skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That metric starts to fail when you've got, say, mediocre products or brands with tons of exposure.

The classic is in "readers choice" reviews of restaurants or eateries. Fast-food franchises dominate? Why? Because the philosophy of such sites is often "majority rules", and the establishment (or brand) with the most votes wins. But there are far more McDonalds or Taco Bells than Jacks Cook Shacks or Trader Vics. Even when the quality of JCS or TV exceeds TB or MD, it's not going to be reflected in the ratings.

Adjustments such as taking a Likert (3-7 point scale) and adjusting reviews based on the number of reviewers, to give both the actual qualitative assessment, and the probable maximal review can help. This is how sites such as Reddit have adjusted their comments/submissions ratings.

The broader and more philosophical problem is that "quality" is not a one-dimensional attribute, interpretation of quality differs among individuals, and "fitness for purpose or task" should be considered when assessing quality as well. McDonalds may very well be appropriate when your goal is a quick, inexpensive meal on the run (a conclusion I'd differ with), while Trader Vics is where you'd head to impress the boss, date, in-laws, or client.

It's a tough problem. It's also one that sees a great many very poor proposed solutions.
Startups, don't do this
"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Yes. I saw an obvious use for this in our products and it would solve a known problem we have so I immediately fired off an email to them. The sooner I can get a few of these in my hot little hands the better.

Thank You to whomever submitted this link!
My first thought was "Well, Diaspora with another name". But after reading and understanding it (it's not very well explained there) seems like a much more abstract thing. They want to build an abstraction layer to the social web, not a social network.

The idea seems pretty good. It's just the basics: you follow people and receive their content (text, images, whatever), and people follow you and you share content with them. The most amazing thing is that, just using these simple concepts the possibilities are infinite. As they said, every social network out there can be implemented in this way. ¿Twitter? It's trivial, just make the format description and you're ready. ¿Facebook? The only thing you should specify is that the relationships are symmetric (you can follow me only if I decide to follow you too, that is, we are mutual friends).

To me, the idea seems absolutely great. The problem will be execution: what apps are created using this protocol. I have also the doubt if apps will be interoperable. Example: I build a twitter-like app named Foo and another guy builds another twitter-like app named Bar. Both use similar formats, so, can an user using Foo see the contents posted with Bar? I imagine that this will be possible as long as they share the same post format, but I'm not sure.

Anyways, good work. I would really like to see Tent to expand and grow.
First Mars Curiosity Panoramic Movement Photos - Looking at Landing area
Two words: Logan's Run.
If you've read Normal Accidents by Perrow, how would you respond to someone who said that a good reason is because of the extreme complexity of nuclear power coupled with our relatively new understanding of it? I think that's a pretty good criticism of nuclear power.
The price is listed under the Buy buttons. Maybe he updated the site already.
Hah. The Register takes the IAEA statement, which says "To date no health effects have been reported in any person as a result of radiation exposure from the nuclear accident.", and turns it into the very different statement that no one WILL be harmed. I would give that a classification of Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire.

Even though probably not very many people will get cancer that is traceable to the Fukushima disaster, it comes at a price -

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LdLr5QPqPgI/Tukyjp5ZdRI/AAAAAAAAOL...

- permanently abandoning several large towns.
HTTP accomplishes all of our design constraints via REST and long-lived streaming connections. It is a very reliable, mature protocol, and the security and performance are very well understood. Also, if we invented a new binary protocol, users wouldn't be able to host their Tent servers on easy-to-use platforms like Heroku.

Developers may implement other protocols in the future, but we are targeting HTTP as an accessible starting point.

We are definitely anticipating heavy mobile use, both through mobile web apps as well as native. There will eventually be iOS and Android frameworks to handle all of the communication with Tent servers.
My favorite part is watching the captures in real time at https://stripe-ctf.com/leaderboard.
In many states, the possession of venomous snakes is illegal. Same goes for poison dart frogs.
Space launch is risky, not just perceived as risky, actually risky. rocketry isn't one of those 5 9's of reliability activities.
Gelato Classico FTW! Anyone can load up their ice cream with sugar, but it takes some care and devotion to be able to feature fresh creaminess!

There's a useful analogy to the current discussion in there.
The problem with that is that an average user would click away or close the tab as soon as the clip is over. I think its best as how they have it in the beginning with the ability to skip longer ads. I rather get it over with and watch peacefully than be interrupted in the middle.
You're correct-- we anticipate users either registering their own domains (i.e. http://danielsiders.com) or using a hosted service that provides subdomains (http://danielsiders.tent.io). If you're hosting at home (dream solution here is plug computers), then dynamic DNS pointing to your home IP/computer.
These aren't meant to be run from personal workstations behind firewalls, they are meant to run on servers. Firewalls in this instance shouldn't be an issue.

If firewalls were actually an issue, you could always run the service on port 443. I don't know how you'd tell anyone else that you're running on a non-standard port, but it would be possible. That's actually another potential problem... this is a server that is masquerading as an HTTPS server... I hope that it plays nice with non-Tent HTTP clients. It isn't nice to hijack ports like that.

They are seem to be assuming a web-based client, so that traffic (which does need to worry about firewalls), should pass though a firewall without issue.

Edit: parent got deleted, it was

One word: Firewalls
I know it's so surprising to encounter ageism in the startup world. ;)
> ... unless their kids eat a lot of dirt ...

You don't have any kids yourself, I take. They are entropy machines! You never know what stupid (from adult perspective) thing they are going to do next.

Besides, it may be nitpicking, but kids eating dirt right outside power plants would die horrible deaths within days. It is the lesser doses in the rear by populated areas whose effects may not be so well understood.
My 5 Step Plan To Rejuvenate The Economy
Would you mind going into more details as to how they are similar and what the differences are between the two? Should I run both, or pick one? You seem to suggest to run both in tandem but I'm not sure I see why since at first sight they seemed pretty much the same to me.

I was planning to setup Logstash next week so your input would really help. Thanks!
To me, the saddest thing about this problem is that the solution is over to just write less code. Be less smart, instigate fewer aggressive redirects to "mobile" sites.
I don't think the founders (of small personal projects) need a lot of convincing, do they?

"Hey, I'm doing a book and would like to feature you. Do you have 15 minutes to answer 6 questions?" You're going to get a 90% hit rate for side-project founders I bet.
as rauljara mentions, the claim that fukishima was victimless is a bit bloated.

nothing i've seen or heard leads me to believe that nuclear waste management is a sustainable thing.

this sounds like the oceanic equivelant of fracking.
From what I've heard, it's because we've now got decades of experience engineering uranium fission reactors, during which we've learned tons about the practical engineering challenges involved. While thorium looks great on paper, engineers expect we'll need decades of working with it before a similar body of expertise is available, during which accidents may occur that we know how to avoid with uranium, etc.

In other words, without uranium being scarce and expensive, and with thorium being lumped in the same "nuclear" bucket (with all the political hurdles that implies), it doesn't make much economic sense to start over with thorium.
That's odd, it should autofollow. I've seen it go under heavy load before where the autofollow took several hours to complete.
AdHawk: Bringing Shazam's technology to identify polical ads' sponsors
The weaponizable argument was why research was shut down in the first place (also, pressurized water reactors were more useful for the US's naval fleet).
Ask HN: I want to make money by helping Hackers write better
Hey Hacker News,

As I understand it I'm a good writer and a better editor. I also realized that I have an excellent source of information on the tech world due to my SO being a developer. I often find myself rewriting other people's works and recently an old developer friend called me up to see if I'd rewrite some of his copy for money because he doesn't write as well as he programs.

I realize this is an opportunity for business and that HN, according to my SO, is a source of not only developers but entrepreneurs.

So here I am asking HN: how should I get into this business? What steps should I take?

Thanks for reading.
High-rewatchability is a poor metric for a good film.

Examples of movies I would highly rate but would not want to rewatch: Schindler's List (1993), Hotel Rwanda (2004), Blindness (2008), Amistad (1997), etc...
It seems like this will use up a crapton of bandwidth with its 'push' style notifications. If someone with a million Facebook followers makes a new post, one entry is made in the database and then users pull it down as they visit their own pages.

If a million people decide to 'camp in my tent' (?), my server is suddenly pushing out gigs of data every time I make a post.
Programming on Parallel Machines; GPU, Multicore, Clusters and More - free ebook
If your analogy is correct, then it's probably advice worth listening to -- although Michael Phelps' swimming advice isn't going to get me 18 gold medals, it's probably going to make me a better swimmer than I am today.
Webcrawling at Scale with Nokogiri and IronWorker
Very good point.

Does lead cause any chromosome mutations? Because if it does the phase out of leaded gasoline alone could have a huge impact.
>A big part of the 37signals play book is awareness through blogs and magazines. Their business model can't be "hey, we're going to sit here for 70 hours a week and crank out code" because then there is nothing to write about.

I'd say that the majority of their customers could not care less what they write about on blogs and magazines. They just use their services because they work for them.

That is, their business model is not "promotion through doing various stunts and writing/having others write about it" as you maybe imply. It's mostly to use, fellow developers, HN/Rails crowd etc that this writing gets known, and we constitute a tiny minority of their customer base, judging from the customer stories they post.
We are putting together a wiki-style solution for community-curated post types. Common types are expected to be standardized so that apps are interoperable. For example status/microblog would be a standardized post type. We will launch with common types specified, so that everyone doesn't reinvent the wheel. After that, community managers will help keep the devs in line.
Sometimes it may be better not to explain than to resort to cosmic molasses and moonlight (terms taken from the NYT quote in the article).

Here is, I think, Feynman explaining it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM

It seems to also apply to explaining through religion.
What could Oracle do if they changed their mind? Serious inquiry, IANAL, etc etc... I like to avoid speculating about the intersection of tech and legal issues, but is Scala in a very different place than other languages targeting the JVM? Are there any actual legal issues with writing a compiler that emits Java bytecode? This has been going on for a while, maybe as long as Java's been around. There's even some mention of it in the intro to the JVM spec.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se7/html/jvms-1.htm...
You know it just redirects to http://blogger.com/home anyway right?
The technology has not been fully developed, there only have been research reactors. Developing reactors for it would require significant investments and apparently no government is willing to invest in it.
SAT for instance has only been solved with O(2^n) algorithms so far. The tricky thing here is that we don't quite know whether it could be done any quicker (google up P=NP for a more detailed description).
You can freeze them now, and hope that by the time you're ready to use them we know more.
Under the hood: Improving messages at Facebook
Ah I see, so the incentive value is just too plain... people may not have the hope that they will get a large enough incentive to make it worthwhile. This is something I hadn't considered... I like your suggestions, especially the first one with 50%. We used to have the incentive more competitive, the top 10 people who had the most friends signed up would get a free shirt, but once again that would mean you'd have to think more about your sharing and check back in.

Very good insight!
Man kicked off flight by pilot for wearing anti-TSA shirt
Just a heads-up: when you buy the book, the PDF will be watermarked with your name, email address, and transaction ID in the footer of every page.
So your post is about broadening your experience, but you're dismissing TV because it's only use is to show you what other people are experiencing?

I'm not a big TV watcher, but I would certainly say there's some value to a walled in, introverted person in figuring out why "American Idol" or "Two And A Half Men" are some of the most popular shows in the US. Most people around here just assume it's because everyone else is a dumbass.

BTW: http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/once.html
Y Combinator Ranked #1 on 2012 Top Accelerator Listing
Top 15 Startup Accelerators of 2012 Ranked, Y Combinator Tops List<p>Study by Team from Kellogg School of Management Reveals Top Accelerator Programs of 2012<p>Washington D.C. August 21, 2012 – Prof. Yael Hochberg and 2012 MBA graduate Kristen Kamath of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, in cooperation with media partner Tech Cocktail (tech.co), set out to determine the best startup accelerator programs in America and rank the top 15. Sitting atop this year’s list was Y Combinator, followed by TechStars Boulder and KickLabs respectively. This is the second year of the report, which was initiated in 2011 with Aziz Gilani, Director at DFJ Mercury.<p>In addition to the announcement of the top accelerators, Tech Cocktail is offering a free report to
entrepreneurs, sponsored by .CO Internet, the company behind the fast-growing .CO domain, titled, “A Guide to Choosing the Best Tech Accelerator for Your Startup”. This report will be available for download exclusively at tech.co, at the bottom of the accelerator rankings article. Topics covered in the report include analysis and advice on funding, mentorship, geography, network strength, and alternative startup programs.<p>“With the explosion of startup accelerators in the past couple of years, there are many options for entrepreneurs to sift through and no real resources to help find the right program for them,” said Frank Gruber, co-founder and CEO of Tech Cocktail. “Our goal in working with Prof. Hochberg’s team was to create an objective ranking that we could couple with our own research to create a more in-depth look at the various programs out there. There are many people who don't know what accelerators are or how to select one. We think the ranking created by Prof. Hochberg’s research team and the report created by Tech Cocktail provide an extremely valuable resource.”<p>See the full release at http://tech.co/top-startup-accelerators-ranked-2012-08
The WHOIS info on the domain (sideprojectbook.com) is under privacy protection as well. I find it a bit odd that the author is masking their identity.

The redirect domain, sideprojects.com, is owned by one "Houtan Fanisalek", but it's unclear if Houtan is the author of the book.
Infinite Scroll: The Web’s Slot Machine | Nir and Far
Another good read is "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia. Its about the birth and death of an entire family line, flowing through the wars, migrations and incest that revolved around it (atleast thats my interpretation :)).
Shouldn't we be conserving nuclear fuel for space flight and other operations where you require a very dense power source?
Thanks for pointing that out. I'll update the post.
I am not convinced that this needs a new protocol as they claim. Facebook-style functionality be done on top of activity streams, pubsubhub, salmon, webfinger et al. They indicate they have investigated existing systems and found them lacking. I would rather have something like this built on protocols that a bunch of people have discussed out in the open first. That said, I am interested to see more details as they arise, as this type of thing is needed.
+1 Project: How to turn an echo-chamber into a concert hall =)

(Ask HN?)
i think that the biggest problem is the potential for making places on our planet unsuitable to live in forever (for all practical purposes). people look at chernobyl and see a place that will be dangerous to all life long after they're dead. they don't want that to happen again. fukushima is potentially the next such place, albeit on a lower scale.

the fact that radiation doesn't hurt doesn't help either. if our civilization ever falls, chernobyl will be a place cursed by gods.
If the stereotypes about Starbucks customers being hipster technologists* are true, then Square is still ahead of PayPal here. The crucial difference between the Square deal and the PayPal deal is that the people who go to Starbucks are more likely to adopt a new technology than your average Walmart shopper.

* I imagine this is not accurate, but it is the sense I've gotten from online jokes about Starbucks. Either way an average Starbucks customer is likely better off than an average Walmart shopper, just based on how necessary Starbucks vs. Walmart is in terms of goods sold.
> "factors other than father’s age do not seem to contribute substantially to the mutation rate diversity in our data".

But as another poster already pointed out, age could be hiding other factors.

Exposure to environmental factors that could cause mutations change with time, e.g, older fathers would have been exposed to pesticides that were banned before younger fathers were born, nutritional changes, etc...
You wouldn't have to invent a new binary protocol, a simple text protocol can work wonders (see: memcached or Redis). I'd personally look more towards SMTP for inspiration (not security wise, of course). Since you're going to mainly be passing messages back and forth, not resources.

You really should also think about two separate protocols... one server-to-server, the other server-to-client.

At least, that's how I've been working on it :)
I'm not saying it's not worth being proud of. It is, for sure.

But is it worthy of being industry wide news? Most of the time, no. Most of these press releases contain no actual information that would be of interest to anyone who's life is not directly affected by that money.

That's my point. Sure, tell all your friends. Post on Facebook and Twitter. Great!

Hell even send out a press release. But industry news sources should not be reprinting these press releases, and we should not be upvoting them, unless they have actual content beyond "Hey these guys got some money to pursue their project."
>If I can get iTunes through the stereo, why bother with radio

Because those are two different mediums. In one you listen to your own music collection over and over, in the other you can find new things (at least where I live, dunno about commercial radio in the states), plus there are tons of NON musical programs you can tune in to.

Tons of people listen to radio stations even over the internet through their laptops/desktops, on which they already have access to iTunes/Spotify et al... Heck, people listen to radio stations even from _within_ iTunes.
We anticipate follower counts similar to the levels seen on Twitter today. Managing 1 few hundred followers isn't too difficult, thousands can be managed by cranking up the dynos on heroku. But yeah, Justin Bieber is going to need a hosted solution to handle that kind of load (like he has now with Twitter, YouTube, etc).

We also have a setting in subscriber settings that control which types of posts are pushed in their entirety to different followers vs just a notification being sent vs nothing at all. So blog entries and status updates might get pushed to all 1M, but you probably wouldn't push an HD video update to all of them without some more serious server architecture.
I wonder if more advanced robotics is going to make farming "complicated" land profitable again. The need for flatness etc. might become irrelevant with smart enough automation, and some variability in land form could be an excellent risk mitigation strategy against disease and harsh weather conditions or variability in fertilizer prices and so on.
To me personally this is at once trite and also a point desperately worth making to the wider public. There's something about the story-telling nature of humanity that makes "that one thing" such a pervasive myth. The written word just doesn't do well at encapsulating the daily grind of thousands of tiny decisions that shape a product to slowly converge on success.

While a precious few products may in fact be a tinder box just waiting for TechCrunch to blow them up, I don't think you stand much chance of success if that's the standard you set for yourself.
I'm trying a few payment options, using paypal for now. I do plan to add gumroad, and try stripe in a while.
It has been a little frustrating being stuck within that default template. At least I've been able to use it to let people in on our status and our story as we're building for launch, but I won't deny that the biggest appeal of putting a Launchrock site up was hoping that it would excite people to spread the news themselves.

Thank you for your honesty though... I am really excited for when we have an actual shop up!
It seems like no matter what screen name I pick, the settings claim that it is unavailable.
In my particular example, you need only brute force it over a dictionary, which is not that hard to do (even for bcrypt). That's because the input set for bcrypt is being artificially constrained.

My concern is that artificially constraining the input set to range(md5) might similarly make brute forcing (or other attacks) easier.
I can imagine so many possibilities for this technology, but, please don't assume, people will write in space in the future, its just not happening :)
Kids of that age (that watch the same "flash animated movies" over and over again) seldom buy/rent movies themselves.

Plus, they do not normally use online rating systems...
>there only have been research reactors

Well not exactly. They tried over here, but it eventually lead to nowhere. 2bn for 4 operational years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300