skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for pointing that out, I was reading the article on the tram this morning and didn't notice the age of the article. It would be very interesting to see if there have been additional research done, or if other teams have been performing research to help verify the early results Snyder found.
Private Equity: Return to Earth
Uh, "Bill Gates" = "unethical business practices".

Where have you been?
53 sales so far at £0.59 ...

not a terrible return, looks like it took an hour or two of development time.
Nice website, good find.

I found comments from HN's edw519 very useful: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191275
Yes, it is.

But you don't have to deal with e-mail as a dribble, as you say. I deal with e-mail as a batch process, just several times a day instead of once every few months. Ditto for Twitter and the like.
You don't get much value out of Twitter if you just post for the sake of posting. It's like e-mail. If all you used it for was writing to a penpal, then there's limited value there. But.. most people have evolved beyond that.

My grandmother would never have seen the point of e-mail beyond sending "letters" to each other.. but we all know now it goes deeper than that.

People who don't see extended value in Twitter now are like my theoretical grandmother and her myopic view of e-mail.
I don't see Obama snowballing a cat, I see a picture of a cat with snow on it inserted in to a sequence of Obama throwing a snowball.

Cheap attempt at a smear in my book, and absolutely nothing to do with hacking.
Slightly misleading headline from BBC there... it should really be "Galaxy may have 'billions of Earths'". There's no proof of it, it's just an estimate/guess. It may well be true, but there's no proof yet.

Billions of earth-like planets. Makes you want to live forever to get to explore all that stuff, doesn't it?
Thanks, prakash. It still works for me. Last night, I spent 2 hours filling in a 5 x 5 grid on one notebook page (the 25 possible outcomes of a process). This morning the code just flowed. Coming here is my reward.
I'm in the UK and I deliberately buy US Letter paper and print on that. It's a nicer shape.
Sure, and I never criticise the noble aim of trying to figure out ways to increase our chances of success (we need all the help we can get). However, I think you'll find a stronger correlation between "being aware of a very pressing and important unmet need that people are willing to pay to resolve" and success than between "making a philosophical gamble on the future" and success...
I think that what he means is whether the adherents to those theories adhere in a dogmatic or rational fashion.
Disclaimer: engineering undergrad here, half-learnt book knowledge lies ahead.

All of this discussion boils down to how you define the word 'enterprise'. A definition I was taught, of the concept of 'empresa' (meaning, literally in Spanish, 'enterprise'), is

socio-economical unit in which capital, work and direction are coordinated to achieve production that responds to the requirements of the human medium in which it acts,

which is indeed a broad definition, and one that accepts Microsoft, Apple, the Wikimedia Foundation and your local soup kitchen as enterprises, even if not all are for-profit organizations.

Now, sustainability is desirable trait all such organizations, but it is not required, obviously ;)

You say that making a definition as general as that to be useless, but I disagree. When someone tells you that he is an entrepreneur, and nothing else, all you know is that he runs an organization that does _something_ for _someone_. You don't know anything about his profits, whether he seeks them or not, and that is something that, for an outsider, doesn't matter. The definition of 'entrepreneur', profit seeking or not, does not help you to know about the finances of the organization, and thus the generality isn't harmful to it.
Taken for granted: the man who wasn't there
I'm certain that both the Cisco founders have a "benign" variant of OCD. Turning these people into heroes is counterproductive: for every founder that is actually able to get something out of their 110-hour workweek, there are 100 who only make their lives miserable and accomplish nothing trying to emulate the masters.

There is no way any halfway sane person is able to work 110 hours a week on a "sustained basis". Your physical and mental health will start to suffer after a pretty short time. Genius comes with insanity, not the other way around. There are a few crazy, brilliant people out there, but you will know beforehand if you are one of them. Ripping out piercings on stage will not turn you into Marilyn Manson, breaking all the sexual conventions will not turn you into Oscar Wilde and leaving only 8 hours a day for life-supporting routines will not turn you into Len Bosack.

Normal people should play by the normal rules. You're only wasting your life if you keep telling yourself that you have to be hard, cold and miserable in order to succeed. The crazy geniuses in this category don't read Hacker News.
I've tried Kayako and Cerberus and they are both fine. Kayako is hosted for $30-$40/mth for unlimited users, I think. Cerberus is about the same. Where these shine is in their knowledge base - you can have a both public and private KB.

http://www.kayako.com/

http://www.cerberusweb.com/

My thoughts are that hosted solutions are an absolute ripoff compared to buying the software and installing it yourself on a POS box. You can buy Cerberus for like $350, I think, and that includes everything.
Nothing really takes 1 hour to develop, test, tune, and release.

It's true, though, that the submission process took longer than development.
Web scraping techniques
This tutorial will show you some of the techniques used to scrape a web page . These techniques will/should increase your development speed . Ruby code included .
I'd tell you to lighten up, marvin, but I don't have enough ti
Most of my non-techy peers do not know what Twitter is (seriously, it's just not very big up here in the Great White North), whereas everyone has seen the IMVU ads...
Thoughts on Yahoo's PNUTS distributed database
I think in many ways those are the same thing. It depends on how wide of a market you want to capture. If you're just solving a single problem, like web forms (wufoo), then it's easy as long as the problem is real.

If you're trying to start a company that changes an industry, like Hulu or Tesla, your predictions need to be quite a bit wider in scope. I'm referring in the article to the latter kinds of companies.
Official release announcement: http://debian.org/News/2009/20090214
I'd gladly pay 2x that for a well-made HN iPhone app. Any takers?
Sex in Space, Pt 1 - Action and Reaction
In case you were disappointed the other sex in space post wasn't worthy, here's a much better one.
New technology would allow you to install software in your car
This has been "known" since the 60s. The Drake equation estimates the number of habitable planets in the universe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
Wow: another full release cycle of KDE 3.5 in Debian. At this rate KDE 5 will be out before Debian ships KDE 4 by default...
I suggest adopting RFC 2119 or something similar to avoid misleading titles on HN.
Have you met a professional VB (only) developer?
Startups: Actual Customer Support is Critical
Not to derail the conversation, but, question: What impact would the undeniable discovery of alien life have on organized religion? Would theists abandon their beliefs en masse or would they find a way of explaining the new discoveries with their existing doctrine?
Analogue between academic science and web startups:

'A tournament market "offers participants the chance of winning a big prize--an independent research career, tenure, a named chair, scientific renown, awards--through competition," writes Richard Freeman and co-authors. Tournament markets amplify "small differences in productivity into large differences in recognition and reward" ... In the real world, casting off large numbers of extremely capable people is no anomaly but simply how a tournament market works.'

The thing is, most people entering academic science don't know this -- whereas startup types seem almost to relish it.
Every non-technical founder without a working prototype needs to read this.
> It's an old adage that design isn't how something looks, it's how it works. Macbooks have far more elegant functionality.

How? When I want to plug a USB device into my Thinkpad, I put the USB device near a USB port and apply pressure to the device. When performing this operation with a Mac, the sequence of events is the same. (I could go on, but won't.)

There is just no difference.

> I don't look at it that way: I look at built-in experience. I think that customization is a waste of time.

No offense, but I think your mind will be changed after you are out of college and need to do $MAXIMAL_TASKS in $MINIMAL_TIME. A day spent customizing something pays for itself very quickly in increased productivity. If you have plenty of free time, you might not care, but if you have more to do than there are hours in a day, you will want to save as much time as possible.

I don't have time for the computer to tell me what to do. (But I do have time to write HN comments... hmm...)
Why does apple think we are some sort of barbarians with no taste?

To be fair, most people just want a computer that loads Google and writes Word documents. Apple serves that market fine, perhaps even better than Windows does.

But if you are a programmer, OS X and Windows are not good choices unless you are writing OS X or Windows apps (or you've watched too many Ruby on Rails screencasts).
Please don't misunderstand or compare Debian with Ubuntu. (at least I have the feeling that people do this nowadays because Ubuntu is so popular).

They have different release strategies, Debian focuses on stability and security as a Server orientated distribution. Ubuntu on the other hand has a strong commitment twoards the user desktop segment. Both is fine, I mean Ubuntu is basically just Debian with faster release cycles (and they like to taint their Kernel). (sorry for the oversimplification)

If you prefer more uptodate Software from the Debian side, please try testing, unstable and experimental. For the totally impatient there is e.g. Backports, Sidux and many more. Cross-pinning (mixing of Debian and Ubuntu is possible too.) Don't know how far Ubutnutu (or how ever you write that project name) has come.
How many of those are getting warmer, gibsonf1? :), couldn't resist.
What would that contradict?
30+ Cool Video Games Wallpapers
30+ Cool Video Games Wallpapers
I freely admit, and sometimes explicitly warn, that I can't compete with doing the problems in textbooks.

But I'll compete with anything short of that; and there are some things today's textbooks don't seem to mention, maybe because it's not formal-sounding enough or universally agreed-upon enough. You can read through a whole physics textbook without understanding MWI; reading about heuristics and biases will leave out a lot that would be helpful in applying it to your everyday life (important exceptions: Robyn Dawes, Cialdini)... but reading standard evolutionary psychology actually will get you all the extras, oddly enough.
> If you prefer more uptodate Software from the Debian side, please try testing, unstable and experimental.

Indeed. I have used Debian Unstable as my desktop OS forever, and it's wonderful. It does not break nearly as often as you might guess by the name. (Maybe once a year.)

It certainly breaks less than Ubuntu, although I got rid of my last Ubuntu machine about a year ago.
Money = Happiness, but when it buys experiences
This is good because it means unstable will be unfrozen again. Hopefully we will have linux-2.6.28 and ghc-6.10 in unstable soon :)
The Pirate Bay Trial - A Spectrial
Nine Reasons Why 8GB Is Only Just Enough
Beware the Inventor
How to Get Free Books to Review on Your Blog
Having streams of fun with a flash game.
I'm reading On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, which is about how the human brain thinks (with the angle of replicating this as artificial intelligence).

In brief, the neocortex has layers. Inputs from senses arrive at the lowest layer, and the data is propagated upwards through the layers to the top, where inputs from different senses are combined and - simplifying my already simple understanding massively - decisions are made. At the lowest layer of the hierarchy, if it is a visual input, it could be a fragment of a line. This could be combined with neighboring inputs to be an eye, and with more inputs, even further up the hierarchy, to be the face you're looking at.

Importantly, data runs down the hierarchy too. This is your brain making predictions of what to see, hear, feel, etc. Suppose someone says "my hands are cold so I'll put on my dloves" (not a typo). Say this to an English speaker and they will hear "gloves"; their mind has predicted the word "gloves" from context and experience (some Eastern European speakers won't be fooled, since their languages do have the "dl" sound). Or if you're listening to a song, your mind is primed to hear the next note at the right time. If I understand it correctly, cortical columns in some regions basically transmit the signal "song going as expected" - just passing up a summary, not the details. If you hear a wrong note, the prediction fails, and the details get passed up to the next layers instead.

It occurs to me that some of the abilities described might be the result of impairing the prediction mechanism. Qualities of autistic people/savants/TMS-enhanced people were mentioned in the article:
-Being unable to recognize the same area when subtle details like shadows were altered.
-Being able to draw accurately
-Being able to count hundreds of matchsticks.

As mentioned in other comments, accurate drawing requires us to not use the mental categorization we're so used to. Without the prediction mechanism, maybe the details of the inputs propagate higher in the hierarchy, closer to what we might consider consciousness. Similarly, counting matchsticks might require us not to group a heap of matchsticks into "a heap of matchsticks" but instead still see each individual matchstick.

But I Am Not A Neurologist.
How To Setup Your Own Software Development Company
What's the Best Retirement Plan for Independent Consultants?
Creationism -- the belief that some deity created all we see -- wouldn't have a problem with life on other planets. We see them. What kind of creation would only involve certain planets or creatures?

ID -- the belief that our perceptions can either be of completely natural artifacts or artifacts created as a result of an external intelligent agent -- also not implicated. Interestingly enough, there may be a counter-movement here: if intelligent life were discovered, arguments could then begin to be made that some sort of intelligent agent had some play in our cultural/geological history. That would be new.

This religion-vs-alien life question has been going around since the 1950s, at least. What a lot of people forget is that most major organized religions have been adapting to situations like this since their beginnings. Christianity, for instance, thought of the "world" as basically Eurasia for hundreds of years. People in Africa and the Americas were not considered fully "human" until fairly recently. That meant, for all intents and purposes, that places like the New World were 1) far away and almost impossible to reach, and 2) not part of the normal world, and 3) inhabited by creatures that were somewhat intelligent but not completely human.

Religions, especially successful ones, adapt. I would be extremely surprised to see any impact at all. The more you study it, the more of a non-issue it is.
Spirited Away wasn't really a mindfuck, actually; it was a lovely, fairly straightforward fantasy/coming-of-age story. Highly recommended nonetheless.
Economic Lessons From Lenin’s Seer
Bullshit. Apple's got emacs and vim, if you're a hardcore coder. Better yet, Apple has some incredible development tools. I use Coda, because I work mostly with PHP, and let me tell you that if you haven't tried Coda before you're missing out. It is a sheer joy to use.

Every programmer is different. Stop making these arbitrary little boxes and assuming that how you work is the best and only way.

We Mac users GET this. We don't get anal and piss the rest of you off by assuming that our way is the only way. PLEASE return the favor, because I HATE that these fucking arguments happen every fucking day and that there's really no need, and that it's wasting all our time. I'm fed up. Hacker News is much better than this.
There is just no difference.

Okaydoke: we'll go from the external stuff ONLY. There's the MagSafe power connector, which I love. There's the built-in iSight that's so pervasive any app writer can build in a camera, which is really neat. There's the fact that the computer suspends as soon as you close the case, wakes as soon as you open it. There's the smoothness of the CD drive. The Unibody case in the new Macbooks, the beautiful little divet you use to wake the computer up, and the function buttons that handle iTunes controls, ejecting. The light-up keys. Stop saying there's no difference.

No offense, but I think your mind will be changed after you are out of college and need to do $MAXIMAL_TASKS in $MINIMAL_TIME. A day spent customizing something pays for itself very quickly in increased productivity. If you have plenty of free time, you might not care, but if you have more to do than there are hours in a day, you will want to save as much time as possible.

Which is why it's a good thing that Mac is full-fledged Unix, so that I can customize every aspect using terminal, I can skin the entire thing, I can modify every little aspect of it to work exactly how I want, and I can go to emacs and do everything I need, right?

The Mac is customizable. I can do anything I want to with it. The fact that I don't is because I don't want to. There's a very healthy Mac-modding community out there.
Philosophy of Death
Look, I'm not in the best of moods and so I really don't want to get into an extended argument - use searchYC with my name + Apple if you really care about my arguments - so excuse me for being a little bit snappy in this response.

If you don't buy Apple's computers, they don't care about you. Apple has slowly been adding the features that they want in their computer, and they've assumed that lots of people want the same. That's the implicit agreement that you make when you buy a Mac: you're getting the computer Apple wants you to have. If you don't want that computer, don't buy Apple and stop arguing about whether or not Apple computers are good.

I get that you want to tinker. My cofounder uses Linux. I really, honestly do not have a problem with Linux. Seriously. I completely understand why you would want to use it. You have a completely different mindset than I have.

I'm a typical "Apple guy" so please listen to me when I say that this is my perspective, and that I say what I do to illustrate the other site. We're both right, I've said as much, and it's pissing me off that when I say "I think customization is a waste of time, I know you disagree, I'm not saying it's an argument," people come in and argue with me! Like, PLEASE excuse me for being irritated but Jesus CHRIST. We are different people! That's okay! We can still love each other and admire each other's works! I'm not assuming the two of us work the same way, and it pisses the FUCK out of me when you reply with the assumptions that:

A) I don't know what kinds of tinker-obsessed users Hacker News users are,

B) I haven't argued this once every five days because as MUCH as I like saying every time that "I understand your position, this isn't an argument," somebody comes in and feels the need to argue,

and C) I haven't been a Linux user myself for extended periods of time, and therefore understand perfectly where you're coming from.

I hold the belief that people who are really affected by aesthetic use Macs. Every last person who feels the drive that I do, the obsessive need to have every little anal detail right, uses a Mac. It's why it's so prevalent in Hollywood: designers love the Mac because it feels good. That's the right way to put it. Feels good. It's not the marketing, I assure you: there is something to how the Mac handles that delights me, that gives me joy. People who don't use Macs seem to think that when I say this I'm lying. I assure you that I'm not.
If MacBooks were made from the blood of infants, considering how rational Apple is with their design process, I'd like there to be a thorough logic for why infant blood is necessary, and why it achieves the best results. Then, if the product truly is the best on the market, I'll buy it, public be damned. When I'm buying a product, all I care about is how good it is. That's my entire thought process.

I understand that's not the theory every hacker here holds, but it's mine, and I'll stand by it.
Long weekend, so coding on a moonlighting project is inevitable.
If this guy doesn't want to buy a computer because he disagrees with the way the company that makes it does business, that's his prerogative just as much as it's Apple's to attempt to control their products after they're outside of Apple controlled warehouses.

If this guy ignores my advice, I won't stop from using his product. I'm allowed to state my opinion.

Similarly, if you think Apple's doing an evil thing, that's fine. I'd see where you're coming from. I happen to think they're not doing enough evil for me to worry about. That's all a matter of opinion. My stated opinion here was: buy a product for the sake of the product. That's all it is: my opinion.
Nice :D I like it a lot
That is the real life :) Code and Beer and HN ;)

P.S . : Lucky my girlfriend is not reading hn ;)
Quite a few of my start-up friends use laptops exclusively and I've never understood how they can be very productive on them. Besides the resource issue, they're only working with a single screen, usually a 15" one at that! I have a Macbook that I will occasionally use for work (though mostly just for reading HN after I wake up, as I am now), but a mere 17" of screen real state and 2GB of RAM is just not enough for the long-term.

Compare this to the 48" of screen and 6GB of RAM I get from my Mac Pro and there is no comparison. Still, even on that machine I routinely use 4 Spaces because there's just too much crap to keep on one desktop. Another advantage is never having to think about what to keep open; everything I use on a daily basis is always open and accessible in a Space without any waiting. There's no way I could do this on my laptop.

I think mobile working is a possibility, but I simply don't believe that laptops can replace desktops when it comes to software development.
Rather poorly though. It takes several numbers for which we have no idea of a reasonable guess, multiplies them to get a number. The best we can say about this number (pretty much) is that it is in the interval (0,1]. Which is what you get by the definition of a probability. We then multiply this by several other (somewhat) arbitrary constants to get a number.
Well... he did make Stack Overflow... which, you know, cured Cancer and AIDS on the day it was made public, and has a strategic lead on solving World Hunger.
fortunately my domU xen instances will not need KDE, however they will gladly welcome a stable xen 3.2. I've been using backports since then, but I'm glad stable is done. I seriously doubt many are using debian on their desktops...
AppCraver Offers to Review My App for $50
The Drake equation is just a guess based on other guesses.
"How do you get on the Top Paid Apps list? You sell lots of apps. How do you sell lots of apps? You get yourself on the Top Paid Apps list."

They could fix this by using exponential decay like Reddit and HN do with stories on the front page.