skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Harness the power of XML to Open Financial Exchange files
But what's the point of leaving all that out there to argue about later on? He's not solving the issue, he's deferring it.
Which means you wouldn't be reading this story - The Economist is owned by the FT, which competes with the Times, which is owned by Murdoch. If you internet is from Sky then they aren't going to be shipping a competitors content over their fibres.

AOL your time has finally come!
Spam in turn is the basis for shady commercial promotions including schemes that frequently involve directing unwary users to Web sites...

Does anyone here know why investigators don't just follow the money trail? I mean, at some point money is being moved into and out of CC or bank accounts that can be traced to a person.
How Twitter Will Make Money
Because people who try to "solve" this issue up front always get it wrong, because there isn't enough information to make decisions like this.
I don't know about you or Cuomo, but when I'm considering a job, I don't say "the company is going to have a bad year, so I'm going to take a pay cut and stick it out". I say "If I can do better elsewhere, I'm leaving". (Interestingly enough, I say that even if the company is going to have a good year.)

AIG was and is going to have trouble hiring good people. We're telling folks that AIG won't live up to its agreements. Who is that going to help?

Apart from shoveling money to Goldman Sachs, AIG is in the process of unwinding a lot of transactions.

AIG is going to lose money and go under no matter what. However, that doesn't imply that good people aren't needed. The amount of money lost depends on how well the unwinding is done.

Me - I'd like the unwinding to be done so as to lose as little money as possible. If you agree, how do you propose to do that without hiring good people?

Of course, you may think that good people can be had for less than AIG thinks. Do you have evidence for that theory beyond "you can't do any worse" and "AIG went into the toilet"?

As I pointed out elsewhere, AIG's mortgage portfolios have performed as advertised....
Video of Spectacular Undersea Volcano Erruption
"I walked up to a neurosurgeon and asked him about a million-node botnet, and never got an answer".

I guess the NYT has to water stuff down for the masses to an extent when they treat technical matters, but I never suspected that they could be so far off...
I hate to say it but this link kinda falls into "weak comic reference" and "useless comment" and whilst only just skirting round "just die already"

[flagged]
Don't use facebook, but when I hear about things like this I am baffled. Haven't any of these engineers taken human factors courses? One of my brothers works for Honda, and I asked him about the ergonomics of car design. His response: at Honda, it is imperative that you design for 95% of the population. It looks like facebook did the exact opposite.
Salt Water collects on leg of Mars Lander
It's Twitter, now, but a little better. It's okay.
Which is why I'm suggesting to split equally and get on with it as an alternative.

(Admittedly this is going further than my experience allows)
Running on the laptop, it wouldn't be a nightly; I'm opining that it would be surprising if it didn't hit the nightly too.
Movable Type gets in Motion, launching a social activity streams aggregator for your site
Cowpox, Smallpox
It seems to me that IE6 is capable of everything that newer browsers are (including new IE's). The problem is that in some cases IE6 requires more or different effort from the content creator to get the same effect as other browsers. I mean, what is something that is just plain impossible to do in IE6 that we will be able to do in Firefox 3.5?

If IE6 has the UI that people accept, and if IE6 has the performance/resource utilization that those people like (compared to modern browers, it is pretty lightweight except on javascript-laden pages), and if IE6 already works for every site that they use, why should they switch? Why should they buy a new computer or more RAM just to run a new browser when their current one works just fine? Why should they download a third-party browser and then have to deal with even more updating and migrating their bookmarks and learning a new UI?

We need to understand that there are going to be a significant number of people running IE6 on Windows XP even a couple of years from now. Nobody has created a compelling reason for them to upgrade and it doesn't seem like it will happen until Microsoft stops issueing security upgrades for those products. Even then, a lot of people won't care if they get security upgrades or not. (I know of a small business that is using a ten-year-old desktop running Windows 98 as their only file server today.)
But there is opportunity in making a solar-fired kiln (mentioned in the article), and produce pure silicon from sand and carbon. The article mentions 1500C, but I'm not sure if 1800C is attainable with the method. Also, (lack of) vacuum might be a problem.
Os 10 melhores aplicativos para Twitter
This is why I find corporate HR "goal-setting" to be such nonsense. You set a bunch of goals, but then you have real work that needs to get done, that is probably completely different from what you thought it would be. At the end of the quarter/half/year, you look back at your goals and say wow, I didn't accomplish any of that! But you were still productive, in completely unexpected ways. The future is funny like that.
well that took my entire morning "reading time", but it was WELL worth it!
This is probably worth reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias
PG&E is a big, slow, regulated utility unlikely to rush in executing anything. And even if PG&E did rush to digitize, that would only mean more pressure on other utilities (even in other markets) to adopt a cheap ready-to-go solution, and more opportunities for software innovations that can take the data from any source (digicam or utilityco meter).
He wants attention, that's all. Watch a video of him speak; he exudes nerd. The 'tude and the copious public blathering is just over-compensation.
If you do any kind of web development you should definitely care...
Apple's Delays Could Cost iPhone Developer $600K
Hi-res Street View for Vancouver/Squamish/Whistler
I'm having a hard time getting excited about this. In 3 months MS will release version 1.1 and then version 2 coming 6 months after, each with version compatibility issues with the release before. Then a new flavor of the month will catch MS's attention and this will finally stabilize to the point where it can be implemented or identified as junk technology.
This looks fun :) I can think of all kinds of fun uses for it already...

I wonder why they choose Alex/Happy instead of Parsec though. From my, admittedly limited, viewpoint Parsec looks brilliant for parsers that can be reused and combined in interesting ways. My experience with it is limited to having done a piece of coursework in it for a compilers course (took me a few hours to do the coursework for the entire course vs. a lot longer for people using other tools).

Anyone who knows a little more about these things who can comment on the pros and cons of Parsec that I may have missed? Is it just that performance isn't as good or is there more to it?
I'm not saying Godin is right, only that you're ignoring his argument.
I like the full-screen mode and how you can jump ahead multiple 'dots'.
"Since Greenspan wasn't a decision maker wrt regulation, it's unclear why his opinion on regulation is any more relevant than his opinion on bubblegum. "

Sheesh, it seems like you're just stretching your argument for the sake of it. By now, it's not like anyone else is even "listening" to this discussion, so neither of us have anything to prove.

Sure, Greenspan indeed had no official power in the matter but the press universally credits him with wielding sufficient influence to decide the question. I documented, as you requested, the fact that Greenspan testified against the regulation of derivatives. Now you say it doesn't matter. I would agree that the legislative branch was also instrumental in deciding derivative regulation BUT that discussion is pretty much irrelevant to the immediate question.

I simply criticized Greenspan, I didn't criticize-Greenspan-to-get-the-democrats-off-the-hook. I have no partisan axes to grind here, though I get the feeling you might. I would see the whole Washington establishment, democrat and republican, as enabling Wall Street's normal operations (which lead us to this crisis). Lots of folks can be blamed but Greenspan is very widely credited as being the articulator of the hand-off ("market fundamentalist") approach. Saying that he didn't have legal power over this or that is not a sufficient argument to challenge his status as architect of overall Washington approach.

Sure, I think by now I've acknowledged there has been plenty of regulation of AIG. As I think I've said, the point isn't regulation but what kind of regulation. Here, I would follow Doug Noland and others who see derivatives, CDOs and other entities as Wall Street devices for the creation of money-like-items - synthetic bonds with a AAA rating were the product was pumped out with the assistance of elaborate constructs like CDS's. This unlimited creation of money-like-objects ran part and parcel with a massive inflation of the value of assets - the bubble.

This process is ultimately equivalent the money-multiplier effect without any underlying capital requirement. Thus, it did not require just any-old-regulation but regulation like banks. The regulations on a savings banks is not simply to keep a single bank safe but to limit the money which banks as a whole inject into the system as a whole.

....

Did I mention regulation-like-banks?
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=68992161659

> This application was not developed by Facebook.
That would be a tough situation, with no great solution.

Am I wrong in thinking you either bring in people from then on as employees?

I can't picture bringing on a 3rd and giving them a full founder stake down the road, and the middle ground is very tough.
The release of IE8 all about embracing open standards (CSS 2.1, most of HTML 4, parts of HTML 5, major parts of ECMAScript 3.1). How is Microsoft supposed to embrace open standards without releasing major upgrades to their products? How can Microsoft start embracing open standards without people complaining about too many versions of their software?
You could ask them what they think that would be best for them to do to help your biz.
How One Social Net In China Is Making A Lot Of Money
I thought it was a great article.

The author is basically telling people not to create bubble startups. If you want to create a business, create one that has value. Don't just create a startup for some romanticized ideal.

It is sound advice, even if it cuts a little too close to the bone for some.
Yeah, maybe it's better than Twitter, but it's not as good as it was a month ago. They have removed the organizational features which brought me back to the site after several years of avoiding it.

I can't see why they would want to "catch up" with Twitter, a distant second place in the social networking race.

Another good article is "Facebook's Lousy Facelift" here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-willman/facebooks-lousy-...
First: Thanks! I've been meaning to do exactly this once I had even a spare moment (consider yourself forked! ;-)...

Second: I think where this will really shine is in the "twilight zone" of shell scripting. So often, I start off with a short chain of commands on the command prompt. I'll keep adding to the chain, until at some point I feel the need to move this elaborate chain (usually an alias at that point) into it's own script file. I could copy directly, but then any improvements would require continuing to use shell script (ugh). On the other hand, I could translate the existing script to Ruby, but then I'd have to put in the overhead to do the translation with no immediate gain.

With this, I could see doing a direct copy-->paste from command line to script file and just keep going...or better yet, since it's all Ruby, why not an extension on File to automatically write out X lines of history to a script file?

...oooooh! I'm excited already!
Yeah, it is kind of weird to copy someone less successful than you. On the other hand, it seems more addicting now with a more constant stream of updates.
It's hard to believe this article when some UN groups are pitching out the Dollar is the world's prime currency.

If future generations are indeed richer, the value of what they hold isn't going to be the same.
The "compatibliity view" feature of IE8 is Microsoft's solution to this problem. Now they can meet their contractual obligations for compatibility with IE7 through IE8 and future versions. They don't have to continue supporting IE7 like they do IE6, because they will eventually be able to put even security bug fixes into IE8 (and later) and require an IE7->IE8 upgrade to get them.
College dropout makes  $100,000 a year, with a two-day workweek
I guess the awkward phrase "Facebook poll users" is a workaround for saying, "Respondents to a voluntary response unscientific poll." We have no idea what the majority of Facebook users feel about the new design. (I'm still deciding what I think about it.) The usual FAQ applies:

VOLUNTARY RESPONSE POLLS

One professor of statistics, who is a co-author of a highly regarded AP statistics textbook, has tried to popularize the phrase that "voluntary response data are worthless" to go along with the phrase "correlation does not imply causation." Other statistics teachers are gradually picking up this phrase.

[quote=Paul Velleman]

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Velleman [SMTPfv2@cornell.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 1998 5:10 PM
To: apstat-l@etc.bc.ca; Kim Robinson
Cc: mmbalach@mtu.edu
Subject: Re: qualtiative study

Sorry Kim, but it just aint so. Voluntary response data are worthless. One excellent example is the books by Shere Hite. She collected many responses from biased lists with voluntary response and drew conclusions that are roundly contradicted by all responsible studies. She claimed to be doing only qualitative work, but what she got was just plain garbage. Another famous example is the Literary Digest "poll". All you learn from voluntary response is what is said by those who choose to respond. Unless the respondents are a substantially large fraction of the population, they are very likely to be a biased -- possibly a very biased -- subset. Anecdotes tell you nothing at all about the state of the world. They can't be "used only as a description" because they describe nothing but themselves.[/quote]

http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta...
InPrivate browsing also has features that make it harder for websites like google-analytics.com and googlesyndication.com to track you across multiple websites. I don't think any other browers have a built-in feature that does that yet.
You mention that you "prefer" this. IMO, this can never work, but I'm curious how/where it's worked successfully for you that you prefer it.

What if you realize that you need to add more executive-level people or even just regular employees to the company, or raise money?
Not allowing yourself to bring in key contributors in the future is an awfully big handicap to accept.

Allocating equity from a large pool, vesting and granting to the original founders as time goes on, and leaving a lot of headroom for future contributors seems like the right play.
Yeah, it is kind of weird to copy someone less successful than you.

Good general principle.

On my part, Facebook is less addictive to me than it was before the change. I could easily forget that I'm a member, as nothing interesting is happening there.
Up until he pulled his trollier-than-thou speech i'd have agreed. The utu documentation is very well written and enlightening and so too are plenty of his trolly articles. What annoys me is that he claimed he was better than that, that it was all a show.
Perhaps he's just gotten used to the rant format. Hopefully he'll improve with time as when he's sensible he's awesome. But like he's said he should be judged not on his personality, bad or good, but by his works and ideas. Frankly they haven't been very impressive lately.
Selection bias exists, but it doesn't explain away numbers like "700,000" and "94%". The fact is that Facebook pissed off a huge number of their users, for seemingly no good reason, as the previous design was quite popular and functional.
Live Search with jQuery & PHP
Yeah, another semi-misleading headline from TechCrunch. It's not a "Facebook Poll" (since only Facebook itself can actually run polls these days, iirc), it's a third party app that is polling Facebook users.

Edit: Looks like Arrington updated the headline after someone pointed that out... still not a very clear headline since it misleadingly labels this a "Facebook Poll," when it is in fact a Facebook app that is polling users.

Perhaps semantics, but an important distinction given that actual Facebook polls are only available to Facebook.
Why is bash rubbish?

This seems like fun anyway. Operator overloading could go a long way in providing a bash-like syntax, while still providing Ruby-like extensibility.
Who has the Best Chicken Sandwich? KFG, McDonalds or Chick-Fil-A
Seems like somewhere between Trac and Github. I'd like to see it integrate with TicGit; that would rule. Trac's tickets are nice but having tickets integrate with the repo itself and being able to mess with tickets when offline or unable to reach your Trac installation is super nice. Especially if you're working on a project for a client, having them be able to open tickets is a huge plus (AFAIK TicGitWeb doesn't do this or integrate with gitweb/cgit/Gitorious.)
This is stupid and Bias... only people who 'dislike' the new layout would add the application AND people don't like change. It is much easier to say 'I don't like something' than to admit that it could be amazing! This riff raff will die down in a week, watch.
The new "constant stream of updates" does not work as well as the previous Live Feed feature. I personally find the new design not just less "addictive" but also quite repulsive. Seeing a stream of fifteen "Jane Doe just gave Joey Someshit a Green Beer! Click here to give a Green Beer to someone!" notifications makes me avoid a site, not hammer on the Reload button.
Sun's Cloud (Johnathan Schwartz's Blog)
it is indeed weird to copy someone less successful than you, but very often in software and web services, the simpler service wins - think wordpress over the bloated CMSs of a decade ago, or SalesForce over SAP, or Adwords over Doubleclick - so maybe it makes sense.
There was a good article around called something like "the well that Google built"... (Ironically I can't find it on Google).

But the basic idea is like building a village well. The rich people of the village may band together and build a well - naturally, they don't make money off it, as the general populace would be too poor to pay.

What happens is that the prosperity of the whole village increases. Disease goes down, productivity goes up - so the demand for what the richer inhabitants have to offer (e.g. goods & services) goes up.

The Internet is all about this - Google isn't the only example, but is a prime one. Whilst many of their services do not directly make any money, they make the Internet a more useful, better place... And the more that people turn to the Internet, the better off Google is.

Edit: pg touches on this too, with his comment about a startup tackling an issue like malaria: http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html
Curing malaria isn't going to immediately/directly make anyone any money - but it's possible the downstream effects could generate a lot of wealth.
A lot of this is just wishful optimism, but he's right to point out that deflation is not necessarily bad. I've been quite perplexed at Bernanke's efforts to stop the deflation that brought gas prices around here below $2 for the first time in seemingly forever.
Hosting companies, grocery stores, and landlords only accept money as payment. That is the main reason.

Google already does what you are hinting at: they give away free services and then harvest the input from that usage to make their services better. However, at the end of the day, Google has significant expensive that need to be paid in "real" money.
Introductions and 'what else should I be doing?' usually are nice things to ask.
Yes, I expect bandwidth to be the bottleneck. But it can be pretty cheap: serveraxis for example has unlimited bandwidth at 10mbps starting from $40 a month.
I wouldn't use bold for the entire page. It makes it harder to read.
I just verified this -- the information is accurate.

It's account wide, not on a per app basis. The exact text is:

"You can still add 79 out of the maximum 100 devices allocated for your team."

I removed a device and the text remained -- 79 out of 100. I'll check again later to see if it's not a caching issue.
I guess hackers shouldn't fat-finger or forget their passwords once creating an account, but I'm pretty sure some user named 'dowski' did just that. Maybe he's not a real hacker, but he'd like to login again. So I'd like to request a reset password feature or something.
you're right - but where is the EveryBlock API so we can use all that awesome data to actually create interesting mashups that will make life easier? :)

In general, I agree with john, the more open-ness and access, the better it will be for everyone involved.
Ask HN: Reseller agreements. What percentage does a reseller take?
If a internet SAAS company offers a service that charges a monthly subscription fee, and were to use the help of a reseller, what is the standard percentage that the reseller keeps?

I've heard 30% as a general guideline, but was wondering if anyone else had any experience here or and tips.

The monthly fees would start around 500 and go up to a few thousand.
Nice service you got, IMHO a good idea is to support a non-url-click email addresses, smthng like myname.nc@..., where ".nc" means "I will handle the urls by myself"

WELL DONE!
i feel like it would be a great article if it weren't playing totally on semantics to write a sensationalist article.

he's basically labeling startups and startup culture as the "bad business" subset of entrepreneurs. it is not the case that all startups are bad businesses, nor is it the case that all entrepreneurs are running good businesses.

he could totally skip all of that labeling and write an article on running good business.
I agree with this. It's a hugely impressive product, but the syntax is rather off-putting. I also feel that the default settings it installs with aren't too great because you can't run scripts in files without changing the environment -- the security angle makes sense, but it makes what's already a hard sell in the Microsoft world (a new shell) even tougher.
Is Kosmix the new Google?
Seth Godin's advice on equity for start-ups
The issue with the new Facebook is that people used Facebook as a way to connect with random people they kinda met. Random people you've kinda met often have pictures you might find interesting or contact info you'd like to look up. You don't want to be updated on what they're doing every day - you just don't care. And so now people are inundated with information they just don't want because they really only care about a small subset of their friends. Twitter, on the other hand, being based around this philosophy doesn't require two-way relationships and people "followed" others knowing that they wanted this data flying at them.

I don't know whether this stat is valid or anything, but I think Facebook just has a different social graph than sites like Twitter and that Facebook's graph isn't people you want these style updates on.
It's not that they designed for 6% of their users, it's just that a large portion of the users don't like the change for some reason -- some is the fact that there was any change at all, and the rest are probably real design issues.