skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If becoming a teacher is the ultimate instrumental good, then we would all become teachers, then nothing would get done.

Since that is obviously the worst of all worlds, it tells me that teachers do a good thing, but not the greatest thing.

However, without teachers, few things would get done as everyone would reinvent the wheel. This is also, while not the worst scenario, it is far from the best.

Thus, the best scenario seems to be that people should try to accomplish something, then go back and teach the next generation. The bonus is that these people will know how to get to the top.

However, people who are good at getting things done are not necessarily the best teachers, and for the people that are...

Perhaps, like we have today, those who are good at teaching and want to should teach, and those who want to produce should produce (and then later teach). The whole system relies on there being a good balance between the two. How to calculate the balance is very hard.
Can someone recommend other useful articles on context vs consistency?
What kind of math? Just curious.
Clojure: an overview
Rewiring the Brain: Inside the New Science of Neuroengineering
Philanthropy has historically followed Pareto's Principle, that about 90% of your donations will come from 10% of your donors. Barack Obama changed this perception. The majority of his donations came small donors, less than $100, who donated over and over. Does this mean we'll start seeing a fundamental shift in philanthropy too? Will development officers stop taking Rockefellers out to lunch so they can spend more time on Facebook?
Understanding Linux Solaris Permissions and Access Control Lists
In scientific circles the idea is called "crash error". RNA viruses, like HIV and influeza (the flu), mutate very fast, because they use polimerases for their replication that lack sequence proofreading and error correction. Theoreticians have estimated that was the virus to mutate a bit faster, its complement of encoded proteins would stop being able to interact with each other, and the virus would lose the ability to recompose itself and spread. Pushing the viral populations to such "crash error" estate is what these drugs are all about. There are already comercial drugs aiming at this effect, and its effects have been thoroughly tested in vitro.

Realize also that a normal population of millions of HIV virions have a huge percentage of those virions inactive. This is caused by the crash error effect: too many bad copies. With this strategy, the virus accomplishes two things: it explores the maximum possible range of mutations, so that it looks forever different to the immune system, and it saturates the immune system with defective virions and viral antigens, diverging resources and allowing for a very tiny subset (don't recall numbers, but was well under 0.01%) to escape detection.

Another key concept is the synergy of viral particles. Many of those non-crashed virions are actually only partially crashed. When they coinfect a cell, betwen both virions they have enough good proteins that they can survive; i.e. reproduce and spread. Considering the cell infection rate is extremely low compared to the viral load in blood, and the even more extremely low probability of coinfection of two complementary virions, realize that was the number of ineffective virions be increased by a tiny amount, the virus would not be able to spread any further. By all means these drugs that push RNA viruses to the crash-error zone are a very good idea.
This is a version of userland execve() for OS X so the plan is to run something new in the memory space of the process which was exploited. The technique presented consists of a bootstrapping 'Auto-loader' which receives an arbitrary Mach-O binary over the network and then 'executes' it in the same process space after evicting the previous tenant. Loading a executable directly from the network is an obvious application of userland exec but as far as I'm aware this is the first time somebody has published an implementation.

Not an entirely new concept, but solid original research to make this happen on OS X. Check out the slides.
this is indeed a good overview of the issues involved. But one thing is painfully clear: no one has a clue! There is so much ambiguity and gray area in this debate, it makes is difficult for both sides to navigate these waters.

It would be great to see each publication explicitly indicate exactly what is permitted with their content, how many words can be excerpted, linking policy etc. Is that so difficult?
Why should SMS cost twitter anything, when cellular providers make so much money charging consumers for SMS because of twitter? They are a large enough source of astronomically profitable SMS messages sent by cell phone users that the cell phone companies should be paying twitter a piece of the SMS action, and may already be?
The average bonus at Google is almost half of their average salary? That seems a little skewed.
I see the fail whale almost every day, and every single time I do things like change my avatar.
The quality on their player is worse than your average Scene DVD rip--and given how bad such rips usually look, this is embarrassing.

How long is it going to take, how many hundreds of millions of wasted dollars, how many failed companies, before people realize that if you're going to charge people to watch video, you should show it in reasonable quality, not godawful low-bitrate VC-1? And it isn't as if good encoders are expensive or something like that.
In general graduate school enrollments go up during bad economic times. The salary you would earn in the workforce is lower so the opportunity cost of grad school is less.
Secret: serious fun with text on a web page
You just compared a presidential candidate to rainbow colored candy. That takes apples and oranges to a new level.

Anyways, I'm not assured that McCain spent more - consider the advertising dollars required to build the Skittles brand over its lifetime...
Debuts at DEMO (34 new product photos/blurbs)
I guess I missed something, but it states early in the article safari has a very low percent. How does it have 10% overall market share?
I originally wrote my comment in regards to the fact that about 8 tweets you can see on the page that were not obscured but the red boxes were extremely racist, hence what I said.

I did not mean to imply if you a non-racist person that likes skittles then you are a racist, or skittle endorses racism or anything like that.

Also other people seem to notice people taking advantage of this.

>> Naturally, people are already spamming the hell out of this. One tweet being repeated over and over again unfortunately uses a racial slur. As such, I suspect this little experiment will end rather soon for Skittles.
This is from a venturebeat article - http://venturebeat.com/2009/03/01/skittles-tweet-the-rainbow...

I don't usually like to comment when people downmod me, they probably had a reason, but I feel like I should try to explain this one.
Mike's back
Thank you quantumhobbit.
Banque Centrale des Etats de l'Afrique de l'Ouest
Yes, I've read that essay, and liked it. What I'm getting at, though, is that isn't it possible that by taking the startup route, by the time you 'get there', yes, you have time to do whatever you want, but you've blown your chance to do something else?
Thanks for contributing to my continuing education. I just don't much follow personalities behind the projects much and so didn't even get down to the people disambiguation, "Richard M. Stallman (often abbreviated in lowercase, "rms"), veteran software developer and founder of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation".
Another serious problem with the iPhone interface is the placement of the 'Cancel' button in the "New Contact" screen. There's no reason to let the user throw away their just-entered contact in one step, especially when the 'Cancel' button is placed where the 'Back' button is on other screens.
I believe that marketing firms have some sort of price gauge per person depending on how much information you have on each person (and other factors)
A few that stuck out to me:

Avaak - super-simple battery-operated webcams

CC:Betty - instant shared email spaces

GoView - Citrix's entry into easy screencasting

MyGuru - Symantec's entry into remote-desktops for casual computer support

Xandros Presto - a quick-boot linux with key net apps for laptops, even if they already have Windows

ShoutOUT - speech-to-text for iPhone TXTing
Flash does have DRM support. My understanding is that Amazon's Video on Demand implements it.
the webmynd dock is remarkably useful. It's a pity it doesn't open previous clicked links in a new tab, rather than current window.
oh, and its a pity it doesnt work with my search engine (duckduckgo) -- can't there be any collaboration between two Hacker News projects?
Gvke - free kelly brook photos
To Make A Blog - 5 Of 100 Tips
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I'm really not seeing why it's awesome. Would it have been awesome if they just redirected to a google search for 'skittles'?
The article is much more alarmist than I feel like the original PDF intends the data to be. It seems like an obvious conclusion that a few well capitalized brokerage and investment firms would be majority stakeholders across several markets.

I'd be more startled if I saw say "xyz US Government holding company" somewhere on the list. But then I'd have to find my tinfoil hat...
http://www.realtytrac.com/ContentManagement/pressrelease.asp...
foreclosures in the US were on about 1.8 percent of all households.

http://www.fanniemae.com/media/pdf/newsreleases/form10k_news...
foreclosure rates hit a high of .65 percent (annualized) in the third quarter on Fannie's portfolio. Note: they stopped foreclosing in December, so their rate dropped in Q4.

Given that the first figure is for all households, including those owned free and clear, it's pretty likely that Fannie and Freddie are seeing substantially lower default rates than the rest of the industry.
Ok - I misspoke: the mortgages they own or guarantee.
I'm trying to build a better extension builder for firefox.

So there's no data that's going to be downloaded or used by the extension from the project site. Thats where i'm stuck. I can still provide login credentials and allow the user only if the user check on the website passes. So i can charge a per month fee maybe. But wont the user just edit the extension files and disable the user check?

I'm gonna have to spend atleast another 4-5 months on this and give it my best. So just dont want it to go waste.
I've always hated that analogy. Tylenol isn't the only profitable drug; Centrum Silver makes plenty of money too. Vitamins are perfectly respectable business.
Ask HN: How to grow a service that is popular but never took off?
Maybe more of a naive question than an enterpreneurial (or even hackerish) one, but here we go.

In 2005, out of pure boredom (and as an exercise to learn a new programming language), I came up with a Google Maps mashup. The idea here would be to allow visitors to click on the map and leave a funny little icon, a message, a link, whatever. Each site owner can setup their own map. The reception was very good (since I only expected to use the service myself): around 10k people signed up on the first month, and a lot more followed (it eventually declined over time, probably because I just left it there collecting dust!), but the fact is the site is still active today, still brings a lot of 'thank you so much for your little service' emails to my inbox every week... And gives me a feeling that I'm leaving money on the table here.

Funny incidental story: one of the 'competitors', Frappr, was actually one of the first 100 MyGuestmap users. Their story, though, is a completely different one: http://mashable.com/2007/10/18/platial-frappr/ (execution is way better too, I admit!)

With regards to business model, it's basically 50/50 between adsense and donations (I get some incredible donations from time to time, and a relatively large number of small ones).

Question is: what can I do to get the service out of its current letargy and maybe make it a viable side-business (not planning on making a living out of it, really)?

oh, the site is at http://www.mapservices.org/myguestmap (I also bought myguestmap.org a couple of years ago, but just redirect to mapservices.org for pagerank reasons) - any other comments (positive or negative) are also welcome!
Well - I would argue that anyone inheriting wealth should pay tax on that inheritance, just like on any other income. Wealth is created as much, if not more, by society as by the owner.
Product-Owner: Are you a chicken?
To be honest I did not notice.
The client-server model: Not dead yet --Ellison
How can you not like System 7. It introduces tinted 3D folders for goodness sake.
So build it :)
I don't quite get the jab at "Permanently under construction" - PHP 5.3 isn't out yet: how can you complain that PHP6 is taking a long time?
I hate to sound cynical, but we've all seen this before. Anyone can inspire and captivate with a flashy video, but these prototypes rarely get brought to market.

The automotive industry is famous for this. Anyone remember the concept-car version of the Chevy Volt? Picture here: http://photos.webridestv.com/datastore/images/user/2551617c1...

The concept car was gorgeous, aggressive, and appealing to a section of the market that traditionally ignores hybrids. Now look at the model that will actually get released: http://www.chevrolet.com/electriccar/

It's a glorified Honda Civic.

They don't have a product here, and I doubt we'll ever see any of the ideas introduced in this video (at least not from Microsoft).

If in ten years time, Microsoft can shut me down with a virtual newspaper, a classroom video-wall with built in translations, and an interactive wallet, then more power to them. But if instead, we're forced to endure another decade of watching a company that helped found the industry, spend its time copying Apple and Google, we might finally come to understand the phrase "real artists ship."
The Real High-Tech Immigrant Problem: They’re Leaving
An Album Is A Social Ontology
Unicode In 5 Minutes
The Promise and Peril of Jumbo Frames
Used Ford Parts
Quality used Ford auto parts
Yeah good luck with that :/

Make something people want. People don't really care if someone gets commission. In fact they often go out of their way to make the website commission if they like what the website does.
Network theory's new math
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Why do we care? Why are people voting this up, as though it is as interesting and significant as one of our peers sharing technical knowledge?

Seriously, when will the tech industry grow up? Why do we treat pundits and gossip hounds as though they are respected journalists and trade editors? Maybe I'm alone in this, but I really wish we looked at ourselves the same way that those in biotech or architecture look at their trade. We need the equivalent of publications such as Nature (nature.com) or Detail (detail.de) -- instead of link/pageview-bait, we need nuanced reporting of current events in our industry, along with thoughtful analysis of new technical advances/trends. We're certainly at a level of sophistication these days where such reporting is both possible and necessary; it's really time someone steps up to the plate and delivers.

TechCrunch and the like are utterly unprofessional, and they make me feel as though I am part of an amateurish cottage industry. They are little more than distractionware; aside from industry promotion, there is no benefit I see from their existence (and the promotional aspect would be gone if companies could get exposure from a more respected, polished outlet with a similarly-sized community). I have no interest in these people and their methods of operation; maybe it's taboo to say it, however I really do think it's time we all grew up, and stopped looking at ourselves as a bunch of kids in the computer lab (even if that's where many of us find ourselves at the moment).

I want techniques, best practices, and interesting/exciting new developments in our industry. I don't want to know about this man and his childish drama, or his tasteless and unprofessional rants (such as the whole Europe thing). I don't want to read his employees' sensationalized pieces on "developments" that are marginally significant at best -- and quite obviously written to meet some sort of self-imposed quota. The whole thing cheapens our industry and the way we look at it, and I hate it.

Here's an immediate, makes-lots-of-sense-at-2AM idea: perhaps we should start a journal under PLoS (plos.org)? Would anyone else support this?
"I just watched a presentation by Richard Baraniuk's, a professor at Rice University and founder of Connexions."

haha.. I just used one of his papers in a completely unrelated thing. What are the odds?
Same question applies to the valuation of Twitter. What's even more delicate: should same methods of valuation be used for both?
TechCrunch and the like are utterly unprofessional

Keep in mind that TechCrunch is not trying to do anything other than make money. People like gossip and rumors a lot more than they like papers about algorithms. Thus, to make money, that's what you've got to appeal to.

This doesn't make it okay, though. It only explains why sites like TechCrunch and Reddit thrive.

Anyway, I'm all for creating a more intelligent news site / journal. Even LtU is becoming hard to read these days, and that makes me really sad.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE3DF173CF...
Where are all the startups doing news?
Or do both.
Any specific examples of stories/articles that you'd prefer to be reading? I think you're definitely on to something, but the idea seems (for now) to be defined as a negative.

In a way, Hacker News plays the role that high-quality publications do in other fields. In technology, everyone publishes on their own blogs, and aggregators link to the best writing rather. But in science, the aggregators are the journals themselves, and they publish articles instead of just linking to them.

I think the ideal news aggregation site would be better than the best journal, but even here on HN there's only 2-3 really good, well-written articles per week. Does that mean that the entire technology world only produces 2-3 great pieces per week? I'm not sure.

Also, the "tech industry" is huge. There are the CS academics on one side, whose work is definitely not getting enough attention. It's fascinating to trawl through conference sites and read papers, but where besides http://hnr.dnsalias.net/wordpress/ are you going to read well-written, approachable reviews of CS papers? And you also have the tech business people who can't program but would read business pieces. HN tries to appeal to both, but it (or something that wanted to be a better aggregator) shouldn't.

So, just a few random thoughts...
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"who actually work to advance the cause of the 'great men' - i.e. Eddie Willers - are given short shrift, and little chance to advance"

That's because he's never advancing much by himself beyond that which he is 'given'. Eddie is definitely an interesting character in the book. Like the 'man of not so great ambition' who still knows that he will, materially and spiritually, be better off by not looting those who made their fortunes exclusively through voluntary exchanges of their own successful products, efforts and work.

Yeah, in the book he lacks their talent but shares their code of value. He's like the character introduced just so that you can't complain 'there's only great men in this book, how unrealistic'.
Cell phones with video aren't the future. I've had one for 2 years now.
Unfortunately, it isn't that useful. And I think the carriers know it.

It _is_ included on my cell plan (video calls are treated just like regular calls on the bill) and my phone supports it (front and rear cameras). And it's the same for a large percentage of cell phone users where I live (Singapore). But I don't think anybody really uses it.

The simple mechanics of it involve too much effort for too little additional utility over a simpler voice call. Positioning / holding the camera. Staying still. It's not about video calling and driving, it's about video calling and _walking_. Or typing. Or video calling and doing anything else at all.

Other than grandparents who want video of the new baby, and teenagers who want to send each other naughty video, I honestly can't see very much point in it. I suspect, however the technology will continue to get cheaper and more pervasive, so we'll all end up with it anyway, even if we don't use it much.
Wow! Using your corporate blog to dispense your opinions on economics (which I share!) is rather 'heroic' in Ayn Rand's sense of the word. I'm not sure I'd do it, but now I wonder why... ;)
>But wont the user just edit the extension files and disable the user check?

I guess that's the open-source equivalent of changing a jne to a nop.
You can't really prevent someone from doing it, but if they did do it, it would break your licensing terms and would be illegal. That's pretty much all the deterrant you can get.
Showing anger 'is good for career'
Most people who do large scale things quickly hit burnout at some point - and then go into bleakness, madness, or meltdown for a while. I don't know of a nicer way to write that, but almost everyone I know and almost everything I've read suggests that if you keep running on overdrive for a long time, you come apart at the seams for a while. I've heard stories about this from mentors and former professors of mine, and always wanted to be above such things. But alas, burnout seems to be real. When it starts coming on, the proverbial camel-back-breaking straw could be any little old thing. Preemptively heading it off by vacationing, scaling down, getting the hell away and doing hard thinking or non-thinking goes a long way.

So there's that - good for Arrington to get away and recharge some. Another thought: If nobody dislikes you, you're not doing something that matters. I'm totally neutral on Michael Arrington - I don't know enough about him and don't read enough Techcrunch to really like or dislike him at all. But I see he polarizes people a lot and people have serious reactions to him. If you want to do something important, look to, expect, and appreciate reactions like that. If nobody dislikes you, you're not doing something that matters.
It was definitely NOT obvious for me...
> Question is: what can I do to get the service out of its current letargy and maybe make it a viable side-business (not planning on making a living out of it, really)?

How about establishing a small but steady stream of improvements to keep the interest, and charge for the password protected maps in a freemium model? Be sure to do lots of testing e.g. A/B testing, to assess the impact of your changes.

(Disclaimer: I have no experience.)