skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well you're entitled to your opinion and I respect that. However I hope I'm expressing something I feel passionately about regarding two people who seem to be rather staunchly disagree with one another, calling each other out for their own b.s. (in my opinion of course); so personally I like to think I've raised myself at least a bit above your common-or-garden troll.

I'm happy to hear feedback of any kind positive or negative (of course I kinda expect a lot of negative), so please feel free to comment, I have moderation on but I'll only redact spam/dodgy comments so rip away :)
Judges tentatively order Calif. inmates released
Theres an overwhelmingly large majority of the people who dont know enough in order to to hack os x and instead pirate a hacked copy. But hey, if you do know enough to hack it, kudos to you.

Though if you're going by the "I bought a legit copy. I should be able to download it in modified forms if I want to" argument, then thats grayer then I would like. Especially if I'm developing for a platform that's controlled by the company that I'm pirating from.
Thanks :)

It really isn't meant as a troll, honest. I really do feel this way about the situation and of course I expressed myself passionately so I expect some strong reaction, however I hope you can see there has been at least some thought put into my post!!
Dude, what are you talking about? Look at Maestro Greenspan. He kept interest rates so low for so long that we will have another great depression. Ben Bernanke - another genius who thinks that THE answer for all the problems in the economy is to: print, print, print, print!!! Truly, one needs to have phd in economics to be such an idiot (forgive me my french).

And all these "experts" who didn't see bubble in dot-com and housing??? Including Harvard professors. When regular folks like Peter Schiff, Jim Rogers, Marc Faber saw it coming since 2000. Are you kidding me???

There is nothing complicated about the economy. This reminds me something from my own experience. Discrete Mathematics. I was forced to go through 15 pages of "evidence" why 2+2 is 4. And then another 15 pages of "evidence" why it is not. After that painful experience I just quit the university. Why? Because I didn't go there to become an idiot. Programming is easy, you don't need to read this kind of cr*p to become a programist. This would just make you look intelligent and do all the things wrong. The same is true with all these so called "economists". As Lenin called them: useful idiots. This is what they are.
It's good you posted this here. I was about to slam on you for not letting me sign up and post my jobs online without contacting sales reps (I'm hiring, so if the price wasn't insane I was going to give it a shot.)
I could be wrong, but I believe that was a talkbox, not a vocoder.

In the style of Zapp & Roger.
Better idea: stop throwing people in prison for nonviolent, victimless crimes like possession of marijuana, etc.

Prisons should be used to prevent people from causing further damage to society, not for lack of a better punishment, assuming punishment is even appropriate in the first place.

This concerns me. Even if all the inmates released committed completely harmless crimes, dumping 10,000 people out of a prison and onto the streets is not going to turn out well.
Advice for entrepreneurs seeking investment: Pull your company's pants down
A Black Mud From Africa Helps Power the New Economy
Meg Whitman's entrance in California governor's race sets up Silicon Valley showdown
This is probably one of the most polished looking netbook server that i've seen. It isn't overly flashy, and is simplistic enough that it could appeal to even the most diehard MS fans.

Well done HP.
This is a constructive use of, "choice architecture". I think these ideas have been around for awhile just in another form - as poor choice architecture in casinos.
It is happening in TV too.

TV producers have been slowly moving their expensive content to pay TV and producing new low-cost shows ("reality TV" and gameshows) for broadcast. Plus, they use their broadcast channels as the stick to beat cable/satellite operators' into paying more for their cable channel bundles.

For example, Disney moved Monday Night Football from ABC (free) to ESPN (the most expensive non-premium channel). Larry David effectively moved "Seinfeld" from NBC to HBO. Dance and singing contests, primetime gameshows, and hours and hours of news broadcasts (5:30-11:00am, 12:00am, 4:00-6:30pm, 10:00-11:00pm where I live) have replaced dramas and comedies. The dramas and comedies that are left are whatever ones that HBO didn't want.
I also didn't mean fancy design.

But in your 'startup ideas', in the idea #16, you said Google has no sense of design, so I suppose that the people responsible for it (Google founders originally. Marissa Meyer with a team of designer now days, I believe) wouldn't be accepted in YC.

And that is more of a rhetoric observation. I know they would.

But then isn't the 'sense of design' requirement unnecessary?
i have no real basis for making this claim, but i suspect that it's more along the lines of "master carpenter" or the equivalent.
Amazon unwraps slimmer Kindle 2
Unfortunately, it only syncs calendars and contacts thus far. Here's hoping for mail syncing soon?

EDIT: Setup instruction for iPhone: http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=13...
I like the idea, but there are quite a few errors.

I had to try 3 times to add my degree to my profile. Furthermore, I keep getting internal server errors when browsing companies (happens whenever I look at a page other than 1).
I absolutely agree that a video of someone talking is a much higher bandwidth form of communication. Similarly, usenet was higher bandwidth in 1995 than it was in 1985 -- but that doesn't mean that it was more useful, only that there was far more noise.

Maybe this will work out fine, but I worry that with a video you'll pick up things like "this guy seems uncomfortable" but not be able to identify the reasons why (is he uncomfortable with the rest of his group? Or just uncomfortable being in front of a camera?) -- or worse, get a subjective sense that a video isn't very inspiring without even identifying what you're noticing, never mind figuring out whether what you're noticing is signal or noise.

There's a reason why most professional symphony orchestras use blind auditions: While nobody disputes the fact that being able to see a musician play is valuable, experience has shown that the noise it introduces is more significant than the signal. Simply put, eliminating the high bandwidth distraction of being able to see someone allows orchestras to pick better people.
My pithy one line take on the article: try to keep interfaces and interactions fun, not just easy to use.
A fly?
How boring, over here we have these: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31EZO1H5iFL._SL500_AA2...
Me too, Dani! Add http://graphics8.nytimes.com/js/common/screen/altClickToSear... to your adblock filter and it will drive you crazy no more.
http://twitter.com/sharpshoot -- millions of twits like this:

> Never ever surrender

> Reaching March 2008 levels of confidence again. This is on

> super proud of the progress being made by Imperial Entrepreneurs

> Oh man - so excited by the prospect of hustling again.

You are an animal!
The blog focus is unfortunate. There's only a small subset of bloggers who make any kind of money to speak of, and then there is an even smaller set who will be regular customers.

I notice that they have a Drupal plugin, Twitter functionality, and code to embed the gallery in your webpage. Why then the focus on blogging? It's not just limited to the Tech Cruch article, it's self described: "Launched in early 2009, Picturesurf makes tools for pro-bloggers."[1].

Seems like a case of premature branding. No need to make your target audience so small initially.

[1] https://picturesurf.pbwiki.com/About-Picturesurf
True. Google's monopoly comes from making an excellent product, not from using underhanded shenanigans.

Also, I'm not worried about "incentive to improve". Google is constantly improving and tweaking their search results. That's the only way they will be able to maintain their monopoly. Because, unlike a platform like Microsoft, there's very little inertia in switching over to a different search engine.
Uh, guess you didn't get it (no, not the book).
Direct link to the video:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=_424YskAfew

The thing that makes it watchable is the speech bubbles above the actors' heads point out the subtext of the conversations at each step in the bureaucracy.

Not surprisingly, it's very applicable outside of NASA, we've all seen some of the patterns of behavior in private industry, in both organizations large and small.
I think you'd be hard pressed to actually make the case that my post represents an appeal to authority. I've read it again and again and the only way I can see that interpretation is if someone didn't actually bother to read it fully. Either literally, in the sense that they skipped parts, or figuratively, in that they already heard what they wanted to hear and the words weren't actually being processed in the brain.

And considering all of this high-minded intellectualism, maybe we need to go back to step one: hearing what the other person is saying so we don't argue with phantoms. So while I appreciate the impassioned defense of the laymen, I could do without both the strawmen and the rampant ad hominem. Normally, I wouldn't get so formal, but it seems to be your thing.
my bad, didn't see it the first time around
I think this technique of giving one something to aim at is well known amongst the potty training crowd.
Wall Street employees can get 60% to 80% of their take home pay from bonuses. So while I'm sure they would be a lot of money over those months, it wouldn't be anywhere close to the actual pay once you include bonuses.
Very true, and I'm not disputing that free has issues.

But saying that no solid business has ever been based on free is just plain wrong.
As IM Finally Begins To Open Up, Yahoo And Microsoft Cling To The Stone Age
Do you have an example where something that depended on slavery as a means ended up good? (It's easy to find things that depended on slavery that produced what someone wanted.)

Yes, there are examples of societies that had slavery and became "good" (for some reasonable definition of "good"), but I'd argue that their "good end" was not dependent upon their slavery means.
Oh great, yet another reason to hate the Oil Industry.

Without Autocorrelation there would be no Auto Tune. Without Auto Tune we wouldn't have to suffer the music of Britney Spears.

Andy Hildebrand.. you've just made my list sir.
Thanks, that gives some insight. The argument for sports tickets is quite convincing, I didn't realize all the factors that were involved.

I'm still not sold on the public-backlash argument for performers though. Couldn't price targeting reduce the public backlash? Eg. charge $50 for a limited number of tickets 3 months in advance, when the die hard, starving-college-student fans are ready to buy tickets, and $200 to the investment banker who buys tickets for his kid at the last minute.

Maybe I'm over-simplifying things, or over-estimating the money the scalpers are making.
I think this would be considered a clever real-world hack.
Anatomy of ads
One thing I would add to that is that Ada at that time (Ada83, that is; Ada95 fixes this) lacked function pointers. There was no mechanism in the language to support the runtime selection of behavior that function pointers allow. Such a feature was intentionally left out of the language in order to facilitate static analysis.

For the class of problems where you are willing to accept decreased expressiveness in order to get increased reliability (e.g. missile guidance software), Ada is great. But in a lot of application development scenarios, expressiveness is important.

As I said above, Ada95 fixed this, but it is still a bit cumbersome and before one could reliably use Ada95, it was necessary to indirect through C to do things dynamically.
Good stuff Sumon and the crew. Being able to change and adapt is key and seems like you guys got it down.

Go get 'em
The thing I don't like about the risk management argument is that aren't these performances usually put on by major labels? Or is it the venue that is taking the risk?

If it is a large label that puts it on, they already have a "diverse portfolio" in some sense, so if one show bombs they can rely on others to balance it out. Even if they do need to manage risk, surely there is a more efficient way to do it?

Maybe you're right and it is the result of benevolence on the part of the artist.
Paradoxically, early Google both had no sense of (visual) design and yet managed to produce results that are way above average. The reason was that (perhaps knowing they weren't good at visual things) they just kept everything as simple as possible. It was like the design equivalent of a low-fee index fund, which despite not even pretending to know how to pick stocks, consistently generates above average net returns because of the low fees.
I am applying this year, it is definitely going to be a challenge for me since I am camera shy, but hopefully it weeds out a lot of non serious people.
I find it most interesting that many of these interactions are analogues to a petting motion. I don't think it's an accident that we find these petting motions reassuring either. I would guess that it might have something to do with nit-picking (think early ape-like ancestors), or possibly something to do with bonding with dogs (who use rubbing motions of these sort to determine pack order). Probably the former, since, while man's interaction with dog is very old, it's probably not old enough to have evolved a self-gratifying feedback loop.
When referring to Kanye West, I'm assuming you mean 808s and Heartbreaks. Auto-Tune was used as an instrument on that album. That's what the original article alludes too. The vocals are supposed to contrast with the super, lofi, YouTubeyness of the background music.

This completely the opposite of Kanye West's past work all the way back to Jay-Z's Blueprint album.

One big critique of Auto-Tune is that it kills emotion by making pitch too perfect.

You can't say this about 808s and Heartbreaks. The album sounds like nails on a chalkboard. And it's supposed to. The album was created in the context of him breaking up with his fiance and his mother dying.

You can call Kanye West a lot of things, but disingenuous is not one of them. The use of Auto-Tune wasn't meant to be disingenuous in this one particular case.

(I can't believe I just deconstructed a Kanye West album on Hacker News.)
we have these in the waterless urinals in SM City Cebu :P
My problem with Taleb and all the attention he's been getting lately because of the financial crisis is that I think it's a logical jump to go from those criticisms to "these models are bad, because of black swans".

These models are bad because the companies that have been bet on their accuracy go bust.

They go bust because they assume that the probability of "black swans" such as housing prices throughout the country all going down at the same time is vanishingly small when it isn't.
Spamming Twitter Is Now Easier Than Ever
We could do blind auditions if a startup had already launched, in the sense that we could just look at stats like their traffic growth. But at the stage we're trying to pick startups, we almost never have such data. So our situation is more analogous to trying to pick people who could become good musicians, before they'd taken any lessons. At our stage, you're judging the people-- so it's useful to see the people.
It is also a joke, bee in latin is 'apis'
I can't read any more. My bs detector is whistling way too loudly...
On a related note, if anyone needs a smarmy sales dude, hit me up.
I have some Feedback.

1) You are forced to enter a .edu email address, and then prompted to enter your University's name -- wtf?

2) The grey-on-white "details" text is hard to read and non-obvious.

Otherwise great design and seems like a neat concept, definitely.
The orthodox school of thought in financial economics was the efficient market hypothesis, which more or less states that the best valuation on current assets is the market price. I suppose there is something to be said for pointing out that the "best valuation" may not be very good. Taleb certainly wasn't the first to bring this up, but we probably aren't worse off for being reminded of that fact.
I was wondering if you'd drop by and comment on this post. It's only fitting.

Can't wait for that creative destruction to come about.
I really want to get one, but it doesn't meet my basic needs. I need to be able to properly display technical books and the other problem is it doesn't support Chinese fonts, so I can't read chinese on it. What I like is that I don't need to carry tons of books with me. When I moved to China last year, I brought a whole suitcase of technical books, a pain to carry around.
I'm surprised how they got a huge audience so fast. When I search for answers to technical problems on google, they appear on top results very often.
This hits home pretty well - I'm a recent grad looking for a job.

Just wondering, why did you guys decide to relaunch it with a different model? The original idea seemed good too.
with Audible in its repository, Amazon could easily offer customers the chance to pay extra, say $10 to $20, to buy a book in all three formats (print, audio, digital) and save you the hassle of re-buying a book in audio or for the Kindle that you already own or want to purchase in print-format.
DataViz to announce Microsoft Office support for iPhone
Humor: V-Day special - Dear Deployment Scripts...
Ok, fair enough. Every Kanye West song I've heard recently.

It's an interesting sound, it's just overused recently. There's basically two ways to use Auto-Tune: the intended way, cleaning up the pitch of vocals; and as a deliberate distortion effect, a la T-Pain / Kanye's recent songs. The latter produces a very distinct sound that gets old, fast.
Okay great - but how do you monetize it now?
There is a Japanese toilet company, whose name escapes me, which previously included a red dot in toilets to capture this advantage. Then, after extensive testing, they realized that the red dot was suboptimal because it encouraged people to shoot for the wall, and the wall of a toilet bowl is very close to things you do not want to get wet.

So they tested a new version, which turned out to be MUCH better: include a laser in the toilet bowl, and PROJECT a red dot on the surface of the water at a particular point in the bowl. (I would assume the geometric center but, hey, they're the experts).

My Google-fu is not turning up the article I read this in, which (I hazily remember) was English and probably in the New York Times.

Anyhow, this is one of my stock anecdotes on why Japanese engineering holds so much appeal to me. (Obsessive, fanatical attempts to squeeze more performance out of things. Its like Apple decided to launch a line of toilets or ceiling fans... except with a little less of an iCult around them.)

[Edit: found a mention of this sort of toilet innovation by Panasonic but it wasn't the article I was talking about, which covered the R&D process in more detail.

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/panasonic-dl+gwn-toilet-s...
]
I.e., the technological singularity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
http://tipjoy.com/ perhaps?
You're going to have trouble getting mathematicians interested in just a hunch. Earlier, you used the phrase: "I have a result which shows..." Which, in maths parlance, that would imply you have a proof. Which, if correct, would be rather interesting.

Though, without a proof, it's uninteresting. It's probably not true.
Image search engines keep launching
Agreed. The case is much more clear cut for sports than it is for concerts. What you're talking about exists in the form of presale passwords:

http://ticketstumbler.com/blog/presale-passwords-faqs/

Presale passwords allow fans to gain access to tickets before the public sale. However, scalpers can pretty easily acquire them and the sales limits aren't very hard to game. What does tend to happen though is that the investment banker type (is that reference even valid anymore? :-D) can buy his tickets on the secondary market at the last minute from TicketsNow, which Ticketmaster owns, and sometimes the artist receives a cut of those proceeds. To people on Hacker News, market prices makes a lot of sense, but in practice they scare a lot of people away. Fixed prices are why Ebay acquired Half.com & Stubhub. And it's why places that deal with futures or more complex purchasing options like First Dibz have blown through loads of cash without gaining much traction; the people behind those sites aren't the target market.

What's also interesting is that artists tend to make more money from tours than CDs, merchandise, itunes, etc (as the label gets a significantly larger cut of the latter). So maybe there's some behind the scenes pressure to ensure sellouts and drive the type of sales that benefit the label most.

One final thought: if an artist becomes really hot (like the Flight of the Conchords currently) shows can be added...double or tripling supply in a given metropolitan area. The same thing cannot be done with sports.
This is a really interesting story even if it is embellished or flat out false, good read.
ha, that's why I always use 011235!
I worked at a company where we very seriously talked about adopting Ada. Let me tell you what else takes the fun out of programming besides an overly strict language: knowing that if the customer encounters a bug, he will send you an email, stop using your software, and use a competing solution until you ship him a new release.

At that job I shipped the least-buggy, most-correct code I have ever shipped in my life, yet I also had the highest sense of incompetence and failure I've ever had. The stress level when making code changes was incredibly high, especially since the code was mostly legacy (i.e., lacking documentation and tests) and introducing even rudimentary testing required rewriting large parts of the system -- which of course created bugs and made regression tests rather less useful than they should have been.

I even had a dream once about reading the gcc manual and finding a new warning flag, -Wsomethingorother. I was really excited. Then I was really disappointed when I woke up.

I REALLY wish that codebase had been writting in Ada. The code was mostly correct (though hideously designed) when I inherited it; if it was written in Ada, the runtime checks would have caught a lot of cases when an innocuous-looking bugfix in one part of the code caused another part of the code to start dereferencing stale data and mixing a subtle spurious signal into the customer's results. In the worst case, we would have had an immediate failure with a good head-start on debugging. Ada might have actually preserved some of the fun of programming for me.

Nothing else I've worked on has called for Ada, though. It's a niche language and should definitely be considered whenever writing a mostly-static system where you're willing to invest a lot of time per loc to avoid bugs.
Besides, if you wanted the definition of a word, you install Ubiquity, hit Cntl+Space and type "def". It's fast, easy and free of annoying pop-ups!
When you pay for a real newspaper, you don't get a "no advertisements" option...
Everything is amazing, but nobody is happy.
Are many of the startups by yc the viaweb sort? Free lisp on free unix with no relational database?
Ma.gnolia Recovery Tools
Study on Test-Driven Dev.: 15-35% longer, but 40-90% less bugs [pdf]
Same with Kongregate. Alexa is somewhat better. We use Quantcast's tracking pixel so you can see the real numbers.
Nice, thankyou.
I try to enter my college as "LeTourneau University" but it defaults to Lasell college. WTF?

Also, help@staptalent.com is bouncing back.