skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Seedcamp?
Is anyone involved [either a mentor or a startup] with Seedcamp? What are your experiences? (similar to YC, but in Europe)

What would your judging criteria be on these forms of investment companies -- their portfolio of investments and the team? Just the team?
I'll vouch for you. I've moved from the UK to Canada (both countries with welfare and universal health care) and I'll never step foot on US soil without travel insurance with an extradition clause, because the US system of health care disgusts me.

I know many people who have moved from the US into welfare countries in Europe. However, I also know many people who have moved out of Europe into the US.

Welfare systems get you good quality for the money, however if you've got the money to spend more (like your example, engineers, scientists and especially doctors) then you're going to want the best quality money pays for. I think the unfortunate situation is that most welfare countries don't have a system far reaching enough to provide everything people want.

I mean the French system is impressive when it comes to child care. I mean you can get daycare for $1 a day. However, from people I talk to there, their health care is rather lax compared to UK standards. However in the UK even the poor can get phenomenal health care, like triple-bypass surgeries, however god forbid you have a child and want to work!

Again what happens when you have a child with disabilities? Well you're royally fucked, you're treated like it's your own fault despite the government wanting you to have children.

I see the benefit of both systems, however personally I like the universal health care. It's rather ironic that I've never stepped foot inside a hospital (I lie, but it was never for me. Once visiting my mum at work - nurse - and the other visiting my dad after he had kidney stones removed) and I barely visited my doctor. In fact I don't even get sick often, I had the flu a few weeks ago, my wife was sleeping like 20 hours a day, I was wide awake the entire time and occasionally had to blow my nose.

However, I'd bet $50,000 that if I ever moved to the US the day I arrived I'd be diagnosed with a prostate tumor the size of a grapefruit, or some incurable disease or something. I mean I didn't even need braces as a kid, I'm either going to die the healthiest person on the planet or my luck's going to turn so bad so fast I'll be hit by a fragment of a meteorite or something equally absurd.
Easy to say "let them wiped out and reset" when you have lots of money to invest and want to get back to making even more.
The writer talked a lot about drag and drop.
OK, fair enough.

But it looks like there's some awareness of these issues in that project, I thought you were trying to pigeonhole this as a glorified hashtable or something. Quoting from the Whoosh docs:

"Like its ancestor Lucene, Whoosh is not really a search engine, it's a toolkit for creating a search engine."

Lucene has support for proximity queries, fuzzy "minimumSimilarity", etc., and it looks like Whoosh wants to be a tool like this.

Would "search engine library" be a more appropriate term for you? Something that is used to construct a useful search engine.
Doug's To Do - Inspired by NowDoThis
whitehouse.gov
Myspace.com

Both written in asp.net.
Dacher Keltner (or his lab at UC-Berkeley) did the original research. I can't find this one specifically, but their website is http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~keltner/

I managed to track it down with the search term 'leadership research "four cookies"' which led me to something with a reference to the study - http://www.yourofficecoach.com/YOCOfficeInsights/OI_bosses.h...
I saw NowDoThis in a blog entry posted on Reddit yesterday. I liked it but it was lacking in some features I wanted so I built this in a couple of hours early this morning.
I meant traded stocks, as many companies who issue dividends are trading at historic lows. Makes for good yields.

Depending on the situation it could bode well for some startups...

Also, sometimes there's no where else to invest profits (within the Company) without expanding outside of what you're good at (I think MBAs call this core competencies).
Android Vulnerability So Dangerous, Users Warned Not to Use Phone's Web Browser
IMHO the real failure is that Libertarian Types cannot seem to articulate a vision for the future. The linked article explicitly hearkens back to the 19th century; almost every libertarian proposal I have seen consists of nothing more substantial than rolling back to those times.

Like "true" communism you will never see free market principles fully embodied, and nobody can seem to articulate real-world half steps that don't have severely unpleasant side effects.
This is not "how to get funded in the recession", it's "how one company got funded in the recession". Reasonably interesting article, but a bit of a linkbaiting title, don't you think?
Most people who drive cars don't do so because it's their hobby. Maybe they're targeting people who actually need to replace parts in their car.
The "amount of information in the genome" is a concept whose only purpose cast doubt on evolution, that is why it is a bad concept.

The mechanism through which the random mutations become inherently useful is the process of natural selection.

The refutation of the challenge is simply that random mutations do add extra information.

The consequence is that in the rare case where such extra complexity is beneficial it maybe transmitted through reproduction. The existence of extra complexity isn't claimed as an inherent benefit by any sane person anywhere.
Yelling "WRONG" at two popular options isn't much of an argument. I suspect that Amazon has a good profit-maximizing reason for their ordering.
UDP [ Reliable_protocol_wrapper [ HTTP ] ]

Where Reliable_protocol_wrapper does retransmissions, acks, sequence numbering etc.

There's no reason why you couldn't use HTTP over UDP if you like, I'm sure it's most likely been done in the past - if only just for fun.
In Defense of Sass
vaksel, you're missing the target market completely. You're not it. It's car parts for people who use price engines like Froogle, not for car enthusiasts.

There is and always will be sites for guys like you and me (and I'm happy you're building another), who want performance parts. This is for people who consider their car simply transportation.
Excellent. Can we implement that on comments here? How hard would it be?
And, now that wikipedia has reached a large enough size it can plan out a change to the editorial process without crippling itself. There are some academics who hate wp, but they might be willing to fix a few problem articles out of frustration if they were given special powers.
The "Don't Click" Twitterjacking Explained
Try not being a developer and having no movement at all. Having some money to pay a programmer would be nice ;)
Those same people won't be fixing their own cars. Most people don't even change their own oil, you think they'll be changing their own clutch or a timing belt?
Ah yes, forgot about the checksum field :) thx
It's reporting that there are rumours = telling you something about how the locals feel.
That's the reason for newspapers and reporters (and spys) instead of just reading raw data feeds. What people are saying - true or not - is the important news.
curl -LO http://www.portaudio.com/archives/pa_stable_v19_20071207.tar.gz
tar xzf pa_stable_v19_20071207.tar.gz
cd portaudios
./configure && make && sudo make install
cd ..
curl -LO http://www.complang.org/ragel/ragel-6.3.tar.gz
tar xzf ragel-6.3.tar.gz
cd ragel-6.3
./configure && make && sudo make install

Now go back to bloopsaphone and

make clean
make ruby

(Make sure "/usr/local/bin" is in your $PATH.)
Suggestion to change the comments order in HN
Today I noticed something interesting in HN. It's about the comments ordering for posts.

Here is the link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=478354

You can see that one "unpopular" comment by "swombat" caused that comment alongwith its replies to be shown at the bottom of the comments list. I think that it is a bit unfair to the readers to show such upvoted replies at the bottom, just because the original comment on which they are replying is downvoted.

I think it would be better for the readers if the comments are given priority based on the points of their replies too. Something like a averaging or weighted averaging of the whole thing.

It's just a suggestion to make HN better ( I think :D )
Free doesn’t work anymore
Isn't the argument the same for any field? Can't we argue that successful practitioners in every field may have just gotten lucky, from entrepreneurship to science to anything else?

Not being able to prove something empirically doesn't mean that it's automatically invalid, or that we should dismiss it as being unworthy of . People don't start companies because they can prove that they'll be successful, and people don't invest in companies because they can prove that they're going to succeed. They invest because they believe the odds of success are sufficiently high to justify the risk.

In the same way, I don't think we've rediscovered that money management is pseudoscience just because most money managers fail to beat the market. That market is itself made up of people who are trying to beat each other, and statistically, most will fail and disappear. That doesn't mean that the market is a failure or that it's "pseudoscience".
Likewise, if I were to roll a die 100,000 times there will likely be a nonzero number of periods where I roll a 4 or better over 20 times in a row! (Numbers made up because this is arguing on the internet.)

Entrepreneurship isn't even a pseudoscience, by the way, in the same sense that raising a family isn't. Apples, oranges. ('Economics' would qualify.)
All they need is to have experts occasionally read articles, and mark them as "verified". Then, every page will display the latest edit, just as now, but have a "last verified" button that will go to the historical page, previously mentioned.
Well, I guess I'm the only one with this particular bee in my bonnet.... :)
Actually it can, and does: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPU
At least with Froogle you can find parts. Search for STI coilovers brings hundreds of results. And they have the good stuff: D2 Racing, Bilstein, Cusco, JIC etc.

And to me, I don't see the guys who use their cars as basic transportation, working on their own cars in the first place.
Mixx has no niche. It's completely bland and generic. There is no single reason why I'd go there over any other site.

Plus, their layout is a mish-mash of content types. It's a jungle.

They've struck some secret sweetheart deals with newspaper companies to get their buttons on sites like CNN. I am assuming they were deals because there's no reason Mixx belongs in the same breath as some of the other sites with buttons on these sites. Mixx has backing from newspaper companies hoping to get in on the social news scene, which probably helped. And it's founders come out of the newspaper advertising scene.
You could give people a bookmarklet as insurance against lost cookies. (One of the key values of keeping lists is you can stop worrying that something will be forgotten. A list service with a significant risk of loss destroys that value.)
Or CCA http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2535
That founders co-op - do they only fund companies that are in Seattle? Looking at their FAQ and application - doesn't come right out and say so, but it appears to be the point of their operation - or at least a driving point.
"How could you want to obscure what are very easy and simple tools still baffles me"

It's because HTTP/HTML is a very simple tool for what it was created to do: retrieving and displaying static pages.

Everything else is not so simple. As soon as people started to move data entry forms with master detail screens, etc. onto that platform things were getting nasty.

Since Microsoft is the master of master detail forms, or at least of the platform on which most of them have been built, they felt a need to come up with a solution.

And the solution the "company who never understood the web" came up with was ... XMLHTTPRequest. No, seriously, it was ASP.NET. No, wait, it was both! ;-)

The world is confusing.
Ask HN: Is there a way to know if someone has commented on any of your (old) posts?
Sometimes I come across old HN threads that I find fascinating. When I reply to a comment, is the author of the parent post notified so that, if they choose, they can continue the discussion?
Gettysburg Address Record (Full Text)
New Vulnerability Found In BlackBerry's Web Application Loader
Ask HN: Good books on machine learning?
I'm trying to learn about methods of machine learning. Do you guys have any suggestions for books or sources I should use?
On the one hand, yes, but on the other hand WP adminship means so little that it's effectively flypaper for the drama club. Admins are essentially powerless against solid contributions, and the cliques and internal strife function as a fine system of checks and balances against overt abuse.

The worst you can say about it is that the admin culture repulses newcomers. But the WP model doesn't really demand long-term commitment from contributors in order to work. WP will improve steadily based on casual contributions. And so adminship is really more of an inefficiency than a serious problem.
Try "The Elements of Statistical Learning" by Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman. Lots of math but an outstanding introduction.
No, I moved here in 2006.
How to view the urls of [dead] submissions
Silly that he messes up the first example, but I've wanted something like this third solution when sorting by rating on Amazon -- when a product has only a couple of positive reviews, it's almost the same as being unreviewed. (On the other hand, just a couple of negative reviews can often be quite helpful, since they can list concrete problems making the product bad -- a positive review has the much harder case to make of "there will be nothing bad about this product".)
The features listed on that page are not, to my knowledge, supported on snippetsEmu.vim:

"- The syntax of snippets is very similar to TextMate's, allowing easy conversion.

- The position of the snippet is kept transparently (i.e. it does not use marks/placeholders inserted in the buffer), which allows you to escape out of an incomplete snippet, something particularly useful in Vim.

- Variables in snippets are updated as-you-type

- Snippets can have multiple matches

- Snippets can be out of order. For instance, in a do...while loop, the condition can be added before the code."

There are also more snippets for more filetypes enabled by default with snipMate.vim, partly because of the features it supports. I also managed to get it to around half the code, which pleases me but I doubt anyone else would consider it a 'feature' ;)
Lets say that you agree with this advice. What language would you recommend learning to code in?
Sometimes I want to view killed stories. You can see the URL by going to http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=x, where x is the item id (which you can get by looking at the URL of the story's upvote button).
monetizing BOSS is a decent idea in theory, but its clear they should have telegraphed this earlier in the program

the real issue here is that this will not and cannot reverse an obvious issue with ysearch - it continues to underperform google in use, revenue, and quality. selling ysearch to msft to me is a no-brainer, the costs for running this service are astronomical, the ad system (panama) is a perennial underperformer, and frankly search is not critical to yahoo's bread and butter businesses...banner ads on key properties like news, sports, finance, mail, and groups.

ysearch has never really made financial sense for the company, i suspect bartz will not be religious about making futile frontal assaults on google like jerry was
Yes, his point is still valid.
The phrase that pays...

"...Twitter or other service to update their status ..."

Other service being oh I dunno, IM, MySpace, Facebook etc.

Twitter has got some great PR people apparently.
50 Must-Have Firefox Extensions for e-Learning & Researching
Are you an e-Learner or a researcher? No matter if you are learning or working online or on campus, the following Firefox extensions can make your life easier.
mainstream news is a scale game. if you aren't yahoo news, cnn, drudge, etc...its almost impossible to survive
Kindle 2 tops Amazon's bestselling electronics list, despite criticism
In general if you sell your company (or pieces of it) you will get something less than the net present value of all its future dividends, as estimated by the buyer.

You or your VC shareholders may choose to do so anyway because it's more comfortable and less risky to cash in earlier. But the party/parties who buy the company will demand a discount as compensation for the inconvenience and risk they're taking on.
Ask HN: How would you format a Linux skill sharing session?
I work on a team that develops a large C/C++ application on Linux. All of the team members have various levels of Linux expertise; some use it as needed for their job, others use Linux as their OS of choice. I think everyone will agree that as you continue to learn Linux, you learn a lot of tricks that make your life a lot easier (obscure commands, command options, various piped combinations, etc). I think we all have a lot we could learn from each other.

The local LUG on campus has sessions like this, but they usually end up being half hour discussions about ls switches. This is a huge waste of time... What's a good way to cover a lot of material quickly? Go around to each team member and ask "what's the most useful command you've learned in the past year"? Have a few self-proclaimed Linux gurus prepare material beforehand to teach?

I'm open to suggestions. What have ya'll done?
The H-1B visa has got to go
Why get the lower bound: this means you systematically underestimate the items with fewer ratings. Also this formula assumes normal distribution.

There is another solution called 'True Bayesian Average' that is used on IMDB.com, for example. For the formula and the explanation how it works see here:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/507508.html
YouTube Adding Downloads, Including For-Pay
As the old saying goes, "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is."
Programming is to great software what writing is to great literature. You might reach some basic level of literacy -- say, the ability to write a blog post -- and conclude that writing is easy. You might then translate your blog post from English into French and take the results as further evidence of your literary mastery. Programmers often celebrate their words, their phrases, their languages, but these things don't really matter. What matters is the end result. Producing great literature or great software is not easy. It is the work of a lifetime.
Rolling a die is a truly random act, where the initiator has no control over the outcome. I don't think the same can be said for entrepreneurship, raising a family, or investing. I don't think they're apples and oranges at all. Just as many money managers (investors) may end up getting lucky through no merit of their own, many businesses succeed or fail due to random chance, and many kids turn out horribly even though they grew up in stable, loving homes. Does that mean that your success in entrepreneurship and raising a family are pure chance?

I don't think that the YC approach to investment carries the same amount of risk as someone going to crunchbase and investing in random companies they find there. Surely there's some value to studying what has worked in the past and trying to apply it to future endeavors.
We use our own optimized BOSS results as a feature over on http://bug.gd -- and I couldn't agree more with every single one of the points in Gabriel's post.

Yes, it's different.

No, it's not the end of the world for major/medium sites. For our site (and likely DuckDuckGo), the added SLA will be a (perceived) risk softener.

Yes, Yahoo is letting down its new "open" developer community by changing the revenue plans from passive to actively invoicing.

It could be worse-- they could be putting the changes into place sooner. But I think a lot of developers were expecting the passive plan, so offering both options would be better.
flypaper for the drama club

Did you just make that up? I like it.
This is, I think, the bestest funniest post to hit Hacker News in awhile.
More-or-less endless progress is something I took for granted most of my life. In the last few years, that's started to appear less sound an axiom. It's good to see a thoughtful exploration of an alternative that doesn't necessarily involve a large die-off and a reversion to pre-technological hunter/gatherer tribes--something closer to "the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider prosperity."
That's a great idea, though I think "All they need..." trivializes the scope of the implementation a bit :)
Sounds like it will be a long time before most videos have download links. For now there's still

http://www.pwnyoutube.com (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458409)

and

http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/youtube-dl
(a fantastically implemented Python script)
Court Rules that Vaccinations do Not cause Autism
Skype for Interviews - A How-To Video
After '89, there were some who said, "Communism didn't fail because this wasn't /really/ Communism." I answered, sorry, but that's how Communism is rendered.

There are those now who are saying, "American Socialism didn't fail because it wasn't /really/ Socialism." I'm answering, sorry, you had your chance. You can argue on blogs all you want. The experiment has failed miserably.

Point being, simply asserting a preferred definition is not a compelling argument. Whatever it was that was going on, it hasn't been working. Making one or another particular economic philosophy the bogeyman isn't going to help, however good it makes people feel to be able to say, "I told you so."
There really isn't very much available on the practical side. So if you are looking to implement algorithms I suggest that you make use of the machine learning at ocw.mit.edu

Alternatively, if you want a good dose of a theoretical explanation of algorithms currently in use I highly recommend "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning" by Christopher Bishop. It is definitely the best machine learning (and statistics) textbook that I have ever come across.
Not really - think about a heart surgeon's success rate vs. a money manager over the long term (20 years).
A very readable introduction to machine learning and recommendation systems is Programming Collective Intelligence, by Toby Seagram (O'Reilly). Worth looking at if you're just getting your feet wet.
Nice, clear explanation of something that drives Python beginners crazy--especially if it's their first programming language.

It would have been worth mentioning the 'copy' module.
'copy.copy' for shallow copies of any object,
'copy.deepcopy' for recursive copies.
You're confusing the last 12 months with a 4,000 + year longterm trend.

Human lifespans, human wealth, and human knowledge have been growing exponentially for a long time. Check out a graph of American income over the last century - the Great Depression is just a blip on the inexorable growth.

By failing to have any long term perspective you're just slamming to the rails, taking the most recent headlines for some sort of reasoned conclusion on the future of growth.
Have you thought about move to Singapore? Govt.funding for stuff like this is way easier to secure and stem cell research is encouraged, I believe.
Absolutely right. Mixx is miserable. If Digg can't manage to sell itself, what chance do 3rd rate copycats have? It doesn't even send significant traffic to stories on the front page. The only thing it's useful for is submitting your blog posts for SEO purposes.