skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you have an S.O.? While you may have one who is anti-V-day (which is fine), but I'd imagine that even the one who "doesn't really care much" would probably be a little disappointed if you made NO effort to do something just a little special.

Of course, you should be nice every day, too. I think that's pretty understood.
Ideally, that "figuring out" would have happened before the marriage part, no?
I'm a hacker that used to play juco basketball - this article is extremely on target.

I'm surprised this article didn't mention Dean Oliver or this book: http://www.amazon.com/Basketball-Paper-Rules-Performance-Ana...
Is this sarcastic ?
"With services that don’t generate much cash, the company looks less at money spent than at measures of usefulness and the opportunity cost of devoting employees to one project over another."

That seems reasonable. If there are multiple projects in play, not investing staff time into the most promising projects is indeed an opportunity cost.
This is the document the source is talking about.. and it appears to be fake:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_12-571-3570
This is not and was not intended to be about "research". This is something that has already been so well researched that it can be casually demonstrated on demand to a journalist with no significant concern that it will fail to impress. This was "mere engineering".

The research has already been done; I've been reading about this for a couple of years now. It's not fringe science. Cutting-edge, maybe, but not fringe.
This analysis fails to take into account the amount of fake/scam/robo entries posted on Craigslist (their biggest problem today).

Several of my friends and I have been studying this in detail for a number of years now... We still haven't figured out why people post fake posts on Craigslist (especially in the personals section), however it is clear that there must be some incentive, as these spammers(?) have become increasingly elaborate. Many of them are ads, of course, however the amount of information that is exchanged before you learn this suggests that there is some sort of viral spam content harvesting occurring.

The author of this piece might find that to be an interesting follow-on study...
And what do you mean by improve? Does a Doctor provide value if she extends life. What if that life is devoted to endless silly pursuits like chatting on IMVU. Or commenting here? :)

Value is subjective. If someone pays for what you are doing, you are providing them value. You do not have to worry about the others. Yes, there are probably some behaviors that might lead society towards the brink and you could say that these should be negatively valued, but then who decides whether that society must be forced away from the brink.

Low-brow entertainment is valuable in someone's world.
I don't read Reddit myself, but for those who do, $1.99 shouldn't be a deal-breaker. People will plunk down two bucks in an instant on the app store if they find something cool that would enhance their experience. (And good on them; if everyone thought free was the only price point, we'd all be out of our jobs.)
> An entrepreneur's job is to build lasting companies that make lots of money. Period.

This is one of those arguments that starts falling apart as soon as you start looking at it closely. What if I build a company that makes lots of money for a short period of time? Am I not an entrepreneur? Or what if I don't respect laws and ethics while making said money, and I'm smart enough to not get caught, or smart enough to quit when I have a reasonable value of "lots of money"?
To maintain a artificially low exchange rate with the US and the rest of the world China uses a fixed exchange rate with exchange rate with the USD. To do this they need to collect a frighting amount of currency every year or the Yuan is going to increase in value.

If they hold that cash without lending it then the US government would need to create money to avoid deflation and the Chinese would lose out on the interest they would get by loaning the money. Effectively this is loaning the US money at zero interest while the the USD they hold is deflating.

They can use some of this money to buy raw materials or intangible assets, but if buy finished products then the cost of raw materials would increase and they can just pirate most movies / software without cost.

PS: US debt is one of the few places you can safely hide a frighting amount of money. People have been buying notes whose interest rate is well below inflation even as the US borrows insane amounts of money to deal with this mess just for the safety.
shortage? nah. now those finance majors who were making millions on juggling mutual funds can get a real job and contribute to society rather than living off unearned commissions. (if your mutual fund does worse than the economy as a whole you don't deserve reward, you are worse than random input)
Thanks! That's exactly what I was looking for.
and years of negative savings encouraged by a highly inflationary policy have nothing to do it?
this "cutting back" is consumption returning to sane levels.
$1.99? I've spent more on worse on the iPhone. Sold.
Ask HN:  Essential books for starting/running a web company
I'm a pretty bright, college educated kid... but unfortunately I lack the knowledge and experience of running a company -- skills that I'm going to need very soon.

In under a month I'll be launching my web service which I know will be huge. There's no lack of motivation or willingness to continue working hard, but there is a serious lack of knowing how to set-up a business. I need to know how to compensate early employees, freelancers, cofounders, when there's no funding (something I'm dealing with right now), what I should be journaling during this process, and any other caveats of the web start-up industry.

Ideally this book will be written by someone in the internet industry who has plenty of experience. Basically, a concise, well-written book by a CEO turned VC would be ideal...

My main issue right now is that I've done all the development of this thing (took several months) and am going to be getting a couple of cofounders / early stage people to help me out.. which is not hard at all once they see the demo of it. But before I seal the deal with any of them, I want to be sure that there's something set up that's fair to all parties.

Somehow this request for a book has morphed into the true problem I'm having... but a book recommendation would still be great!
The parent of this comment calls Reddit a time-wasters and contrasts it with online education.

Probably the most valuable online education available today for a sufficiently smart person wanting to become a scientific generalist is provided by Eliezer Yudkowsky. (Since 2001 I for example have learned more science from Eliezer's online writings than from all other sources combined.) The software for Eliezer's latest project, Less Wrong, is . . . Reddit.

(Clarification on what I mean by "education": Eliezer provides education, not credentialing.)
Well said. :-)

I'm fine with the people who provide low-brow entertainment. At the same time... I really wish they'd spend their time trying for something a bit more up-scale.
Check out some books from Nolo Press.
Michael Lewis is a non-fiction author. Most relevant to this thread, his name is instantly recognizable among people who are interested in the intersection of baseball and statistics, because he wrote Moneyball. The basic idea is that historically the market for talent in baseball has severely mispriced talent because it overpays for attributes that do not win ballgames. Thus, if one knew what actually won ballgames, one could thwomp the competition while spending much less money. And, sure enough, someone did just that.

For the rest of the story, I recommend the book. I have no interest in sports whatsoever but one of my stats geek friends does, and he accords it a place of honor in his bookshelf.
That the linked article is by Michael Lewis. A very important data point, since I would probably read Michael Lewis if he just reprinted the phone directory. He would find some way to make those numbers compelling.
Ask HN: How many of you are coding today?
Life is unfair

But that's okay

Someday I swear

No coding away

On Valentine's Day
although it is definitely not cheap... :)
I personally use &shy; (soft-hyphen) where this article uses <wbr>. Inserting hyphenation over plain line-breaking help the reader to understand that the words are joined (conventionally, at least), and make the resulting text read more like prose. Also, &shy; is cutely memorable.
This sounds good in theory but there are a TON of variables that would be really hard to encapsulate. I'm not saying it can't be done, but (good) defense in basketball is extremely team-oriented. Positioning, rotations, double teams (and the rotations that accompany them), etc., not to mention zone defense.

To give a more concrete example, a team with a great defensive center gives the guards flexibility to play tighter man to man, because they can more readily afford to let the guy they're guarding get by them (thanks to their "backup", the center). This has the additional consequence of implying that they give up less room on jump shots.

Another thing to consider is steals. A steal is really big because it obviously prevents the opponent from scoring, and frequently leads to fast break opportunities. However, it's misleading to simply look at the number of steals a player gets. Some players get steals within the "flow of the game", whereas others get them through gambling (I don't have a quantitative source for this, but anyone who's watched Larry Hughes play knows what I'm talking about) for steals, meaning that whenever they fail to get the steal, they also end up way out of position, often leading to an easy score for the opponent.

The list of variables goes on and on....
Hire a damn good attorney.
Lucky or Smart by Bo Peabody
A Microsoft Store? Isn't that kind of like a Procter & Gamble Store?
Fortunately I only have an iPod Touch, I visit Reddit frequently enough while at home.
I think it's better to phrase this in terms of instrumental vs. inherent goals. The inherent goal of an entrepreneur is to build lasting companies that generate large profits. That's what they're there for, and that's the yardstick for success.

Some instrumental goals of this are being passionate about the product, changing the world, doing what you love, etc. Because if you do what you love, you're likely passionate about the product. If you're passionate about the product, you'll likely change the world. If you change the world, you'll likely (though not always) have a built a lasting company that generates large profits.

Similarly, for most people, generating large profits is an instrumental goal to being happy, and then being happy is the inherent goal. Some people find they can be happy by doing a not-so-profitable small business that happens to let them do what they want, skipping the make-lots-of-profits step. These people fail at entrepreneurship but win at life.
How about the <optgroup> tag: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_optgroup.asp
How can one create a long lasting company if that person isn't passionate about what he is creating? How long one work on something he doesn't love? I think his statements are contradicting or at least nearly impossible to achieve.
If You Spend Your Time Wisely, A Week From Now You Will Realise That You Are an Idiot
davetufts already covered it by posting http://mises.org/misesreview_detail.aspx?control=53
Honestly, I don't think Eliezer Yudkowsky's writings at all compare with what you can get by seriously working through the MIT OpenCourseware site and/or buying textbooks off Amazon.com and working through all the problems in them. Don't confuse feeling smart with being smart.
Maybe later. Was out with friends this afternoon.
oh definitely... no GF so a nobrainer ;)
To be fair, Phil Knight gave her some Nike stock 25 years ago. I just got this from the link you posted, but it's worth emphasizing that he did a decent thing.
> Lively, Google’s entry into three-dimensional virtual worlds, was publicly unveiled last July. Four months later, when the company decided to close it, only 10,000 people had logged into the service over the previous seven days. That was well below the targets set by Google’s quarterly project review process, and far behind Second Life from Linden Lab, which had about half a million users in a similar period.

Hmm. I'd be happy with that. I wonder how much it costs to run the service? I don't need to kill Second Life to be successful.
The real world is far from an ideal situation!
I'm fairly sure that, a few years ago, I saw a program about an EMP generator about half the size of a car, with a range of 50 yards. So, yeah, a bit confused by the article, which says that it's been considered to be a few years off for a while.

Of course, that one was also not mobile at all, and may have been hooked up to a really large power supply, so having portable EMP generators is certainly a major advancement.
Another factor to consider: Boston has a high population of college students (ie, seasonal residents), making the housing market very active.
Since a computer based singularity is not arriving, I wonder if a human one might - can you imagine if this got good enough that large numbers of people were using it routinely?

*I am aware that that would not meet the typical definition of singularity. I'm referring more to a leap in technology, then technology inventing itself.
Fun article. I loved Moneyball, and enjoyed other stuff Michael Lewis has written. I'm glad he's looking at basketball, since that's really the only sport I actually follow a bit, mostly through a blog dedicated to sports stats that happens to focus mostly on basketball: http://dberri.wordpress.com/.

The author (Dave Berri) is an economist who's done some work on connecting team success to the actions of individual players through stats. A major theme is that many players try to maximize their paydays by over-emphasizing scoring, and that this is actually reasonably sensible on their part because decision makers in basketball currently overvalue scoring, and pay accordingly. It does look like that's slowly changing, at least according to this article.
The app works on the touch as well.
Flagged. This article is nonsense/fake.
All right, here's where I see the problem with the current way that HN displays the source URLs of submitted articles. To say (google.com) is the source of this submitted article is misleading. Yes, I did mouse over the article title to see the full URL, but this behavior prevents rapid viewing of the newest submitted articles in the most user-friendly way.

P.S. I'm not sure I agree with the advice in the submitted article, either.
My wife works for Medtronic, I'll see if she can bring one home for the weekend :)
"'In many respects we are probably worse off than we were 20 years ago,' said Eugene Spafford, the executive director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University and a pioneering Internet security researcher, 'because all of the money has been devoted to patching the current problem rather than investing in the redesign of our infrastructure.'"

It probably is time to rethink the problem of spammers and worms at a more fundamental level.
Right. I grew up with the metric system. (Just like anyone else outside Britain or their old colonies.) To me gallons and feet are not intuitive. But a meter and a liter and a kg is familiar, so I can roughly tell how much that is without a measuring instrument.

The fact that a foot is supposed to be the length as a foot doesn't seem like any useful advantage to me. My foot is not precisely 30.48 cm anyway.

Some imperial units are still in use outside of the British world. Inches for TVs and computer monitors and car wheels. Feet is used for boat lengths although meters is also used sometimes. Knots and nautical miles in sailing. Feet is also used in aviation.
No. They are just using the anti-circumvention rule from the DMCA. Jail-breaking an iPhone is no more illegal than ripping a DVD. Jail time comes into play if you break copyright fro profit.
Fakeness aside, it is an interesting question. Quite interdisciplinary.
I need to find someone that can hack an airg account so i can get the users name and possible address. How can i do this?
To me, entrepreneur meant trying something new. By the way, it's a French word, so I should be qualified to comment on its meaning beyond what your thesaurus says :-)

So I agree with your disagreement.
Yes but without 3G I won't be able to use it while traveling, unless WiFi is available.
And it's also the problem with obscure urls (...Doc?id=dcfqz3h7_226gbbhd7dx) and Tiny URL schemes.

Should I know the author of that introspective look at procrastination, hacking, and "continuing (browser-based) education"?
But this stuff is too good to be fake :p

"Only four positions were found possible without "mechanical assistance". The other six needed a special elastic belt and inflatable tunnel, like an open-ended sleeping bag."
Art and Linux family trees
I wasn't going to code until I needed to give my SO a gift... so I made an export-to-CSV feature she had been asking for.
I think it's a little strange that though this announcement has been submitted to reddit, it currently has only four upvotes there.

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7xgql/i_read_it_...
Worked a bit on some iPhone dev, but mostly I was busy cooking
The artist here is Jared Tarbell, one of the co-founders of Etsy. Of interest to HN readers, the source (mostly Java/Processing) is available. He's also got some pretty remarkable things on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/generated/
This gives a better idea of the index ...
http://harpers.org/subjects/HarpersIndex
the general theme was amazon is cheap - cheap computers, cheap office space (poor ventilation, uncomfy chairs etc), long hours, a large amount of pager duty (1 week/month not uncommon), relatively poor pay, etc
This post irks me!

What does the author consider Thomas Edison's work? Did Edison innovate early for the sole purpose of making money? I think rather he did because of passion, interest and possibly the thought of changing the world. Obviously he succeeded in the above and in turn created industries that fed and feeds millions of people each year.

I can't imagine starting up a business where I had no passion and interest in doing, rather only for the money. Ummm i had that type of situation before and it was called a job!
Boston is the land of puritans. I can barely get a beer after midnight, never mind buy one at a gas station. I'm surprised we even have a bar on that graph.
Also tangentially related, Rockets GM Daryl Morey is often referred to as "Moneyball Morey" by the basketball press.
Agreed, it suppresses electrical activity in the brain, a sufficiently powerful pulse from a device like this can potentially stop all electrical activity in the brain, including the areas that control the lungs and heart.

In theory any sufficiently powerful EM field could kill a person. However it's fortunate that magnetic fields diminish significantly with distance, so the primitive parts of our brain that control bodily functions are relatively protected so I wouldn't be surprised if they start researching ways to use this as a stun weapon.
The essays I've been writing about startups are most of what will eventually be roughly what you're looking for.
From experience, I can definitely relate to one point raised by the author - no database can completely overcome an application with badly designed queries... also, as a developer, I would prefer to have the various checks and triggers that are possible with RDBs..
The spam gets verified addresses, and ones of a specific demographic.

The fake postings generally aren't listed as paid services--that is a much smaller pool of potential responders--but instead casual, no strings attached encounters.
I went to the gym, watched a TV episode, coded, had a few beers... so, yeah, the same thing I do every day.

One way or another, if you were coding today, you made a conscious decision to do that instead of an alternative -- There's no point regretting it.
They have an amazing rating from the Better Business Bureau, which is quite surprising for an online product, I mean it's probably better than most chain stores.

The reason I think IMVU isn't profitable is likely because they have such a high monthly usership and such a comparatively low revenue. I mean for 600,000 monthly viewers (not even repeat views) a blog would bring in amazing profits for relatively low bandwidth usage. However IMVU has high bandwidth usage simply due to its nature, yet it only brings in $1 mil a month.

I mean adsense can bring in like $1 easy for 1,000 views, that's easy $600 for 600,000 views. If people are constantly using it, like they do IM's, even just a daily visit from each would be near $20,000 with 100% front page visits from 1 small banner.
No one's asked me to contribute. I actually am going to be helping the nasm project instead. They needed me.
nostrademons makes a good point: reading textbooks and working many problems are essential. Still say that Eliezer's writings and the online discussion of them can be a very useful supplement to the textbooks and problem sets.
how do you like my "poem"? :)
Also, perhaps google docs URLs are more likely to get deleted at the whim of the author. I hate broken links.
The oddest thing about that video is that his wife was dating speedo guy's brother, and then dumped his brother for him.
A letter from an investor to an entrepreneur
I have always admired Tom Clancy's response on whether he considers himself literature:

"I entertain people. It is an honest occupation."
First things came to my mind being that schools would use these data to determine admission. What kind of applicants will yield the best pay off? (endowment?) Same for companies hiring employees.
Well if they can't even do better than the S&P 500. Let's not hope that they'd do much to society analyzing other data. ;)
Yes; I think Mark Pilgrim said it best: "I don’t understand this continuing obsession with buying things that you need to break before they do what you want." http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/10/04/if-wishes-were-i...
They're not changing at all, you're just noticing it more now that they have something they feel they need to protect.
Canadian Hackers: Tell the CRTC that you oppose traffic throttling
http://support.crtc.gc.ca/rapidscin/default.aspx?lang=en

Scroll to the bottom and click on either "pt2008-19" or "pt2008-19-2". Choose "OPPOSITION" in the drop-down menu and tell the CRTC what you think about traffic throttling!

This takes two minutes and will hopefully make a difference. Thank you!
What would you consider decent tech coverage to look like? jw
No argument there. Twenty-five years is still quite a long time for ROI. ;) Let's hope she retires well.
>> this is less important now given relaxation of CPU rules

If you run on the server-side, you are still severely limited by request time limits, so you'll have to move the outer loops off App Engine. I already wrote a REST api to my app, and it'll still be used for AJAX clients and routines and authorization-specific scenarios. But for schema migrations, backup/restore systems, and quick and dirty prototype apps, the remote API simplifies the programming.

> Also consider this paper by Jim Gray

I don't dispute the bottom line of putting computation near the data... if your app is computation-driven or each computation requires mondo data. Ease of programming against the datastore shouldn't be casually dismissed in favor of architectural ideals, particularly in the context of free app quotas and programmers who want to quickly hack up a web app or prototypes.