skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An inconvenient truth of HN seems to be that 95% of voter ring detections are legit, while the other 5% are not. This is understandable. As jQueryIsAwesome said, it's a tricky problem.

Another inconvenient truth is, the demigods of HN often see the 95% as the 100%. No matter what defenses fellow HN users can come up with, pg likely gave his response in the way he did because he assumed something about you. Knowing pg's writings, he may have apologized or at least explained the problem if he had identified one. To say that terseness is pg's typical mode is...wrong.

I'm glad you pointed this out. pg has done a lot for this community, so we can't criticize too lightly. But it is a shame that in this instance, he didn't take that extra step for a fellow hacker.
Certainly when you get up into the sort of speeds things become very tricky and unpractical. The problem right now though isn't really that we aren't all driving at 100+, but that we still have all of those straight as an arrow 55/65mph roads criss-crossing fly-over country in the US. Those may have made sense at some point, but modern cars can easily do 100mph on those roads with no particularly unusual danger. Pretty much everywhere in this country speed limits are artificially low though. Most country/wooded area roads don't make any sense in cars with ABS or traction control; my limiting factor on most Pennsylvanian roads is the danger of deer, not road geometry or car capabilities.

I think with the spread of autonomous driving technology we'll be able to see even more proper, and reasonably safe, speed from cars.
"Live in the future, then build what's missing."

This hit home run.
I love your quotes! I am myself a founder just getting to market and these serendipitous encounters and random acts seem to pop up out of nowhere and solidify my progress. Cheers and thanks!
Building an Iconography for Digital Privacy
In the spirit of this article, I would like to point out something broken with pg's essays (which are otherwise excellent) -- the footnotes should appear in the right margin beside the paragraphs that reference them. Its unlikely a reader will continuously scroll up and down to read them, and by the time the end of the article is reached they have lost all context. The essays on grantland.com are a good example of this done well.
Woah, this is very recent! An article published today:
http://betabeat.com/2012/11/david-tisch-techstars-new-york-c...
I'm not sure UIUC and UT-Austin are great examples for second-tier schools, as both are top 10 for graduate CS departments.
I think that the part that I have issue with is that people have been having online discussions for far longer than moot has been around (hell, probably even alive). Unless you are aware of 4chan, you'd probably never even heard of him outside of a few news articles. 4chan and moot are well known within their own realms, but in reality, it is a small fraction of the "online discussion" world. So, when you're looking at applying trademark-level protection, it's not appropriate to look at the smaller realm, but rather the environment as a whole.

This all seems like a big-fish, small-pond vs. small-fish, medium-pond argument to me.

Moot maybe incredibly influential in his corner of the 'net, but the larger world probably doesn't know him. Moreover, the brand of his product isn't "moot", it's 4chan. To top it off, "moot" isn't a rare word, it's a commonly used word in English. All of this combines to make it very difficult for him to try to make any direct claims against Moot.it.
Amazon Kindle Fire 8.9: Gunning For Every Other Tablet Out There
Right. The mob mentality of the internet often jumps to conclusions when accusations are leveled like this. We have defense attorneys and such for a reason. If these accusations are true, let's get some evidence and a trial together.

I'm willing to bet this will be settled out of court and the details will not be publicly available.
Using this fabrication method on a smaller/safer scale would be great for the Australian construction industry. There's so much regulation and risk-assignment involved in construction that only the biggest players can afford to bid and execute on a medium-large project. The result is little innovation, lengthy project completion times and high costs.

Forget the construction companies for a moment - the amount of training and accreditation required for a tradesman (e.g. electrician) is unheard of anywhere else in the world. My friend has three different Working at Heights tickets, and the various state licenses have cost him a small fortune.

If we could shift much of the fabrication to local factories/warehouses where working at height and weather exposure can be reduced or eliminated, we might be able to encourage more competition and speed up production times.
Teaching music theory can be hard, but it doesn't have to be. I know, because I do it almost every day (its my day job). To make it relatable, you have to tie it into the elements of music-- for this, I use Copland's "What to Listen for in Music". Once students can generally grasp and talk specifically about Melody, Harmony, Rhythm, and Tone Color, you can relate the music theory to it.

I have about 200 6th-8th graders that are able to perform basic figured-bass analysis on major-key chorales in about 3-4 months by progressing in an orderly fashion from notation to rhythm to major scales to the Circle of Fifths to minor scales to intervals, to chords, and finally, to cadencial analysis. Some of them pretty much view it as a game we play with written notes, but, when reinforced by practical experience in private lessons or participation in ensembles, it is remarkable how much they like it and are sad when we move on to Music History in the second half of the year.
Just curious, how old is Chris Dixon?

Awesome news, I'm a big fan of his posts and his track-record as an entrepreneur/investor. He bleeds startups.

Just looking at his LinkedIn profile to get a sense of his career path and where it's taken him (http://linkedin.com/profile/view?id=56309)... guess he's 41 years old? (since he started undergrad in 1989)

That must mean SiteAdvisor was acquired when he was 36. I know age doesn't mean much, but it's something I've been thinking about a lot lately, esp after reading that Fast Company article on Paul Graham. I think all too often startup founders forget that big wins don't happen overnight, there's something to be said for training and having a long time horizon.
Great Point about asking what they can cut to get to their budget... This is the reason why when negotiating media buys with commissioned salesmen, you should always give them a budget first and stick to it, and than negotiate for more exposure...This way, the salesmen's commission remains in tact, and he fights to get you what you want, because he wants the sale... Instead of being in a situation where every penny you try to cut in your media spend, he views as a cut to his commission.
Great Post.
I was thinking the same exact thing.
Support the holidays
Can you provide a source to your claim?
A variety of buildings have collapsed in China in recent years. Here's one good example with great pictures. I don't know if it's the same company or not.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196064/Tumbling-tow...
I should state that I'm not part of the original posters team or in any way affiliated with them to alleviate any confusion ("he assumed something about you") before I go on.

I don't wish to devolve in to bitchiness and have no reason to continue criticizing PG after my original post, but I agree that thus far PG has already done a lot to help the community and that he could have done more in this case.

I'm not saying your post was bitchy, I'm saying that I couldn't think of a response which wouldn't have come across as needlessly bitchy if I continued to criticise PG after my original statement
Warning over armies developing 'Terminator'-style killer robots
OT: I am not a musician, still kick myself for giving up piano lessons after only a couple years. I believe that anyone who writes software can learn from how musicians practice and get better and don't or do get in a creative/skills/motivation/passion/Groundhog-Day rut...

One of the most interesting books I have in my library is "Effortless Mastery". Recommended by a musician and artist.

http://www.amazon.com/Effortless-Mastery-Liberating-Master-M...
Actually, my own plan doesn't charge for VoIP data (as far as I can tell), just a fixed fee.
Not that VoIP would use much.
Not sure what to make of this: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=dogster
Ask HN: What are some highly profitable small companies?
E.g. AppSumo
How Israel Built Shockingly Effective Rocket Defense System
Is there enough demand for office space in Changsa to support this structure?
A Simple Model of Cults of Personality
I'm noticing this trend in numerous projects. Clients expect so much in 90 days. Sigh.

Pretty impressive if they can do it.
I'm not sure exactly which incident you're referring to as there have been several of these stories coming out of China in the last few years, but as far as I know none are associated with Broad Group. They pride themselves on being safer than other Chinese builders because of the tests they can perform on fabricated pieces– obviously that's what they'd want you to think regardless, but from what I've read it certainly seems to be the case. Chinese construction on average isn't great, and they appear to have their own process down pat even if it misses out on some more exciting design features.

Edit: Is this (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/world/asia/collapse-of-new...) what you're referring to? It's a bridge obviously, and not related to these builders but it was fairly high profile because it hadn't even been open for a full year.
Cabana Shutting Down
The developer can change the nav-bar color.

But Apple's whole chicklety, gumdroppy motif is quite dated. As is their 25-year-old inverse color scheme for the Mac OS. Reading black text off the glaring surface of a light bulb all day is a shitty way to work.

Not to mention shitty glossy screens.
From what I have read, it looks like the core of the spaceX program is built around super-efficient merlin 1-D engine still around development. They will undercut and profit, if they are able to beat the NK-33 which is in use under various other names.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NK-33

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_rocket_en...
And yet Coca-Cola stayed a nickel for 70 years[1].

I think going back to guilds and trade secrets isn't right, but it's not completely wrong, either.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4788659
Just keep doing what you're doing, in the UK, try not to open yourself up to US jurisdiction if you don't have to. Keep assets out of there.

If you really are infringing and concerned, I'd see about proactively getting favorable licenses while you're tiny, in case you get big.

If you aren't infringing and it's a bunch of crap, like the Hipmunk case, I'd do what they did. Seek a declaratory judgment and call their bluff. After all, the troll might not even have money to fund a real battle. If their lawyers are working on contingency (they often are), they won't waste their money pursuing something with no real shot.
I humbly disagree with your theory that making money for a company is more valuable than saving them money.

As a marketer/rainmaker, I can assure you that I get much further with clients when I can cut their advertising and marketing costs, or cost per acquisition, than when I find them more profitable traffic and revenues.

My clients never scream, bring me the rain... They demand, "Bring Me More Rain For Less Money."

I think the dynamic going on is that people hate losing money, and when you find them wasted money they can save, they view it as "their rightful money,not something you got for them." In fact, saving them money that they were wasting can really rattle their ego, and make them feel like they were taken advantage of, and who wants to be the bearer of bad news?!

Making money for companies though is just not powerful enough to be the end all solution to rake in the dough.

Being able to find cheaper traffic and revenues to generate proportionately less traffic or revenue is a much bigger win. (i.e. if you make them $1000 at a cpa of $100 a customer... you are better off generating for them $800 for a $75 cpa... even though the rain is less, the cpa is better, which makes them look really good, and is a defensible place to be...
What Marijuana Does To Your Body And Mind
FB: Much ado about liquidity? Lockup expirations and stock prices
Awesome. I couldn't be happier with your response. I'll definitely keep Bitmaker Labs in mind for when I graduate next year, and in the meantime I'll spread the word!
Is this real? Not trying to be a jerk but it seems kind of crazy. Also I need a sugar cookie from harlem.
For people who'd feel "constrained" by your average first-world laws, Belize must indeed feel like a paradise: where else could one maintain a completely legal harem (including minors !), or a militarized compound with 20+ segregated women subjected to god-know-what perversion?

To people like this, the current PM (elected in 2008) and his gang are the cost of access to a "social paradise" they wouldn't get in a country under the Rule of Law.
GetAround
It doesn't just sound like a lot. It is a lot.

Even with the "high income" surcharge here for health-care, it's less than $1000 a year for an individual. Since it's deducted from your income along with regular payroll taxes, you don't even have to pay for dependents. They're covered under their own plan which is basically free until they start earning and paying deductions of their own.

In a start-up environment, $12,000 a year is not a lease on a Mercedes, it's the difference between your business floundering in obscurity and affording a few key networking trips, or the difference between living in a bedbug infested hellhole or having a decent apartment.
The 3 Marketing Brains (or Why Your Message Doesn’t Sell)
Rake::RemoteTask (a dependency of Vlad) defines a bunch of stuff on Kernel, including #role. For whatever reason, if an ActiveRecord model includes role as a property, things break in weird ways.

Reasonably easy to work around by aliasing/undefing Kernel#role to #server_role or something, but amusingly that would be something that could be fixed by refinements (though I'd rather see something more like Thor, that's not run toplevel).
There are different laws for concealed carry vs open carry, and "brandishing" a weapon is a crime.

It is very much a relevant issue to determine the context in which a gun is mentioned. Connecting a firearm mention to an otherwise unrelated statement is quite reasonable interpreted as an implied threat to use the firearm.
You're still way up the pointy end of the business though. You are directly involved in acquiring customers.

I think the OP was making the contrast more with people who try and reduce the companies admin overhead slightly by automating parts of the accounting system.

That type of thing is easy for a company to put off and involves getting through cultural change and threatening people's turf to implement. A harder path.
And that's not a 90 day pre-fab building. IIRC, they had a dodgy underground carpark, which subsided. It had nothing to do with the actual building.

Also, the pre-fabs they are starting to build have a lot of steel, which is easy to engineer. Concrete can be more difficult to get right, especially when you don't trust the suppliers (bamboo rebar anyone?).
Prediction: Anchor Text is Dying...And Will Be Replaced by Co-citation
SEC Rocked By Lurid Sex-and-Corruption Lawsuit
The benefit to refinements is in preventing code conflicts from a shared namespace (like monkeypatching a core class).

The downside is it becomes even _harder_ to figure out what code is being run just by reading it. Right now, you just have superclasses and included modules, potentially gummed up by method_missing. Now, you need to also pay attention to refinements included by code that _calls_ the code you're looking at, which may change the way it behaves.

Unless used with great care, it's going to create a nightmare debugging situation. And with some of the code I've seen, it'll happen.
Agreed. My point was simply being a rainmaker isn't enough. You need to give your boss or client a defensible position to take about hiring you. One that makes them look good to their bosses, boards, etc... (i.e. lowering a CPA sells a much stronger fantasy than acquiring customers at a higher but acceptable rate.)
College of Future Could Be Come One, Come All
Awesome feature by Wired about the man behind this: http://www.wired.com/design/2012/09/broad-sustainable-buildi...

HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4574100
I think another thing that people forget when they talk about a16z is the fact that they seem to be quite hands on and they make a point out of turning technical founders into CEOs. Chris Dixon makes a point of the former fact in his blog post, and Ben Horowitz makes mention of the latter point in his interview with Kevin Rose on the last Foundation podcast.

Rather than 'picking winners' I think part of their success probably stems from the fact that they actually had a material effect in helping to create winners with something more than just providing capital - I wouldn't be surprised if some of their more dubious investments pivot into something else and find success. Definitely happened with their investment in Burbn which pivoted into Instagram, and Rap Genius has already announced that there are a number of directions they will probably move in.
I disagree entirely. Graduate school has nothing to do with the undergraduate curriculum. I went to a school with an amazing graduate program but I had a terrible watered down education that barely went passed Java and did not push me or many of the other students.

It's an excellent opportunity for summer research jobs and the such, but otherwise does not translate well into the lower curriculum unless you want it to.
I think it comes down simply to: don't set out to make a startup. That's the wrong mind set. You shouldn't be creating a startup for the sake of creating a startup. You should be setting out to solve a problem, and somehow happen to turn that into a startup along the way.
Worse than nothing, they compromised the integrity of their investigation by leaking allegations and identifying the source of the claims. (Allegedly, per items ~48-54, and 67-68)
The obvious thing to do is to find ways to incorporate Growth Hacks into the product.

One such formula would be to browse API's on programmableweb, and other places looking for opportunities to leverage other sites audience as a platform.

Another thing you can do is profile an audience and crunch big data to help find new opportunities...
According to the legal papers, Bill Nguyen had a friend who is an OIG Agent (apparently with the US Postal Service) involved. That sounds kind of fishy, as generally those agents investigate internal matters, not external law enforcement. The US Postal Inspection Service deals with most outside matters like postal fraud.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Inspection...
> If you ask your client questions and debate features, that's already a good start.

I've always been doing that, and felt uncomfortable to call this activity ‘programming’. Local clients (small businesses) hire a web developer to build a site, but it usually requires at least some education and research, as they rarely have good understanding of their needs. Still I'm shy to call it consulting except to myself. Your comment helped me understand better that it's almost exactly that consulting everyone talks about—thank you.

You mentioned books—can you recommend some titles, authors, or maybe subjects?
There might be exceptions. Been working as a freelancer for parallel income for years, I see how the tone of clients get changed when they find out that I am not from 1st world. They eventually start expecting something cheap. Issue is that we Asians do spoil them by working cheap too. For instance Noah Kagan's APPSUMO was built in just $60 by a few Pakistani developers.
I've definitely seen a HN'er suggest that a losing patent troll should have to at least cover the defendant's legal fees.

That's probably enough to put them out of business isn't it? The guy who's patent trolling Hipmunk is a one man shop, so getting hit with a 7 figure legal fee upon losing will force him to liquidate all his assets (read: Patents!). Though I'm not sure what would happen if various patents and assets were partitioned off into separate C corporations that would effectively protect the guy himself :(
Context is definitely missing from most systems and it's one of our key differentiators. Our goal is to handle all those contextual details so you don't have to.
I do second you and there are some good guys like you who value talent rather than saving a few $$$.

Patrick's post is more about consultation rather than freelance work, I wonder whether people prefer to hire remote consultants?
sorry, was sick all weekend! So far we haven't worked out anti-cheating strategies, because we haven't really structured the initial challenges around rewards or achievements, but rather around personal interests. As we add more traditional rewards and scoring type stuff (it hurts my soul to type gameification with sincerity) we'll have to start addressing cheating, particularly if we release clients on other platforms or a direct API to our system.
Not sure but kind of relevant post in Inc:

http://www.inc.com/marla-tabaka/charge-customers-more.html
Don't feed the trolls. See:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4804437
I'd be interested to see whether the NYC connection was part of why a16z offered him the job. Depending on how you read the announcement it could either be a huge win for NYC or a huge loss. Probably need to wait for some more info from people closer to the source to find out.
I'm still here, and ready to continue contributing
An online Art Gallery in 1995 is not a bad but rather a premature idea for that epoche. It's a norm for the Art to be a decade or so behind the technology world. No wonder Google launched this idea with Google Art Project in 2011, which is more appropriate as far as timing concerned. How about the lost art gallery? http://galleryoflostart.com @PG - you are just ahead of the crowd. Timing and luck are two ingredients of the same origin. Good timing is essentially luck:) On the other hand hard working is a guarantee of success if the "good timing" component presents.
Maybe they were torn between losing their job/submarining their startup job?
Just out of curiosity, does the undergrad/grad ranking apply to other (non-CS) engineering careers as well? I ask because I went to a top 5 undergrad but never did any research so I'm not attending a top 5 grad school. However, I think the research I am doing now is possibly eye-catching, so how much does what-research vs. which-grad school matter?

(By the way, I actually like my grad school significantly more than my undergrad so ranking of course isn't everything).
A question comes across my mind; being a developer how one can make a difference between working as a freelance or given consultancy? At the end of the day you're going to write code, No?

Answers by you guys may help many freelancers who might prefer to follow Patrick.
Can I ask what js framework/proj. you are using to graph the data?
Thanks for the fudge, much nicer to read, appreciated.
I must not be cool enough; I think the icons look fine.
I think the author is claiming that the difficulty of undergraduate admissions is the important metric, not the quality of the program. UIUC and UT-Austin are tier 1 research departments, but not among the most selective of programs for undergraduates. (I realize they are extremely selective as PhD programs.)
10 km/sec. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that number. That's close to Mach 30, right?
Show HN: A visual way to share links and media