skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sorry but that does not sound feasible. Large scale forest fires are accidents and not energy generation stations. The logistics would be prohibitive and absent any forest fires (usually considered a good thing) you'd be babysitting a pile of rust. Also, the heat produced by a forest fire would handily destroy your equipment.

Forest fires at scale tend to be pretty much unmanageable, people are more than happy just to put them out without having to think about extracting energy from them.

10 points for out of the box thinking, minus several for a lack of feasibility. But keep at it, maybe one day you'll hit the jackpot!
I am not aware of chargebacks yet. My understanding from other comments in this thread is that it takes months for chargebacks to hit.
This is coming full circle for GM - they, not long ago, bought EDS and had all of their IT run internally. It got so uncomfortable, they had to separate EDS out to not much avail because of the stranglehold EDS had gotten on GM's operations.

Having in-sourced IT can work, but it takes a lot of work to make sure you don't end up with just a boat load of B & C players that become complacent and work just hard enough to keep the status quo.

I suppose since GM has now experience both ways they can make it work this time. They are hiring many of the same old EDS (now HP) employees though [1] - hopefully they'll turn the old mindset around and be succesful in getting things done the way they intend to.

[1]http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20121018-712331.html
Slightly off-topic, DHH racing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1GG7-1AW3A

I've been obsessed with auto racing, so thanks DHH for the illustration.

Getting into an LMP is a distant goal, and who knows if that's where I'll end up, so the advice about completing much closer goals makes sense from where I'm standing, and is exactly what I've experienced in other area of life where I've already accomplished 5+ year goals.
On a related note, I'm somewhat surprised that molten salt reactors don't get much interest or press.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor

It seems like they have many advantages over conventional water-based reactors and are much, much safer to boot. Also the waste products decay quickly so storing the waste for long periods of time is less of an issue. But I guess anything nuclear is pretty much out of fashion today.
Research in this direction could provide us cleaner air in the cities and more health.

Just one small change like this, nuclear instead of gasoline in the cars could make a tremendous impact on our lives.

I think adding a new variable to the existing capitalist system along with existing one and only, profit, something that takes into account health or the ecosystem could change our lives dramatically.

Entrepeuners competing not only on cost and profit but also on health and ecosystem impact could make a big difference to us and our planet.

It will be great that we finally realize how important stuff like this is and focus more on research instead of using 100 year old polluting technologies because there is no obvious pressure to move forward.
Ignoring leap seconds will not make them disappear :-) They belong to UTC not to ECMA-262.

Therefore, whenever we compute the difference between two UTC times, we should really account for any leap second.
Haven't you signed an NDA or something?
TL;DR

Some entrepreneurs care about tax. Others don't. But they will care when they start making money.

COMMENT

Well, Mark Cuban says he doesn't care. Let's take him at face value.

His opinion is a statistical sample based on a data set of N = 1.

I have multiple clients who in fact do care and are scrambling to rearrange their lives -- and in a few cases give up U.S. citizenship -- in 2012 because of it.

Off the top of my head, that is a data set of let's say N = 6.

I don't win either. My anecdotal evidence means nothing, just as much as pointing at Mark Cuban means nothing.

What does matter is common sense:

-- people have different levels of caring; and

-- someone might not care about taxes when profits are zero, but they will care later.

An entrepreneur starting a venture truly doesn't care about tax -- all that matters is eating and sleeping in a warm, dry place every night. Later in the venture's life cycle, however, tax costs matter. And they matter in a huge way.

Then when you get to juggernaut-sized businesses (think Apple, Google, General Electric, etc.) there are small armies of people worrying about tax. The government has permanent people assigned to specific companies, and the companies of course have their people.

We're not talking the juggernauts.

We're talking about people who are on HN and take something from idea to reality. In the process they get wealthy, if they're lucky. When it comes time to sell (if that's the exit) or it comes time to live comfortably off the cash flow (if that's the plan), you bet they will care about taxes.

I think Mark Cuban's statement speaks only for his own feelings a few days before an election, for public consumption purposes.

I'm pretty sure he's looked at his income tax returns, seen the "Tax Due" line, and uttered epithets like a pirate. :-)

Despite what he says in that blog post.
Very amusing! Thanks for sharing.
Instagram is focused on the production of photos from mobile devices so users are not currently able to upload from the web. We’re excited about how Web Profiles will make it easier to browse and share content on the web for all our users.

-- So there is nothing new here? Just seems like competition for existing instagram viewers that are web-enabled...
You just argued against yourself, here.

> Other people at my age didn't have such chances

That's my point. Being a 14 year old who knows Objective-C and has published a video game is still rare. I don't see how you can argue otherwise.
I'd be much more confident he invested in it because he thought it was a good investment.
Great book - thanks for mentioning. Agree with you that there are multiple ways of locking in customers but the point of the post was rather that the web has changed the relative importance of the different barriers to entry. Most have decreased in their importance (among others lock-in effects) but the clear winner are demand-side economies of scale.
and that's why US cars suck ass compared to German ones. because, no, actually it is really hard to build a good powertrain. and this is what customers actually buy from you. your customers don't give a shit what you can do with your software unless it leads to better products for them.

but hey, IT stroke-fests are fun.
I think what you're missing is that network effects ("standardization") have intrinsic value. Is it "stealing" when that value accrues to its creator? It is true that it can lead to anticompetitive behavior and eventually dated, mediocre products, but I think that's a secondary phenomenon.

Microsoft is a business built entirely on network effects -- both their operating system business (everyone developed for Windows because it had all the users; it had all of the users because it had the most applications) and their office suite business (Office was taught in community colleges because it made you desirable to the maximum number of employers; businesses standardized on it because it was easy to hire workers that already knew it, and because they could exchange files with other businesses.)

Microsoft enriched itself enormously through network effects -- and I would argue, enriched society as well, compared to an alternate timeline where operating systems and application software were fragmented and software and skills were not portable. Though I do wish they'd done a better job with the win32 API.
Why I Chose Engineering Over Philosophy, And Other Thoughts on Wasting Your 20s
In a similar fashion to a few comments above, you may be conflating shyness for introversion. One can be introverted and social at the same time. Presentations specifically are a very different form of social interaction than ad-hoc interaction with large groups; one involves speaking _to_ people while the other involves speaking _with_ people. For example, I rank pretty high on the "I" side of the MBTI[1] but I enjoy giving presentations and speeches and I'm even a member of a Toastmasters club [2]. Given the choice of presenting organized information to a group versus chatting up a bunch of partygoers, I will almost always choose the former.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator

[2] http://www.toastmasters.org/

Edit: clarity
The Vine Nerds
...Boeing does make rovers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_rover#Specifications
Stop the presses, this man was followed by a botnet!
You can outsource most of this stuff for $500-1500/mo, and maybe $200/mo per employee if you go PEO. You can pay your lawyers more to do all the paperwork and just bring it to you to sign.

At least in silicon valley, the annoyances still exist but don't rise to the level of huge opportunity to fix, since the current solutions solve them pretty well, and the pain-per-customer is finite (you only really set up payroll once, etc.)

It's just annoying. The real pain points remain 1) finding great people and hiring them 2) managing teams 3) product 4) customers 5) funding. Office space is the only minor issue which ever rises to the point of serious, and it's only exceptionally bad if you're looking in Palo Alto (SF and even MV are fairly ok). Admin overhead isn't on the list.

(unless you really want to solve it, but there are a lot of reasons why startups aren't great customers. Only really in the Bay Area and maybe NYC is there high enough density to come up with something, and since most of this is regulated per-state (and per-city in NYC and SF), you'd probably want it to be locally focused.)
Spin it up and give it a shot, you might want to install the preview locally too: http://coderwall.com/p/tptocq
Earnings was up for me
A very thoughtful article by DHH. I think there seems to be two "goals" at work.

1. Short-term, achievable goal. Acts like a milestone and gives you momentum, feedback, encouragement.

2. Long-term ambitious goal. This is something that acts like a lighthouse in the distance.

To me, it's interesting how these two types of goals interact and how one manages them.

For example, some companies seem to be formed by the small achievable "goal" method. They start small with little ambitions. They get traction and initial success, and then grow from there. This is similar to DHH's racing journey.

However, there are other examples of people starting out with more audacious goals, like Elon Musk with Tesla or even SpaceX. The long-term audacious goals seem to drive development and the short-term milestones. Without the long-term audacious goal I don't think that there would be enough momentum/energy/vision to push through the short term goals.

I'm not sure how these two goals work together, and would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Can you just have the short term achievable "goals" and then grow from there? Or do you need the long-term audacious goal to guide your short term milestones?
Six Tips To Convert Complex Data Into Simple Logical Stories
It depends.

If the market creates an innovation engine, then participants in the market will compete over scraps. Unix, the Windows application environment, Apple and Android marketplaces, consumer fashion.

If a company creates an innovation engine, then it can ride a stream of development that gives it a persistent advantage: 3M, Edison, Apple, Google, Intel. Possibly IBM (though I'd count its success on other factors, despite a few periods of significant innovation).

Contrast this with companies which created one big idea and camped on it for a long time: AT&T, Xerox, Boeing, Microsoft, Comcast. These have essentially leveraged economies of scale, regulatory environments, and monopolies to capture and retain a market for an extended period of time during which little if any real innovation happened. Oftentimes these companies actively discouraged significant new innovation (AT&T and IP telephony, Boeing and high-speed rail, Microsoft and OS alternatives from DR-DOS to OS2 to Novell to Linux, Comcast with municipal broadband).

It depends on whether or not your goal is market dominance or advancing overall conditions. I'd like to see an innovation-based strategy encouraged, and demand-side benefits of scale doesn't deliver on this.
I think that there is a big problem with having so few candidates, even for the president there are only two candidates.

This is a very big problem if one supports acta and the other one supports baning abortions or something like it, choose the smaller evil? this is stupid, the system must be changed.
Instagram Launches Web Profiles: Your Instagram Photos on the Web
Lessons Learned Launching My Startup on My Final Day at Wired
His intent barely matters. If it gets worse, it is worse.
If you're going to be loading the capture in to Wireshark anyway, not just use Wireshark to do the capture to begin with?
Really slick tech and a great way to share a meme.
beyond what natural selection would favour

Not really. The Social constructs are beneficial to gene survival. If a woolly mammoth injures you, I take care of you because I have a social bond that works both ways. Prehistoric me does not necessarily understand if the injury is permanent, but our bond is there to assume that the help I'm giving you will be conferred upon me or my offspring at some point.

Love, cooperation, and compassion are (situationally) survival traits.

When you consider further that individual survival isn't as important as genetic survival, you can see that social behaviors are selected for in animals capable of exhibiting them to some degree.
You are making a fundamental error by assuming classical kinetics. At .9c, your first interactions would be electronic (ionization), then nuclear and radiative. The complete and initial ionization of all the atoms of 10mg of, say carbon, would be a lot less than 360 GJ. Then you'd have different interactions depending on your hull material, magnetic shielding/Bremsstrahlung losses, etc...

With some complicated magnetic fields, you could probably do something smart to take advantage the different charge/mass ratio of an ionized atom and positron and minimize interaction with a steady/confined positronic cloud. You might be able to annihilate enough electrons of the dust particle to ionize it enough to subsequently deflect it from the ship. Then you'd still have to worry about gamma ray radiation and back pressure and maybe some other interactions.

I don't really know about all of this for sure, just a thought.
schraeds - You may be interested in knowing that nobody will see your useful answer to the question posed, because you were capriciously hellbanned 218 days ago due to your unpopular opinion of the baby boomer generation.
Backup SQL dumps with diff's via Git
Rule #1: Never lose sight of your product. If youn business name is "General <Motors>", for example. Or is it better to think of you as "General Mediocre Widget Producer, Software Enabled>? The latter doesn't sound like either a great operating or marketing strategy.
My family has used Colgate toothpaste since the 60's. Do you really look to advertising to decide on toothpaste choices?
Alternate title: "Announcing the serious Facebook competitor that could have been."
Who Owns a Link? Google Vs. European Publishers
Since I haven't seen anyone else mention it, ventilation! Fresh, clean, breathable air does wonders for mood. Good circulation also keeps people from getting sick and heating/cooling issues from being silly.

This is not a simple thing to address, or easily noticed in spaces before a wall is up.
Maybe green threads
Good call. I've made a ticket for this, "roll our own automatic fraud prevention," and have included this suggestion: https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/360
Very interesting. Begs the question to whether facebook plans to disrupt itself with the Instagram acquisition somewhere down the line.
We don't currently have any interest in moving to a database abstraction layer. We do, however, allow you to drop in a db.php file that can replace the core database portion. That's not abstraction (you'll have to rewrite any MySQL-isms to be compatible with your DB of choice), but it is an option for people who absolutely cannot run MySQL. Microsoft wrote a WordPress plugin to do something like that: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-database-abstr...
For those unfamiliar with the back story of Pacific Fibre - it failed partly because of US opposition to Chinese commercial and technological interests in the project.

While Kim Dotcom might be willing to fund the cable, the issue of US protectionism doesn't go away. If the US blocked Chinese involvement for spurious security reasons, does anyone think they'll be more enthusiastic to facilitate their piracy nemesis du jour from building a haven for his new business, purportedly using money won from suing the US government for shutting down the old one?

So, yes it's pure PR, to suck in tech journalists.
This is, sadly, false. It may be true that anyone cool would ignore such things, but there are plenty of companies and recruiters out there that will consider this kind of thing a red flag and downvote people during the recruiting process. (Edit: this comment has been getting upvoted and downvoted in equal proportions, which kind of supports my point. It's an ugly truth, what I'm saying here.)
No. Btw, that story is a fake by all accounts.
SSL support is not so easy to set up if you are on Suse Linux Enterprise. There is basically no support for it. And for some reason it doesn't work for me.

But the thing I don't understand is, if people use replicasets, how comes they're not using encryption? It would be easy to sniff data off the instances. But yet, when I search on stackoverflow/serverfault, there are close to no people using SSL with Mongo.
Don't car radios still have station preset buttons, e.g. labelled 1 through 5, with one (and only one) being lit when you press it?
Do you have any data on what percentage of fraudulent charges get past your system. (i.e. of all fraudulent charges received how many does your system not catch) and what percentage of your fraudulent charge alerts are non-fraudulent? Just curious! I'm a co-founder of an eCommerce company and our average transaction is around $5,000 so this is pretty important to us and we already have some pretty strong systems in place, but I'm curious how well this more automatic approach works.
Screen size limitation is a temporary setback. After Google Glasses we'll have unlimited space. As far as the eye can see.
At Facebook they first release to a small percentage of users. They test and fix bugs. If all is fine and dandy they increase it step by step until the feature is live for everyone.

Tech talk on fb release strategies
https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10100259101684977...
Agreed - great differentiation between company and market dynamis. Looks like you have done some thinking on this topic.
All valid - though I'm going to check the read-before update as I thought that was a non-issue in 2.2? I'll write them up but it might take a little time. Thanks!
You should change "Less Options" to "Fewer Options". It's one of those things that if you know the difference, you can't stop noticing it everywhere.
Launching and quitting your job don't have to happen at the same time.
A gem for fetching addresses from Brazilian zip codes
>That's assuming he's actively malicious.

No, it's not. It's not assuming that he is against the PATRIOT Act. I've seen no reason to believe that he is, other than the projections of his constituency. President Obama has advanced and legalized most of the encroachments on civil liberties from the Bush years, and in no way that I am aware of has he made any argument to curtail them since he was Candidate Obama.

Assigning malice to that is assuming that he believes that the PATRIOT Act is a bad thing, and that supporting it would be knowingly perpetuating a bad thing. In other words, assuming that he secretly thinks of PATRIOT as you think of PATRIOT.
Here is a definitive argument to your point:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/09/how_dems_and_re....
The internet is the largest interoperable web service and wasn't VC-funded.
Tiny Clever Quadrotors Now on Kickstarter
Fair question: WordPress.com. This list from Quantcast has WP.com at #16

https://www.quantcast.com/top-sites/US/1

But that only includes *.wordpress.com subdomains, and our highest traffic blogs almost always invest the money to have their own domain. We have a tag[0] to track those in Quantcast, and it's currently at 129.7M people in the US, which would place it between Facebook (143M) and MSN (98M). (Blogger might have a similar boost into the top 10, but I don't see any others in the top 50 that could have so many mapped domains.)

Of course we cache, with a publicly available WP plugin called Batcache.[1]

[0] http://cl.ly/image/081G1r2f0Z18
[1] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/batcache/
Did Facebook bring about this change? Interesting.
The same people who say they hate abortions are also opposed to subsidizing contraception.

And it makes no sense. Unless you're ideologically opposed to any sort of government subsidy, contraception has got to have the best return on a per-dollar basis.
Interesting how the designer tried to keep the reactor away from the driver. I 'm sure it's a safe distance. OTOH, the lack of doors is baffling.
_"it's almost breathtaking to realize that a dragged-out Linux will close out next year as the single most relevant and dominant OS on Earth"_

Two things about that:

1. The price of admission to the OS business is to come up with a better kernel than Linux, with better driver support. If that price is higher than the benefit a new kernel will deliver to end-users, it won't happen.

2. The center of gravity in OS innovation is in the managed language runtime and middleware, where Android has done a great job (while Microsoft failed to capitalize on the userland power of the CLR, MSIL, and C# and other CLR languages).
Why do they have to participate in our society in order to be protected from torture/murder/slavery/etc?

That's a strawman. The proposal was to give Dolphins "the same rights as humans".

Protection of the creatures from hunting and physical exploitation is sufficient and something normally agreed to through international treaties. Equating cetaceans with humans is unnecessary and illogical.
> Just one small change like this

I hardly think that this would qualify as a small change.
To fix bugs, to test performance and avoid an massive traffic hit to their servers
Wow, the design is very similar to Facebook's cover photo layout with the profile photo overlaying it part way, the buttons on the right, and the blue bar on the top. Hopefully this isn't the beginning of a Facebook/Instagram merge.
Here is one to add to the list - if you delete records and/or entire collections, you won't reclaim the associated disk space automatically. Once the space is allocated, it remains allocated and will be reused when more data is added later. If you want to reclaim the "empty space", you need to run a repairDatabase() which will lock the entire database while it's busy.
We don't know what "people" want, but I do think that to whatever degree we can find such things out, we probably have a higher degree of confidence that the government doesn't want to iterate on the people who comprise it. The revolving door is a highly-valued feature in DC. That's what voting against incumbents threatens.
5 trends in small banking
Great article discussing the current trends in community banking institutions.
There are already several 3rd parties on the web offering this service (e.g., web.stagram.com, statigr.am), wonder how they'll take this.
Reasons Not to Use 99Designs - Refund Policy and Poor Customer Support
What a great thought and a what a great way to express it. 37signals proves time and time again they have mastered the art of expressing so much with so few words.
Is this the ‘NEW’ SEO?