skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Given that Apple tends to buy companies for projects they are working on or technology that they need, it's worth taking note that Apple has stockpiled so much cash that they can spend $365 million on what might just amount to a upcoming feature in iOS or some upcoming iPhone/iPad/Macbook Air device.

That is the power of cash.
It can be relevant to answer the moral question with a business argument because the moral question often has economic underpinnings. The idea that copying is equivalent to theft is based on the idea that pirates would otherwise have bought the work, making piracy an indirect financial loss. Creating a new business model that accommodates piracy with equal or better returns resolves the fundamental moral issue. (Whether that's possible is beyond me, though.)

There is, of course, the completely separate moral issue of the rights of artists to control their work. Business arguments are inappropriate there.
I do everything you describe over the concept of a filesystem. A project/collection... has its own folder. If you have a shared resource you can have it appear in both folders (either through symlinks which are transparent at most UI levels, or by the system automatically configure a mount --bind when you want to share a resource between projects, or you can say, I want to make use of a resource that is part of another project, so I explicitly link to that other project)
Practical machine learning tricks from the KDD 2011 best industry paper
I have not either, but agree with you, we don't think (at this stage) really anyone is worth taking that much of our bank account when it could (and probably would) not give us enough resources to finish our sellable product.
An opinion on the future of GNOME
Yeah with the health concerns over eating a lot of red meat (my side of the family has a history of colon cancer) and the fact that it keeps getting more expensive, we've relegated ribeyes to birthdays and our anniversary. So we get a package of ribeyes from Costco maybe 3-4 times a year (we celebrate as many birthdays and anniversaries as we can). Other than that we eat a lot of chicken and pork. We do consume a fair bit of ground beef for hamburgers and spaghetti however. In that case, I probably wouldn't notice the difference between fake beef and the real thing.
We don't have numbers, so this is all speculation. Still, I think we can agree it's a neat idea that definitely deserves exploration.

With regards tot he transmission question: my car (and many others) allow me to select the gear even though it has an automatic transmission. In my car it's called Autostick, other cars it will be something else; sportshift maybe.

In this way, I can ensure the gear will be optimal for gasoline consumption.

Also, perhaps in the future, a model can be made to incorporate regenerative breaking.
Fantastic POV. Thank you
170,000,000 lessons.

"We contend that"

No. You cannot contend against 170 million.
>> ... it's highly likely that Microsoft has already patented the letters X, Y, A, and B...

Nintendo and Sega have both used this scheme since SNES / Dreamcast respectively (as well as Nintendo DS).
FYI: He didn't see much at all inside the latter. His tenure was order of single digit months and he appeared to have his mind made up within a matter of weeks.
Personal opinion about game controllers aside, I'm worried about infringement. Game controllers are heavily patented and designmarked and their design is as much about avoiding legal pitfalls as making a good input device.

Similarly, doesn't their console UI look dangerously close to the current Xbox dashboard? Surely this infringes on Metro in a big way?
> it's seems a bit rough for it to be a tax event if you are locked out of liquidating for six months.

Life is not fair. And the tax code is totally ridiculous.

> I guess you could have hedged or something.

A prior version of rule 144 explicitly stated that any kind of hedging is unlawful. The current revision is unclear on that. My counsel advised me against doing anything, as (in the extremely unlikely case of an SEC inquiry) my representation would cost several times the profits I would have insured. (And .. I had no reason to expect a 50% drop, practically overnight, a couple of months after the deal went through).

There's apparently complex ways to legally avoid the tax event until your profits are realized, which are worthwhile if you're a big VC or something and manage tens of millions of dollars. But they would probably trigger an audit and the IRS deciding you are cheating if you do that as an individual.

Romney can afford these things. I can't. The tax code is completely borked.
Orthodoxy has greater social reward when everyone around you is orthodox...
They are perfect because they charge $70 for gigabit fiber. period. :-D
Yeah, they say it gets between 50 and 100% better gas milage, but are those "savings" spent at the electrical outlet?
Worth a read: Pitfalls of Prophecy:
Why Science Fiction So Often Fails to Predict the Future , http://www.locusmag.com/2009/Westfahl_Predictions.html.
Why do they think that the fact that they write science fiction makes it worth listening to their predictions anyways? Well, besides the genre inferiority complex, which requires its hacks to pretend they're prophets, so they can feel important.
While this may be true it is important to note that the corollary is not necessarily true. That is to say, not having good linux skills doesn't make you bad developer. I've found plenty of people who don't know linux very well and are fantastic developers.

Personally, I'm having trouble living without grep (work is easier on a windows machine).
"Video learning" can reinforce wrong beliefs (TED video)
Meant to reply to this, but didn't work, so copying and pasting:

In the debate about khan academy, there's an important fact that is continuously missed, it's not about effective instruction vs. ineffective instruction; it's about less effective vs. more effective.

The khan academy way may be better than trying to learn from the lower X% of math teachers out there. It's highly unlikely that it's going to be better than the top Y%.

Things like Khan academy will not "fix" education. Anything that standardizes and automates education will only do one thing: insure mediocrity. It will protect against the bad while eliminating the possibility of excellence.
How Startups Use The Cloud — Round Up
Why Science Fiction So Often Fails to Predict the Future
The article misses the point of Khan Academy. The point is that the world only ever has to find _one good example_ of how to teach something.

If someone comes up with a theory on a better way to teach something, cool. A/B test it and keep the winner.
Indeed. It's the same as their chrome gambit. Releasing chrome kicked the IE development team into gear and lit a fire under firefox's ass. Today if I launch any of the 3 most popular browsers on this machine each of them will score 100/100 on the acid 3 test and render it smoothly and seamlessly. That certainly wasn't the case when chrome 1.0 was released a bit more than 3 years ago. Now the installed base of folks who have truly modern browsers is vastly higher and the sort of browser-side capabilities one can safely assume when they build web apps is very much expanded.
$50K sounds about right. This wreaks of trouble.
Comment by jgrahamc that has been inexplicably dead-ed:

Her actual tweets read:

CPS owe my constituent @pauljchambers and the country a huge apology for a shameful prosecution that should never have been brought

Two years of a man's life, stress and massive public costs wasted over an obvious joke. It is for Parliament to investigate actions here.

Whether it is the Justice or Home Affairs Select Cttee, the CPS and this decision should be investigated on Parlt return #twitterjoketrial

I think she's asking that parliament look into why the CPS ever brought this to trial in the first place.
I'd be interested to know (and, apologies if you've opined on it before) what you think of Lockhart's Lament.

http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

His seems to advocate that children should be taught to explore math problems and make discoveries rather than memorize and practice given truths. My layperson's read of your comment finds some commonality between your positions.
From your post and description, this looks like a bad start. $180K CEO Salary for a company that got $250K fund is a bad sign, assuming this is seed-fund, your company have no revenue yet.

Coaxed him to stay around $100K and get another developer with the $80K.
A good teacher will never become irrelevant. A bad teacher will become more effective because they they don't waste time with bad lectures. I also think it would be easier to help individuals with problems rather than dealing with the varying abilities of a group of students at the same time.
Does Windows 8 succeed as a true tablet operating system?
If we setup a an American Corp in the form our advisor recommended, we do need a CEO on paper, but of course that's just on paper.

I do have a unique agreement with my current employer where it's in my contract that they're fine with me working/venturing on the side as long as I'm not competing. In fact as soon as the basic POC worked I emailed the owners, legal, hr people as I fully disclose everything I do outside of the day job. There was no objection. My goal is actually to see if my employer can benefit from the tech, so far it may happen and I'm keeping a few fingers crossed.

Thank you for the thoughts jhaniv.
Isn't anti-trust about hurting the users, not the competition, anyway?

It's about hurting the consumer by hurting the competition.
Guchex - Keep yourself updated by following Gurus and subjects of your interest
Nike’s stroboscopic eyewear improves visual memory, hand-eye coordination
I've wanted to a/b test my plan name but don't know of any good alternatives. I have a free WordPress plugin and have a paid-for version which adds more features so it's called generically 'Premium version'.

The people who buy it come from different backgrounds and I don't want to segment the product.

It's a recipe plugin and the premium version adds a nutrition tab to satisfy the nutritionists and category listing pages for people who want to organise their recipes more than what the free version allows.

Any thoughts on a name?
Agree completely. Thanks Brajeshwar
Or even just plain Hindley-Milner.
I think android has the approach to filesystems write. Each app has there own dedicated folder for internal usage and is hidden from the user (actually, the user cannot access it at all unless the specific app provides a method because of sandboxing, but that is a different issue). There is also a file structure where apps can read and write any data that the user might want to share between apps, devices. By convention, the files are organized either by type (image) or by app, however when the user wants to move them, or open them with a different program, this option is left available.
"Drawing conclusions about manufacturers based on pricing is dangerous." I completely agree. But in my opinion, drawing conclusions about manufacturers based on reputation is as dangerous. And it takes time to get that reputation info. Time I don't have many times.

Only reliable way to have good conclusions about manufacturers is to examine their business throughly. That's obviously just impossible in most cases.

PS. Chicken breast is expensive here too. I buy whole legs.
I can't help but think this is an overreaction to the Zynga implosion. Feeling the urge to buy...
You're making the assumption that the laboratory meet will somehow automatically be worse, and that it is whatever "is most conveniently and cheaply produced".

I eat a lot of meat. I could not conceive of giving up meat. Not going to happen. I don't care if I have to slaughter the animals myself to get it.

But if there was a high enough quality "laboratory meat"? I'd try it. I'd even be willing to pay more for it in certain circumstances:

- Consider custom-adapted marbling.
- Arbitrary sized cuts. Want a fillet larger than any real animal?
- New types of "meat"? Yes please.
- Healthier versions? If they can come up with variations that taste as nice while being better for me, sure, I'll pay a premium for that.

While there undoubtably will also be attempts to make cheap replacements, there's no reason to automatically assume that the fact it is "faux-meat" means it can't be just as healthy - or better - than the real thing.
Framework Fixation - An Anti-Pattern?
Designmarked, not patented I believe. So the green A, red B, blue X, yellow Y are owned by Microsoft. Sony have the circle, triangle, square and cross.

In terms of patents, Nintendo have the cross-shaped D-pad, Sony have the segmented d-pad and Microsoft are left with the awful spongy rocker pad.
Maybe I'm missing the point, but what's the problem? It seems to me that the worst senario here is that Google supplants traditional telcos, and essentially becomes another monopoly for >1Gbps web access. Compared with what we have today, I'm pretty happy with that outcome.

Actually, the worst outcome will be that the general public doesn't care enough, Google fiber flops, and the traditional model becomes further entrenched.

I would also be a bit happier with a real, innovative, public broadband program. I don't think the US has the political culture to pull that off.

> In fact, Google has gained "question answering" capabilities in the last few years thanks to web spam farms run by companies like eHow.

I was under the general impression that they're trying to minimize this. It also seems like this kind of plague would affect any dominant search engine.
Los Angeles. Almost equally as expensive, but we still feel it's too much.
You realize most of us in the midwest live in towns and cities too. We even have running water and electricity and computers! One time[1] I got into a town[2] and the neighborhoods/edge development/sprawl looked just like the real people in california and the I95 corridor have. We're still savages with trivial concerns about stuff like "can we feed everyone else this year", but I have great hopes for our people to be civilized someday in my lifetime!

Snark aside: look at population densities for metro areas for midwestern cities, they are pretty much the same as most costal cities. My particular town, which is pretty standard has a density greater than a lot of bay area towns. In last-mile installations, you can't pretend that a cookie cutter neighborhood isn't a cookie-cutter neighborhood. Further, in terms of overall connectivity, Kansas City has lots of fiber going into it - the place was a major rail hub, and fiber laying in the 90s was largely along rail tracks because of nice rightaways.

[1] actually every

[2] actually every one sized big-town and small - large cities (or their metro areas)

(ok, so that was a bit of a rant, but dismissing the midwest based largely on either ignorance or disingenuous bullshit really gets on my nerves.)
I know of it, but haven't used it, yet. That's why my comment was a bit more guarded than it would have otherwise been. (Though re-reading that line, it doesn't come across as such to me now.)
Ah ok, I took you to be asking what's needed for HTML5 technologies to replace LaTeX/ConTeXt and similar as general tools for typesetting, which would include the ability to target both paper and screen output.

If it's for electronic documents purely, then I think we're pretty close, at least in terms of what the technology supports. Making it easy to do various kinds of typesetting tasks are perhaps another story; there is a lot of stuff that is technically possible with the tech modern browsers support but not easy to do, certainly not with a workflow as automated as LaTeX's.
Why wouldn't you be able to do that after taking some classes online?

I guess some people are suggesting that Khan Academy is the ultimate in education and that everybody should use only that and nothing else?
A good product will help make selling way, way easier. If we see a sale as a pie composed of two pieces(the actual product and then the marketing or pitch), the better and more self-explainable the former is, the easier the latter becomes.

Let's say you have a product that is sold once every hour per sales/rep for $30/month. A good product's main job is to increase your retention and thus to increase your revenue. A super shitty product, even if sold like cupcakes because of your selling skills, will likely result in higher cancellations and less revenue overall than a product that can be sold AND is useful.

The two things are not mutually exclusive and they both are critical in making revenue.
Tesla Motors Inc. Stock Downgraded (TSLA)
Fighting Hackers without Sinking to Their Level
and the Khan Academy developers have been listening, and I have had interesting off-forum email interaction

And THERE is the difference between genuinely-given constructive criticism and the questionably-motivated smearing that those folks working with the Washington Post are attempting to deliver.

Thank you very much for the links. I've already sent some of them on to my wife so that she and I can research them a bit more as instructional aids for our children.
I'd like to use a keyboard to play street fighter and super mario.

The reason I think keyboard is superior is that when using a keyboard, I can have few fingers on top of keys at the same time. Whereas when using the controller, I just use two thumbs. My thumb has to jump between buttons in order to switch different moves. That is slow.
Where did he refuse to fix it? I'm confused. I've talked with him directly, and we're in progress on a complete fix for that issue (the cryptography issues in the session class)...
In Asia, there is a delicacy called dog meat. To maximize profit, cooks use pork instead (sometimes from sick or dead pigs) Then they fake it by adding fermented rice, ginger, shrimp paste to make it look feel and taste like real dog meat. For more info (in Vietnamese) http://goo.gl/g07yF
Well, let's put it to the test. Not at a desk, of course, but while walking, or using one hand while the other's holding a baby, or in the back seat of a taxi.

Edit: I forgot to mention, the test will be carried out by a 62-year-old Egyptian grandmother.
If their controller fails horribly, perhaps they could use the OnLive 'universal' controller -- the one that works with OnLive's console as well as all laptops and android/iOS devices. It's actually a really nice controller -- better than the PS3, slightly worse than the Xbox 360 (but without the battery pack issues).
I was a vegetarian for 9 years (vegan for 4). My personal, anecdotal and completely unscientific experience: when i switched from soy protein shakes to whey protein shakes, I immediately noticed an improvement in recovery times, not to mention less gas.

Soy is not going to be a complete substitute for meat's nutritional components. Supplemented with lots of liquid aminos, etc? Probably will work well. But the worst part for me about a vegan diet is the difficulty in getting enough fat intake. Too little fat in the diet causes depression.
Agreed. You may be overestimating his value in general. Take that money and use it to quit your full time job so you can focus entirely on building your business.

I don't know enough about the specifics of your business to say much else, but in general, the only thing that matters is having a product people will open their wallets for. If your poc is turning heads but not opening wallets--why is that? Are you positive those wallets would open if you presented some kind of MVP or a polished product? Could you get a deposit now?
not a problem as long as you support USB.
I used to teach math and reading Lockharts Lament was deeply satisfying. He is much closer to the light than our current system, but in retrospect I think he's got his head in the clouds a little.
Sorry for the weak pun, but I really couldn't help myself: I wish the title had been "Why Google is an acceptable ISP".

Apropos of the article, I'm increasingly unconvinced that free markets work well enough when they're dealing with infrastructure--roads, train lines, phone lines--that have an expensive one-off set-up cost and then a larger cost of switching while the original provider attempts to recoup the set-up subsidy. Certainly Britain's experience with train lines, and the US's existing telco network, among others, seems to demonstrate that it doesn't tend towards a free market. (Compare, of all places, Somalia's mobile network, which is thriving--at least relatively, for a country that's been in a civil war for two decades-- in the absence of a set-up cost).
Thanks yoseph. We (myself and other co-founder) agree that the goal shouldn't be taking money unless necessary. We envision him 1. leading the co as a Fulltime figure, 2. being available to take all meetings/travel if necessary where the others can't 3. utilize his rolodex to make as many connections as possible and 4. sell what we build.

The biggest issue is we don't have a sellable product yet, that's what the round is for. We want to take our POC and convert it to an MVP and possibly more.

In terms of equity, we were all honestly fine with taking 1/3 to start, however now this warrants a drastic re-visiting of that, which is why everyones thoughts here are so valuable to me.
> This could be solved very easily by picking some symbols to go along with the colors. Of course, our patent and trademark laws are ridiculous and it's highly likely that Microsoft has already patented the letters X, Y, A, and B...

That'd be a shame. X, Y, A and B sounds more Super Nintendo than Xbox.
This is probably already patented in some way by Peugeot since that's (almost) how their 'hybrid4' (diesel+electric) work. The engine is not in the wheels but that's really not a stretch to place them there. I would be surprised it they did not try it.

[0] http://carscoop.blogspot.com/2010/08/new-peugeot-3008-hybrid...
"From the infrastructure on the back end to the TV and Wi-Fi routers in the home, Google has built its own stuff. Most carriers rely on outside vendors to sell them networking gear and even set-top boxes."

If I were Comcast I would really be afraid at this point, because Google now has access to top-notch set-top-box, as well as other CATV equipment know-how through Motorola Mobility's Home division. If then can incorporate that knowledge into their system they would have an end-to-end entertainment delivery system.
Wow, downvoted for that?
> ethical costs

That's manufactured problem. And I'd say extremely stupid. Cannot wait till activists will go on a mission to stop other animals from eating meat.
We are humans. We eat meat. How complicated is that?

And yes, I had an opportunity to witness how pig becomes bacon and tasty sausages when I was kid.
I am not an engineer, but seems a retrofit like this adds un-sprung weight which increases wear and changes handling.

How about put the motors in a new differential? It'd take a larger casing, but you could apply the electric torque to each wheel too.
Google Drive Gets a Jump on Dropbox
Fascinating. There is also research showing (in gossip/news and politics) that by refuting a false statement, the act of repeating the statement actually reinforces it. People ignore the "... IS FALSE" part. I think that plays in here --- my simply consuming a statement, they slightly edit it to fit in with their prior information, or just to make it easier to remember, by dropping the complications.

You need to to drag someone through the mental struggle of unseating their beliefs.

My favorite technique is to find the source of the misconception, and highlight it. Instead of attempting to dispose of an entire complex thought, pick it a part, find the mistake ("you are confusing 'velocity' and 'force' -- they are different things."), and rebuild the correct explanation using the patched piece.