skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Given that he makes money off his books, and his books are only succeed or fail based on the strength of research supporting his point of view, he has a financial interest in seeing a particular point of view succeed or fail.

He isn't simply "doing more than one activity in a field", he is, as you say, "setting yourself up as someone who is only judging on the merits when you have a financial interest in the judgement going a particular way".

BTW, conflicts of interest are not always monetary. At least in most fields, emotional (and other kinds) conflicts of interest are also prohibited.
Even ignoring him making money off his books, i'm not sure how you can say that, given his very passionate, subjective, argument in favor of one particular point of view in his books, he doesn't have an emotional conflict of interest in seeing his point of view succeed.
The idea that he can just "turn it on and off" so that when he's doing "science time" he's magically objective, and when he's doing "book time", he's not, would require a bit of straining to believe.

This is why, for example, in the legal field, judges are required to avoid the appearance of bias, not just bias.
I don't know how Apple is going to catch up with Google, when Google has about 7100 people working on Google Maps

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-has-7000-fewer-people-w...
what do you mean? lede is the first paragraph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lede_(news)) so you seem to be saying

"An well written little essay that buries the first paragraph on the last paragraph. ;-)"

and why (what?) is the "first paragraph on the last paragraph"? did you mean "in"?

"An well written little essay that buries the first paragraph in the last paragraph. ;-)"

and it should be "a", right?

"A well written little essay that buries the first paragraph in the last paragraph. ;-)"

but i still don't understand what you're trying to say.
Wouldn't an even better question be: how do we build the kind of society where people can express their thoughts attached to their names without fear of reprisal?
Being turned down for jobs for not having a Facebook account: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/109ipi/no_faceboo...
He seems to make the implicit assumption that you can only spend money on goods, and not services.

I have all the Stuff I could need or want (save maybe an rMBP instead of my Air, or a new camera or something), but if I had more money I would almost certainly spend it on things like airfare, hotels, seed-stage investments, and the like.

There's a lot more one can do with money than "buy stuff to fill up one's house" or "fund research".
Minecraft maybe didn't set out to be a startup, but it achieved all the growth goals of one, and it's certainly fair to call it one now, isn't it?

Games like Diablo and BG are actually run in a fashion closer to movies than startups. A game publisher finances games that it expects will succeed. The publisher's competitive advantage comes largely from brand equity and high capital cost of creating a new game. Thanks to brand equity, they are primarily expanding or upselling into a market where they already have a lot of reach. Of course, there is some risk of failure in each project, but it's closer to that of making a blockbuster sequel than that of solving a novel problem with technology.
The scoring system needs to be bell-curve weighted by the release date of the movie.
Had you read your own reference, you would have found a definition of "burying the lead" which might have assisted you.
The examples he give seem to be more about "money can't buy everything" instead of diminishing marginal returns.

Under diminishing marginal returns of Stuff, I would have expected something akin to "Gadget A generation n+1 is only an incremental improvement over Gadget A generation n, we should aim to build Gadget B instead".
If this helps replace functors I'm all for it.
RealName.com

As an entrepreneur, your first product is _yourself_
Getting a Malware Detected! message from chrome when I try to visit this link
I am tiring of these articles.

I like how some firms decide to throw in P/E comparisons to Apple and Google (Two seasoned juggernaut companies.) . Yet LinkedIn is also a social network, has an absurd P/E ratio over 100, but that's okay.

"Anyone who owns Facebook should be exceptionally troubled that they're still trying to 'figure out' mobile monetization and had to lay out $1 billion for Instagram because some start-up had figured out mobile pictures better than Facebook," says one institutional investor.

These are what the experts have to say? He hardly sounds like an expert to me. Tell me a company who excels at mobile monetization.

I wonder if Wallstreet fully grasps what Facebook is all about and how it fits into the grand scheme of things. Perhaps looking at traditional markers for evaluating a company like Facebook isn't working?

They fail to realize that Facebook is the most traffic'd website in the world. (According to Alexa: http://www.alexa.com/topsites).

Somehow $15 doesn't sound right.
Writing Rules: Advice From The Times on Writing Well
I'll admit that I was a little bummed after reading this article. Every single PG essay I've read left me feeling stoked, lit on fire like I could take on the world. I felt I could identify with the man, and like I belonged here.

This essay, on the other hand, left me feeling like I don't belong here. I feel as if the YC philosophy has evolved into something different than it was, or perhaps, that this is more honesty than we've ever seen before.

Either way, I couldn't be happier to use revenue as my measuring tool, and not free users. Racing to give my product away at a rate of 5-7% weekly growth would require me to completely change my product development philosophy. I build what I build because I see something missing, not because I hope to flip it in a year.
Any groups or meet ups on Big Data Technologies in Paris?
Are there any groups and meet ups on Big Data Technologies happening in Paris?
Also, if things didn't go the way they did, then the lack of flash on the original iPhone might have been viewed that way if Apple had to back peddle.

(In retrospect, Apple won that gamble, because it wasn't that much of a problem).
This is a good example of the little inconsequential details that I love about Ruby. As much as I sometimes dislike the way things are done in the community, I always respect this attention to detail. It contrasts with the PHP approach of "what symbol is available to shoehorn in this new functionality", not to pick on PHP but that's where I spent half my professional life.
I wish I could find a satellite map of the road cut into the mountain, I'm having a hard time appreciating how this path was able to cut 67 km out of the journey.
Any similarities to the bird flocking algorithm when compared to a force directed graph? Here's a link to a force directed graph I did in HTML5: http://amirrajan.net/Home/FdgHtml5
Part of the writing on his head gear seems to be his name. You can clearly see "Dashrath" in Hindi(His name is Dashrath Manji). I suspect the rest of the writing is a concise description of his achievement, including the dimensions of the road.
Effective communication hinges on empathy. We're taught to write well (maybe) in terms of style and coherence, but effective writing, which persuades or fully informs, depends upon being able to anticipate the concerns and questions of the reader and then address them for the reader. Good writing goes a long way to making your work more comprehensible, but ultimately effective writing anticipates the reader.
Even if they assume 100% of the liability, it's still a PAIN to deal with stuff like that.
Just a stock I have no interest of owning.
It's complex. Writing disciplines thought, and thought disciplines writing. The two must progress hand in hand.

Analytical writing is a method for achieving greater intellectual honesty. It includes the habit of giving evidence for assertions, of clearing up ambiguity, of putting causes before consequences, of replacing hand-waving with concrete facts. And so on.

But it's not failsafe. "The Xorbians are foreign interlopers, so we must hunt them down and kill them" is analytical writing. I think it would pass some of the more basic tests described in the Atlantic article. But it doesn't necessarily tell the truth, and this failing may be down to a want of ethics.

By contrast, "What do I think about the Xorbian issue? Live and let live" is not analytical writing. But it may be truer and more valuable.

Judicial and deliberative rhetoric in Greece demanded a backbone of analysis. But it wasn't by any means the whole of rhetoric.

Well, as stated, it's complex. One could write books...
I think it's very unfair to portray all politicians that way. For example, where I live, we have three parties which have been sharing the powers since the transition to democracy (38 years ago), three others which don't go above 7% of the votes, and thirteen others which don't get a single seat in the Parliament.

Do you really think that the leaders of those parties are after unlimited power? Or any power at all - the PM's maid has probably more power than them.

Or for another example, take the current leaders of Communist Party USA, and all the power they have.

Any of those would have a much greater chance at power if they joined the bigger parties.
Love it...Please hack for education!

Here's my last appeal:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4534204
Doubtful. The implementation is trivial. You just try both during the authentication step. If the password isn't recognized by the full hashing algorithm, try it against the first 16.
Please hack for education!

Here's my last appeal:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4534204
Why doesn't $15 "sound right"? Because it's not 700?

Judging share prices by whether they "sound right" is not good investment advice.
How Many Startup Stock Options are Enough?
I do the same thing, every second Friday. If I don't get paid, I stop working. Even worse, I don't even start working unless I have a pledge from someone to give me money in 2 weeks or less. Hold 'em hostage, show 'em whose boss

But yeah, these open source guys have a lot of nerve, not giving away stuff for free. How am I supposed to run a business with suppliers who can arbitrarily raise prices for future supply?
The way forward, in my view, is not acceptance, but a complete separation of individuals and ideas.
Is this even relevant to hacker news? I mean I could see that technically he is "hacking" through a mountain, but really?
Booting the computer in the morning.
can't find it for gmail either.
The attraction to the center seems to produce very erratic pathing - cutting that to zero immediately makes the flocking effect more 'natural'. Then increasing the acceleration factor helps produce those instantaneous changes of direction that are characteristic of animal flocks. With the current defaults the behavior is more 'cloud of flies' than 'flock of starlings' - which is fine, but doesn't show off the large scale co-ordinated movement the boids algorithm can produce. The collision avoidance threshold seems a little high - a slider to reduce that would help make flocks more compact which would produce better behavior when the number of boids is high...
Effin middle class. What a waste of oxygen.
It's linked from the Wikipedia article.
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=24.877093,85.242956&t=h&#...
> I am 100 percent behind the idea that people using their real names (the rule of some networks I have been on) promotes better online community

That's funny, since hard evidence for that idea is pretty thin on the ground. I really don't think it is a good idea given that it can do a lot of harm http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Rea...

> That said, I do have some friends who have long established pseudonyms that have most of the good effects of real names

Which good effects of real names do long established pseudonyms lack?

Also, would you be happy to put your real name on your reply here?
I think you're too nice. Downvote things that made you regret taking the time to read it; flag anything horribly offensive, stupid, etc. It's the only way to keep the community healthy - http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/.
I wonder if Wallstreet fully grasps what Facebook is all about and how it fits into the grand scheme of things. Perhaps looking at traditional markers for evaluating a company like Facebook isn't working?
They fail to realize that Facebook is the most traffic'd website in the world. (According to Alexa: http://www.alexa.com/topsites).
Somehow $15 doesn't sound right.

Too young to remember the dotcom boom? If I gave everyone in the world a $1 every time they visited my site I could also have the most traffic'd site in the world, but that wouldn't make my site worth any money.

Of course FB isn't like that, but the point is that traffic is worthless until you can monetize it. IMHO, their biggest problem is monetizing their users without running them away.
Yes, but that's going to take 100+ years. It's is not an argument in favour of real names only, today.
That's suspended to me.
It’s Dark | A Thing for Cars
Reminds me a bit of this tunnel, though it had a rather different motivation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burro_Schmidt_Tunnel
It's not so much "who cares if you're inefficient" - if you really have found that goldmine then you have to tear into it quickly, because if you slow down to get that extra efficiency then a faster, less efficient competitor will dig it out from under you.
I wonder how much it would have cost to do this with mining/tunnelling/etc. modern equipment. And whether it would have been cheaper to pay him $10/hr for 22 years of work, or whether the 'modern' way would have cost more.
Ruby also lets you do this in function definitions. Python doesn't special-case the underscore like Ruby does -- while I have occasionally wished otherwise, it is at least consistent with Python's language design principles that the special case doesn't exist.
Nice to see Groupon empathizing with its customers, who can't afford to spend 75% of marginal revenue on customer acquistion.
Finnish Startups Are Raising Large Rounds by Targeting the Largest Opportunity
What good is Feedback when Google is determined to take away features from something like Google Books? You can complain all you want but they won't revert. Just making it easier to complain does nothing to fix anything.
The article implies that this is a new phenomenon brought on by the advent of computers. Computers have certainly accelerated this trend but certain occupations have had this problem since before computers were ubiquitous. For example doctors have to regularly submit proof of continuous learning or they lose their license to practice.
Google Granted Pseudonym Patent (You’re Welcome. And, What Is Wrong With You)
If you called your resume a CV, you are have way to lying abounding an academic already.
It's all about the number of shares. Google or Apple could be at $15 as well and still have the same market cap.
Duplicate from 3 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4540742
Work better with us scatter brained developers by knowing these tips
Teardown revives hopes that Lightning might be USB 3.0-compatible
Personally, I find this to be quite inspirational, especially when compared to entrepreneurial endeavors.

While the comparison is mostly metaphorical, often metaphors are more on point than any 1:1 comparison.
List is not very strong. As said by many others before me. @Zimahl being the first.
I think this is more like Josef Prusa and a couple of angry reprap guys trying to 'take their ball and go home' than a revolution of some sort.
Exactly.

There is a reason we don't dispose of our own garbage. It's just worth paying some one else (plus efficiencies of scale). Infrastructure like social network is garbage. People don't wanna deal with it, don't care how it works, and are glad to externalize the cost. They just want their waste to magically disappear. Or, to maintain / increase their social status with friends and family.
If you look at the reviews at IMDB you will see something strange. Most of the reviews are either 1 or 10 stars. I feel like some kind of gaming of the IMDB ratings is happening.
It is top 2 percent "equvalent" scale score on any one instance of an intelligence or aptitude test, not top 2% overall, and that is a score that anyone remotely qualified for a relevant job would be able to do. It is entirely game able.

And it is douchy to boot. If you want to advertise your 1560 SAT, do that. Why send away for a Mensa membership and brag about that? It adds no value and shows you waste money and effort tracing meaningless tags. Are you listed in Who's Who in US Business too?
I don't have a source for this, but it is my understanding that, even though the python interpreter doesn't special-case the "_" variable name, it is a convention to use the underscore in the same situations in python as are described in ruby in the article.
You are missing the point.

A lot of hacker news is about accomplishing goals that others would tell you is impossible or not worthwhile. This article is meant to inspire to you to keep dreaming. It's one thing to climb a mountain for someone, its a whole other feat of accomplishment to carve a hole through one. The determination this guy had should be taken as a lesson; not in hacking, but in attitude and life and then applied to hacking.
A less aggressive method is to attempt to achieve things that you're not sure how to do you. Learning is built in to every project, then.
That reminds me of my neighbour's wife who on a rainy evening dug a new driveway, with a shovel.

This was a bungalow and on one side was their driveway and on the other was the lawn. She dug back ten meters and down about three meters, by hand, with a shovel, in the rain.

Yes my neighbours are crazy.
Ask HN: I just inherited 700K+ lines of bad PHP. Advice?
So, I've just inherited a very large, very badly written monstrosity. Including javascript, template files etc, it breaks the 1 million LOC barrier. I'm looking for some advice and strategies that you guys might have used in similar situations, in particular on:

- getting a handle on the code base
- communicating 'progress' to the client
- not losing the will to live

The software is based on vtiger, an open-source CRM that has a (deserved) reputation of being incredibly badly written, that has since been badly hacked apart by several different companies with wildly differing ideas. My client currently have 150+ installs and 150+ angry clients.

Words fail me trying to describe the state of the software.

- no niceties such as MVC, ORMs, a DBAL, or a modular design
- all DB queries are inline SQL, with tens of inner joins on most queries
- dizzying call stack, yet reams of copy+paste code

The best part: the code will often query the DB and execute PHP code contained in the response, or load and run arbitrary files and modules as dictated by parsing particular DB fields. The one page I have studied in detail generates 105 DB queries in the simple case.

The DB itself is even worse. There are over 600 tables, as well as views, custom functions, cascades and (but of course) triggers. There is no consistent naming schema, very few explicit foreign key references (despite being heavily, heavily entwined) and I have already discovered several tables that don’t have primary keys, but are referenced by exact string matches on things like date stamps.

I wont mention the table-based HTML, javascript, lack of version control etc.

I’m not sure if its even possible to give relevant advice (besides perhaps ‘run screaming’), but if anyone here has come through a similar situation and has any advice to share, I would be deeply grateful.

Help me HN - you're my only hope.
(PS. 2K char limit sux)
Hey, it's only been 17 years.
Plus, it's Saturday ;p
Same thing for me as a CPA. Even though I'm not specialized in actually putting an entry into the books or doing taxes, I still have to keep up with forty formal hours of training a year. Courses have to be approved by state societies before they'll even count for continuing education.
More than 2% of population qualify. This is a great interview question for any data analysis related job: Explain why Mensa's brand claims are false, then explain why you thought joining Mensa would impress me.
Rafter CEO: The innovation curve hasn’t hit education yet
FB is not comparable to a dotcom book company.

If I gave everyone in the world a $1 every time they visited my site I could also have the most traffic'd site in the world

Perhaps, but your site would probably not have the marketing treasure-trove that FB has. FB needs to learn how to use it.
Who is history's greatest badass, and why? [Quora]
Please read definition of "inter". The Internet is a collection of crappy networks.
And an 800 on math requires comprehension of age 16 math, on a test taken as many times as you like before age 18.
Hah. I'm not saying Spring is a good framework, I don't know it that well. But try building an app without any framework at all. Getting frameworks right is hard - they need to be abstract enough to be flexible, but not so abstract that you end up with a "general-purpose tool-building factory factory factory" when you want the framework to give you a hammer.
The danger is that "You don't understand, everything is different now! The old rules don't apply" type thinking sounds like the first dot-com bubble. How do we know if things are different now, or if this is a bubble.
In Thailand you could be imprisoned if anything you say can be misconstrued as a criticism of the King.

This kinds of laws that make all kinds of utterly harmless speech a very serious risk are very widespread.

See also what happened to some poor guy that made a joke in Twitter about his trip to the US.

People in favor of "Real Names" are the same kind of people who say "If you have nothing to hide, why do you care about privacy?"
Both. RealName.com is the founder/creator/developer/instigator of CompanyName.com. And eventually CompanyName2.com and CompanyName3.com.
Dishing It Out
this is so silly..so a company now doesnt have the right to try to make money? are they now "selling out"?
silly revolt
Maybe it would help to put design docs somewhere more accessible than buried in the commit log.
What the iPhone 5's big screen means for mobile advertising
company name..gives you more options should you decide to sell..
yes, for a long time, anonymous classes was enough, verbose but enough.
Not to be obtuse, but shouldn't loose should rhyme with choose, and lose with chose.
man, fuck metaphors, this was awesome. No further justification needed for sharing.
Apple could solve this problem with money by licensing Google's existing service. Actually building a competing service can't be solved with money alone. Just think of the number of people involved.
Medicare Bills Rise as Records Turn Electronic
I'm having a very hard time responding to the idea that extraordinarily bad technical reporting on the trading markets is redeemed by colorful writing. Is he a journalist or a poet?

I get it: people like reading this stuff. That's why they write it that way. But I'm saying, like reading it or don't like reading it, a lot of the underlying facts being reported are laughable.
Actually I think their recent approach to monetizing the mobile market is quite clever.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/18/facebook-mobile-ad-network/
This is an especially important point for coders. In my 23 year professional life I've had 4 very different careers, involving 7 major platform changes, at least a dozen different languages and more SDK documentation that I can remember.

It's not like technology or the rate of change will be slowing down in the future either.

So, learning how to learn efficiently is an important tech skill.
Are you working on this by yourself? How long until your employer is expecting bugs fixed and features added?
At least MobileMe didn't replace some other awesome cloud functionality.
Interesting essay until it revealed itself only to be an elaborate pot-shot on a politician he apparently doesn't like.