skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey Kevin,

1. About half-way through, you said that nobody would pay to own a pre-iPhone, or would give two twenty year olds the run of a plant. But what about Pebble? Granted, it's not built in a garage, but this printrbot could be: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/printrbot/printrbot-your...

You did say that there was a reversal of this trend, but can you clarify what you meant when you said "In 2012 it almost defies belief."

2. I like the take on attributing inventions to a single inventor - this was brought up in the book "The Myths of Innovation" by Scott Berkun which he talks about in a lecture at Carnegie Mellon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amt3ag2BaKc and the premise for my website http://brownieinmotion.ca (read the essay on 3M) where I say that expertise in one domain helps you solve problems in another (also the reason I pursued three degrees in engineering, music and economics).

3. I agree with your counter-argument to entrepreneurs chasing ideas that are too small. I wanted to add my thoughts on that. Groupon didn't think that selling 2-for-1 coupons were beneath them. I elaborated on it here: The Move to Less Productivity http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/25224585415/the-move... Google, RIM, etc got to where they where by a series of small attainable steps. Eventually, they discover a scalable model.

4. Also wanted to add to your take on lottery tickets/incubators. Getting into an accelerator program was never a permission slip for doing what you love. But business planning is essential, even if the plan is worthless (to paraphrase Eisenhower) and to paraphrase the founder of Zappos: the goal is not to lower risk, but to go for higher expected positive outcome.

Thanks for sharing Kevin. If you don't mind, please critique my book-in-progress on innovation and startups: http://bit.ly/icecreamstart
2012 Perseid Meteor Shower (Aug 11 to 13)
I'm not going to submit this as a separate link, but here's Haskell: http://blog.ezyang.com/2012/08/is-haskell-liberal-or-conserv...

I want to make a bit of a snarky comment about everyone rushing to disclaim being conservative, but I think this really reflects the fact that the distinction isn't a very useful one for languages, and very dubious even for communities. If it's useful at all, which I don't particularly believe, it's only for specific people.
No sarcasm; just a lot of regret and self-loathing.

It seems like the root of our disagreement is our differeing expectations for the cognitive and decisionmaking abilities of teenagers. As other posters have mentioned, there are lots of social factors at play in the college decision, and I think those factors can be far more powerful than what's necessary to lead a straight-A high school student astray.

If we pared away all of the people who were susceptible to making bad decisions based on what they're told or who are focused on the past successes of others, only the tiniest sliver of the population would remain as viable candidates for college. Maybe this is the point you're making - maybe you think we should shut down almost every university and tell everyone outside the enlightened sliver to go figure out something else to do. (Might actually not be that bad of an idea.) Or maybe you have a different view of people's cognitive abilities at age 17.

The approach that you personally took toward your college decision is, I think, pretty exceptional, and puts you toward the top of the top 1% of rational 17-year-old decisionmakers. I hesitate to condemn people as clueless and undeserving of our sympathy because they fall short of that lofty standard.
It's all the same pie, from the point-of-view of state government. They need to make their budget balance, and the school is a target-rich environment for them.
I guess I 'kind of' knew that, but always figured it was going to take more work to set one up. That's me just being plain lazy and not ING's fault. Thanks for pointing this out.
What's the latency of that data connection?
Dictation - Online Speech Recognition
Rolling In The Deep - Swagbucks TV
I don't think engineers are all about making things into money. I think they're more interested in doing things efficiently. Think about a barber shop: would an engineer repeat the same task every day, or would they automate it? I think most would try to automate it. The tradeoff would be efficiency for personality, and I think some people value it enough to keep it, while others wouldn't. That's probably a separate debate: would life be happier if everyone were an engineer?

I'm also not saying everyone should be an engineer on this thread. I'm saying it's an interesting thought to change the way lending the money out works. What I'm getting at is this: is the non-absolvable nature of student debt a conflict of interest with the creditors, and are they giving it out indiscriminately?
I heard good things about integrating Vim with Clang:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5641001/clang-complete-fo...

http://zwiener.org/vimautocomplete.html
Inside every gook there is an american trying to get out!
You must be new here :). Hacker news is for the entertainment of highly-intelligent,self-absorbed, millions-deserving kids.

You are either with us, or you are just old and suck :)
It's a nice comeback of village mentality in our global anonymous village.
I wish for it to grow really big!
Are You an Optimist or a Pessimist?
The vast majority of cool, hip startups nowadays have absolutely no interest in profit or even simply revenue. Just gotta stack those users up.
Why "non-profit"? What's the fundamental difference between surplus going to shareholders instead of going to directors?
This is wrong in so many ways. But yet, so right.
from my years of experience working on policy issues i can tell you this: letters like this never really do anything, sadly what works is lobbying. lobbying requires both organization and money. the people who have a stake in IP enforcement not only have money, but represent well established industries that provide an base of existing jobs. so unless entrepreneurs can get their act together -- or unless you can get the grassroots excited about giving money this really isn't going to go anywhere.
Searching for "paypad" results in a "did you mean paypal?" Of course, searching for "pay pad" works just fine.

I downloaded the free version because I don't need to create or charge customers from the app. A couple of things that would motivate me to pay:

• Graphs

• Payment forecasting for recurring payments ($X expected this week, month, etc.)

• Multiple accounts. Not a big deal, but if I could easily switch between stripe accounts [without re-logging in] I would.

Looks like a nice app though; thanks for putting this out there.
I asked this question on quora, about 14 minutes.

http://www.quora.com/Curiosity-Mars-Rover-1/What-is-the-bit-...
I am on the same (js) track, I second this recommendation for code academy learning the language by actually using it is twice as fast at least. Imhexperince
Looks good man, I especially like the tutorials. All kinds of stuff I hadn't seen on there. I went ahead and added it to my list. Very cool.
I think App.net is a gigantic communication screw up. If you already knew where Dalton was coming from, you know what he is talking about. But still to this day, if you only read app.net-related blog posts or info on the site, you come away feeling confused about what it is until you rely on other folks not officially connected to App.net--such as this blogger--to translate Dalton's vision in a way that can be understood by people who don't already know where Dalton's coming from.
This does sound sort of interesting, but after thinking about it I don't get why this is cool. Can someone explain a practical use case?

How is it different, in practice, from say running a Node.JS on localhost and using localtunnel?
New human species identified from Kenya fossils
A default rate of 5.9 vs. 3.8 is significant. That means that if two groups of 1000 students take out loans, the group made up of liberal arts majors will have 55% more defaults than the engineering group. Given that loan interest rates are on the order of 5%, I fail to see how a 2.1% difference in default rate would ever not be significant.
Mark Zuckerberg Topless
I think it is a great article. I really think that all copyrights and patents do is stifle innovation and sadly, they increase the costs for everyone....including right owners themselves. It makes me cringe to see how much money Google and Apple have to spend to duke it out in court. I am sure they feel this way, but it seems like an ever escalating black hole where only the lawyers benefit.
Using Sloppy to view websites gives a reasonable idea of how slow this is.

(http://www.dallaway.com/sloppy/)
The challenge here is to recognize there is a happy medium.
" pursue the worst offenders (those who knowingly publish copyrighted content) "

There is a difference between someone who sells indexed warez/books/movies/music on a retail site, and someone running a bit torrent client. Aggressively pursue the first, and educate the second. Simply having the ISP send a warning notice of copyright infringement to the account holder of an IP address, without in any way communicating back to the rightsholder _who_ that IP Address holder was, is a nice medium. Note - just because it's easy to run a bit-torrent client sharing the latest GameOfThrones Books (all available via Kindle, or the library) doesn't mean it's legal (or even ethical).

Re: Posted Links to copyrighted material - depends on how organized / indexed those links are. If it's a casual site with a few links pointing out, clearly that falls under fair use. If it has carefully indexed/searchable database of 750,000 songs, and 35,000 movies,, and 250,000 books in such a way that you just have to visit that site, click a link, and download the content - well, perhaps there needs to be a conversation.

But reasonable people can come up with reasonable solutions. It doesn't have to be "All Sharing, All the Time" - nor does it have to be "Idiotic Draconian RIAA $22K/Song to some random bit torrent user"
And it won't change course decisions at all.

If an engineer is allowed to borrow $30,000 and the liberal arts major is allowed to borrow $10,000, then the school will just charge the engineer $20,000 more. (They'll probably frame it in a much better way that looks like a discount to the liberal arts major, but it's important to not be fooled by that.)
There's no reason for Liberal Arts majors to be paying obscene amounts of tuition, and especially shouldn't be going into debt, for a degree that isn't going to get them hired.

It's just a fact of the broken system. Tuition is justified by the job you get after it. But if you can't get a job in it, the high tuition is completely unjustified.

There have got to be better alternatives to getting a liberal education. Got any ideas?
Wouldn't the cost of transferring the crawled data (compressed/archived) to AWS/EC2 partially offset the cost saving?

Edit: AWS still has free imbound BW.. my bad
The original premise is that successful people owe something to society because there are roads, bridges, technology advancements like the internet, etc, etc. without which they would not be successful.

My point is, what about the people that are doing nothing? They have the same access to the roads, bridges, internet, but they do nothing. Don't they owe some sort of debt to society to go try to work instead of just collecting from others?

What I meant is the federal income tax ... which is what funds a majority of this country's expenditures.

I work. I pay my taxes. I donate money to non-profit organizations. I'm a good citizen. And I'm sick of being told by a bunch of redistributionist minded people that I owe more back to the collective good of society just because I have been successful and someone else hasn't.
nice thing about running crawlers from EC2 - all inbound bandwidth is free
>Do you have any proof that Manchu influence is the reason for Mandarin's relative paucity of tones in comparison to southern Chinese languages?

It's very hard to prove. There are materials from Qing Dynasty that still have the 入(entering) tone, this indicate the tone disappeared sometime during the late Qing. But others hold belief that the northern language lost the entering tone long before Qing, maybe as early as Yuan.
Steal my idea. Simple income and expenses tracker
You don't understand intelligence. Doubling the circuits doubles the speed of the intelligence, but it has no effect on it's quality.

Uh the singularity may be a crack-pot idea in the end but it seems like brings out a whole of slew crackpot refutations.

No, I don't understand flexible human intelligence or even animal intelligence fully and neither do you or other human. That's why it's not been programmed.

I do know that doubling circuit size doesn't double speed.

People have a really hard time admitting that some people are truly fundamentally smarter than others.

And you'd have a hard coming up with any evidence for this "fundamental" rather than relative intelligence difference.

The singularity, crackpot or not, is based on the hypothesis that there is a single "neocortical algorithm". It may indeed be dubious theory but it's cobbled together from some real evidence. If you're going to have counter-arguments to this, why not do the same?
Agreed. I consider myself most comfortable in Python and I find myself uncomfortable with Clojure's liberal side more often than it's conservative side. I think I still have a lot to learn from and about Clojure but I don't think it fits very well into Yegge's spectrum. The author is correct that the most important thing about Clojure is Rich Hickey's philosophies on simplicity in code. I don't find simplicity to be a very political topic.
Sad and cool at the same time! Definitely a winner.
As it stands, we have not yet built a factory using exclusively robots. I'm sure that this would have very useful applications on Earth, as well as on Mars, if you were interested in tackling it :).
I think the biggest problem with higher education today is the fact that colleges aren't the one issuing the student loans. If a student enters the workforce and can't find a job to pay back their loan, the colleges aren't the ones on the hook; the students are, and eventually, the taxpayers. I understand that government-backed loans are a way to try to make higher education available to more people but all this easy money has resulted in a huge cash grab by for profit institutions who frankly could care less whether or not their graduates actually pay the loans back. Couple that with the almost religious belief that a college education is the only way to achieve the American dream and you have a recipe for the exact disaster we're flying head first into today.
Used to be poets earned very little but had very simple lifestyles. It was their choice so everyone was happy.

Now if you want to be a poet, you still can. But the problem is that there are upper-class kids who want to be poets but not live like one, and they are going to bid up the cost of the poet lifestyle.

A similar thing happened in journalism. Kids of rich families wanted to "change the world" and bid the wages of working journalists down to nil.
Great ideas, kick ass design.
What's the motivation for everyone to add noise to Yegge's obviously broken claim that you can reason about software engineering in such a one dimensional way?
It was in fact already submitted by somebody but hasn't caught a lot of attention: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4367807
Is it fairer to over-allocate to the major where the graduate has a 2.1 percentage point higher chance of defaulting on a loan they will never be able to escape? The cost of an artificially levelled playing field is the present malaise.
It's a good letter, but I would have appreciated a mention of lowering corporate taxes. With a 35% corporate tax rate, that does encourage innovation -- innovation in tax avoidance. Think of the innovation that could happen if companies had a 15% corporate tax rate.. that would mean 20% available capital to companies. If I suddenly had access to 20% more capital, I would hire more people and build more things. A 35% corporate tax rate is the highest in the industrialized world and it's as big a detriment to company growth as any IP battle.
> but you'll have a non-zero rate of pages you think you've downloaded but you actually haven't, depending how you tune it.

My (not-very fresh) memory of what bloom filter actually is tells me that this "non-zero rate" you're talking about must be HUUUUGE. In order of millions of pages. Am I right?
Wouldn't just a higher orbit achieve the same thing? You'd be in sight for longer periods, right? Without locking you into a location the way synchronous would.

The current orbiters are primarily for imaging, so it makes sense that they're as low as possible. If you were always going to have several surface missions, it might make sense to have higher orbiters primarily tasked with communication relay.
I'll post my favourite (sorted by topic - many of them free)

http://hbpms.blogspot.com/
He has a lot of visibility, and makes an argument that many people disagree with. Also, on the Internet there is no such thing as "obvious".
How to build an app that "views" RSS and ATOM feeds in Chrome.
Blizzard Battle.net hack attack hits millions
That's a false dichotomy. Nobody is suggesting that nobody should choose a liberal arts degree. What's being suggested is that less people should be doing it because there's more supply for those professions than there is demand. There's very high demand for technology degrees and trade skills (welders are in desperate demand, for instance). These truths aren't being communicated to college freshmen as well as they should be, and that's causing a major crisis for a lot of liberal arts college grads who enter a job market that simply doesn't need them.
Great, glad you liked it :)

Edit: Thanks for the link!
I think you and I have different working definitions of 'search quality'. My definition is that the sites you find by searching for something give you the information you want.

I think 'bowing to big copyright' is no different than 'bowing to Chinese censors' or 'bowing to Administration staffers' or 'bowing to conservative thinkers'. All of them affect what results you get vs what you asked for. That those web pages have information that some other folks don't want you to see, is a discussion between page provider and complainer, not a fight the search engine should get into.

Using blekko.com as an example. You could create a slashtag with all the best torrent sites you can find on the web, and then you and anyone else who uses your slashtag could be searching all those sites for what is useful information to them. As a copyright holder they could search those sites too (and presumably they do) and attempt to take action against the sites if they chose to. The search engine is a window between two spaces, and while sure as a choke point it provides an easy target for those would would want to control the greater masses, it doesn't improve the 'quality' of the service when that occurs. It is of demonstrably lower quality so some folks.
No - inbound data transfer cost to AWS is free.
These are all on my short list :)

To do #1 and #2 require a larger backend system. I've been building that system for the last couple weeks...

Stripe allows you to pull 100 records at a time via the API, so what I've done is combined the API with WebHooks. I use the API to fetch historical data, and webhooks to capture anything new. To be clear, this is not part of Pay Pad today, rather it's part of another set of products I've got cooking.

I hope to launch some of these things over the next month.

regarding the multi-account... I started with that. I have 7 Stripe accounts and it was important that I have easy access to all of them. About halfway through the development of Pay Pad, I switched to OAuth and had to take the multi-account support out because the way I was doing it was not a good fit.

I'll add it back at some point. I'm just working on a way to make that process intuitive. I want it to be one or two taps at the most.
The traditional name for this: The agency problem.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/agencyproblem.asp#axzz23...
The latency is about 14 minutes, which is funny because we consider 100 ms latency a bad thing here on earth.
You can construct a bloom filter with an arbitrarily low error rate.
Agreed. Coding standards have nothing to do with "my way is better than yours". If you feel like they do, you should find new people to work with. It's all about being able to view code consistently.

At my previous employer (Large consumer electronics company doing embedded dev) we had a LOT of old code, or code we had originally gotten from third parties. We also had a fairly exacting coding standard. The coding standard made groking the 3+ million lines of code running your average TV MUCH MUCH easier. However, if you came onto a file that was written for some other coding standard and you dropped code into it that didn't match the style of that specific file you would probably not get a thumbs up rom a code review.

In that situation we all understood it was far more important for all of the old crusty code in third party libs to have the same style even if it didn't match out own internal coding standard.

Reading bodies of code with different conventions sprinkled throughout adds needless complexity to the task.
I'm not an accountant, but aren't the salaries paid to people you hire expenses thus not subject to corporate tax? In other words, if you make $1M a year and spend $1M a year on salaries, you pay $0 in taxes. If you instead spend $800K on salaries and have no other expenses, you pay tax on the $200K in profit.

Besides which, the point of the letter was to argue a single point: innovation over enforcement. Why stuff it up with topics like taxes, healthcare, or any other unrelated topic that would only serve to dilute the core message?
Next iPhone’s tiny docking connector possibly spotted
How do you manage the exponential/fibonacci growth?

We actually had exponential growth for our first four batches, but that's not super impressive when you consider our first batch only had six students :)

In truth, every batch is an experiment, and each time we're terrified we won't get enough qualified applicants.
What about rates?

ING Direct USA:
Savings: 0.30% APY
Checking: 0.90% APY

Simple (via Bancorp)
Savings: 0.30% APY
Checking: 0.01% APY

Also, due to the acquisition of ING Direct USA by Capital One, the ING Direct logo and branding will expire in February, 2013. I bet we'll see new a UI/UX soon.
Great :-)

<pet_peeve>
Can we say "free-fall" though? The ISS has at least 90%
of the gravity we have down here... not very micro!
</pet_peeve>
Even in the announcement, it's about "legitimate, quality sources". Legitimate comes first, it is there combined with quality, but in reality it isn't. The best videohosters out there aren't legitimate in the eyes of the copyright-holders.

How high quality is the linked and praised npr.org, which incorporates Youtube-Videos which arent playable "from some websites", including npr.org [1] (from my ip at least)?

I don't have the data. I can't have. But according to the argumentation of the announcement itself and my own judgement regarding the sites in question, this is not a "search quality change" with a high bar to meet, done by engineers wanting to improve the results. I bet this comes from lawyers, (internal?) politics or pressure from the copyright-industry.

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/08/09/158525288/muse...
Yes, there's an error there, conflating two ideas. I think tabs-only can still cause a problem, say when lining up comments on the end of a line because there might be a different amount needed per line depending on its length. Still, you can't be sure what other people will have, so for interop spaces it is.

It might not be the case for everyone, but my laptop screen is 1920x1080 and has more room for text than I can use. In a three way merge your strategy could help me perhaps.