into an issue where the spacing was different on everyone's computers. The title page would look perfect on one computer and overflow to the next page on another. This was in Chrome on OS X and Ubuntu. It really made me pine for native apps.
Lacking the Internet, I'd probably follow the herd and play the Web-startup lottery.