skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is worthwhile taking this joke as serious, because the perspective on why we need AI at all is enlightening.

Take WoW, for example. Right now there are several million players logged in, busy beating the tar out of several million bad guys who are programmed to lose. They are playing, and paying good money, to have the illusion of challenge while winning the overwhelming majority of all encounters. (Why can't PVP replace this for most players? Because PVP implies someone is losing and the overwhelming majority of players want to decisively win the overwhelming majority of encounters. There is no way to accomplish those things without instructing a non-player to throw their matches.)

Let's say we replaced the AI with hired actors who played the monsters, and played poorly. Heck, we'll say the actors can even multitask 4 monsters at a time, all played to a similar level of poorly. At 60 monster-hours (15 man hours) per month per player, Blizzard would be in the red on accounts just from the actors salary unless their fully-loaded cost was under $1 a man-hour. Even if they got away with 40 cent wages for urban China and had minimal overhead this would slash their margins to bits.

So that's why we have AI: to do jobs humans won't do willingly (losing) at a price which is cheaper than the cheapest possible human implementation.
usually it isn't filmed because people haven't launched. it is an investor event, not a publicity event.
I suppose Google was just another me-too search engine and MS-DOS was just another copy of CP/M -- one that they didn't even write themselves.

We are at a time where the Internet is changing the world in significant ways, and the biggest changes I expect haven't fully come to fruition yet. They are forged in the minds and the blood sweat and tears of lots of startups, including the ones that you just dismissed carte blanche.

YC has created tremendous value, as have many other startups that you personally probably would never use or care about. So rather than sound the misguided cry of "where's the innovation?", perhaps it would be better to look within oneself and find the fire to create it yourself.
> These people took the money and ran.

They got pre-agreed bonuses for what they did. They saw that things were changing for the worse and left.

What part of that do you have a problem with?

Thanks to the handwringing, started by people who knew about the bonus months ago, AIG is going to have trouble hiring people. Since we're hoping to get tax money back, it's unclear why that's a good thing.
> we'll have less technical debt due to pairing.

Could you explain this point?

I think most of the points you make a pretty good points. I have not worked in a pair programming environment myself but find it quite attractive. Mainly because sometimes I tend to rapidly analyse multiple ideas for pros and cons and to try and break them and having someone as a sounding off board is something that I would like.
But what about when it is interesting but only say more technically challenging than grunt work?
So long as I can have Hulu on Plex, I don't mind. I am astonished Plex is given away for free.
Thanks for the article.

Just as a completely useless data point, I suffered two different disk crashes in rapid succession a couple of months back, and out of frustration got one of the Transcend SSDs that were cheap and available at the time (ATA for an old PBG4).

It works great, I love it, and I no longer have to fear data loss when stupid software drives me to banging my fists on the desk.
I think that is the most fuzzy part. Determining combined productivity, factoring the "improved" quality and the knowledge sharing and gain is a lot more difficult than simply adding up the individual productivity of each programmer (whatever may the metric for measuring the productivity be), but in this case, not tending to factor in improved code quality, constant code review and higher probability of catching subtle bugs
Finally, some sanity within the Web 2.0 circlejerk.

There's only so many apps you can aim at "early adopters" before they say "enough, i'm tired of signing up for yet another gimmick app!".

Where's the next innovation aimed at the mainstream? Where are the startups with a business plan, and a product customers will want to pay for?

The deluge of "we will fund it with ad revenue and then get bought by Google" has got to stop soon. And when it does, when all the widgets and gadgets and mashups that create no value finally collapse, the bubble..will..burst.
Ah.. Thanks for the link. I missed that during my vacation..
The Importance of a Good jQuery Selector
It would be amazing if these "content providers" got their heads out of their asses and Hulu implemented some sort of subscription model on Hulu that allowed me to watch any video without advertising wherever the fuck I want to, whether it be a computer, television or cellular device.

They have a chance to turn Hulu into a very, very large Netflix competitor but I don't see them realizing this.
Aren't there situations where this could backfire? What if you just finished running around the block and need to get inside? What if you just finished running around the block away from rabid dogs and need to get inside FAST?
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To me, photo sharing isn't a solved problem. But honestly, who cares if it is? When Google came on the scene, a lot of people said search was a solved problem. So what did they do? Made search better/easier/faster/insert adjective here.

The same thing can happen with any startup. You don't necessarily have to identify an unsolved problem -- you just have to solve the problem better than anyone else.

Ideas evolve over time as the problem and the need becomes clearer, feedback is provided, and these startups just get better at what they're doing. Let's cut these guys a break, give them a little support for putting themselves out there, and provide some constructive feedback.
I need a co-founder for YC in the Bay area
I'm extremely interested in applying for the next YC round. I have a concept with a day-one business model. I have been developing the concept for about 6 months, just locally running php code, and the results are enough to convince me there might be some value here. The one thing I'm lacking is a dedicated co-founder.

I've been reading extensively through the application and related info, and the biggest thing that pops out at me is its highly encouraged to have at least 2 cofounders, even better with 3. PG has even said several times that its highly unlikely for a lone developer to get accepted.

Another friend of mine is extremely good with data analytics, which will be a vital component of this. She's not a coder though, but I hope will be a great contributor to the project.

I have the front-end handled. I have some experience working with EC2 and setting up server environments and have had several years of php coding experience. Overall, I know enough that I can string this together, throw some ducktape on it, and get it launched. But its going to be much, much harder than need be.

I am open to any kind of backend infrastructure except java. Python, RoR, php, Erlang, Arc, whatever. Java is a nightmare I just escaped and have no intentions of going back.

If you are reading this and you seriously, seriously interested in shooting for starting a company and our skills complement each other, email me asap. We only have a few days left to get it together.

Email is geuis.teses@gmail.com

*Edit based on comments:

The core idea is a content publishing tool for real-time content. We aggregate real-time content from a variety of sources. Users are able to filter through content based on a variety of methods to monitor exactly the kind of content they are interested in.

Secondly, we provide a publishing tool that allows users to republish filtered content to any number of their own services. This would work for sites ranging from major news portals to status updates on social networks.

The third leg of the system involves extensive analytics tracking on republished content.

The business model is freemium, with a limited free account and paid versions that allow full access to all features.
Introducing Microsoft Web Platform Installer
A tiny jpeg takes 10 seconds to load? That's weird. Does Vista have issues with your SSD's drivers or something?

Nice to hear that it worked as it should with Ubuntu
Well, I've seen numbers stated at 100gigs write per day for 5 years guaranteed. That's a shitload really, more than enough to that I wouldn't be concerned with it.
Seventh dumbest mistake: enumerated goodness. Because good and bad are context dependent and computers are such awesome mind readers.
Reverse engineering Apple's OS X
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Agreed, I'm getting ready to buy some SSD's for my production servers, and after reading this I know exactly what I want to buy and why and what to avoid. This was a great article.

I wish I'd read this before buying my SSD for my workstation, an impulse buy while at Fry's with my boss. I've largely avoided the write stuttering that is problematic for these low end MLC SSD's by using my old HDD for all my data and the SSD for OS/Programs so writes are fairly rare to the SSD; it still kicks the shit out of the old HDD.

For a database server however, buying a non intel MLC SSD would have been a huge mistake that I'm now well informed enough to avoid.
> The cure for "Enumerating Badness" is, of course, "Enumerating Goodness." Amazingly, there is virtually no support in operating systems for such software-level controls

The closest an OS has come to "enumerating goodness" is the User Access Control (UAC) introduced in Vista that, among other things, blocks any executable from running as Administrator until you say "Yes, please run this" at least twice. While well-intentioned, that frustrated most users to no end. So it's not as simple as the author may think.
It looks more like an interesting result with an overblown headline.

In the linked article they refer to the Y(4140) as a composite of quarks, possibly charm and anti-charm quarks. Charm and anti-charm quarks are nothing new, but this is a new composite particle made out of them.

Unlike normal mesons, which are a quark and its anti-quark, this is likely composed of more than just a pair of quarks; four or more. If I had to guess I would say that it is extremely unstable and therefore short-lived.

If it's true, this story wouldn't lead to a rewrite of the Standard Model of particle physics but could offer some insight into the strong force works.

As for my background, I have only spent one year as an undergrad in particle physics and that was in neutrinos and not high-energy stuff like in the article. So I'm sure someone else here will be better prepared to do a deeper analysis of the data.
I agree that ambitious ideas are important, and technically hard solutions are inspiring, but I think it's a mistake to assume those qualities always make better businesses.

Great businesses solve problems people care about in a way that makes money. Identifying those problems is often as hard as creating the solution. The notion of releasing early and often is important because it lets entrepreneurs quickly identify the problem users want solved and test their solutions.

I'm happy people tackle hard problems, but keep in mind that precious few arrive at their solution (or even figure out the real problem) in 3 months. Wait a few years and I'm confident you'll see great innovation out of YC, or YC-like programs.
That's exactly what I'm doing, 64gig SSD for OS/Programs and 756gig SATA HDD for data/temp files/cache. Seems to work great, loving the speed of program launching on the SSD, no delay, click an icon and bam.. app is launched.
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There was a blog post recently about the performance improvements of using the very same SSD drive for Gemstone/S http://gemstonesoup.wordpress.com/2009/02/28/approaching-the....
Alternately, /etc/sudoers and explicit instructions to escalate privilege.
Perhaps this wouldn't be a good choice for a front door to a regular home. Perhaps the entrance to a secure facility, though, where time would never be an issue (with a keycard and a vocalized passphrase as well, for additional factors.) Not a nuclear launch silo, but perhaps a top-secret research facility.
> Ideas are priceless. If you are a programmer and you aren't "plugged" into the bubble money, a great idea is your only chance.

It may be your only chance at becoming the next Google (although I disagree). It's definitely not your only chance at creating a relatively small business that has revenues of millions of dollars per year.

There have always been and always will be plenty of markets that are being neglected for one reason or another. Finding one and owning it is not rocket science, and it doesn't have to involve a grandiose vision for changing the world.

Whether you want to spend your time shooting for the stars or building a small, but less risky, business is a personal decision.

History has shown that it's quite possible for a business that looks tiny at first to hit a deep vein and become a huge monster. I wouldn't bet against YC having at least one of these.
5 Ways to Retain Superstar Employees
Please, HN people, stop linking to the print only versions. It takes me work to navigate back to the version that shows the publisher navigation conext, proper reading width, and makes the publisher happy that you linked to them. If I want to get an unformatted, often less tested version with missing images, I'll choose to click on 'printer version' myself.
Harvard prof apologizes to judge, RIAA lawyers. Sort Of.
Is Our Belt Way Too Tight? A Remarkable Capacity For Self Delusion
A Better Biofuel Bug: Bacteria engineered to efficiently breakdown cellulose
To an outside observer, Wattvision doesn't exist yet either :). But given that I doubt I'll be getting a new meter anytime soon, it does seem a better bet. If anyone from Wattvision is reading, I would love to be a beta tester...
Having to create an ID manually is temporary.

When complete, the ID is going to be a hash of the extension's public key, and extension content will be signed with the key. So there won't be conflicts (unless you share your private key).
He should get a laser pointer. Much cooler than a USB drive.
Massively better? No.

If you create an imaginary baseline SSD with the X25-M's 80 GB and the Vertex's 9836 PCMarks and then compare both drives against the baseline you get:

Intel: 20% faster

OCZ: 50% larger

Both cost $350. Given that the slow one is faster than the fastest desktop HD but the big one is only 1/3 the size of a standard laptop HD, I think I prefer the extra space.
I'm not saying you should... but it might be a good idea to give even a generalized idea of what you are trying to build. even if it's a couple of lines, you don't have to sell your secret sauce. just show us the box.
Hell, maybe even something more than the box. This is a community of developers, yes. Are they all ready to jump on your idea? No. If you're serious about finding a co-founder, open up a little. Thats how I found mine.
Plus, I'd rather see a company encouraging people to buy local and depend less on high-energy infrastructure

The high-energy infrastructure is the car trip to "local", not making additional use at the margin of mail trucks which would travel the same streets regardless of whether they had another case of organic blueberry jam on them or not.
We need calculators because it's cheaper than keeping a human with you at all times to calculate sums for you. That sounds pretty silly, right?
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I would say mostly political punk and KMFDM. Listening to music with someone spewing their personal views which most of the time I share, helps anger me and get me going... ;)
Foodoro seems most clearly positioned to make money. Some of the others look like it's acquisition or bust.

It's nice to see that most are trying to charge for something.

It's easy to see how cloudkick could make money, especially since their competitors already charge for similar services. However, they should probably put out a pricing plan soon. It might even draw more interest to their company (a giffen good!) because potential customers might want to do business with a company that looks like it is making money and therefore stable.
Yea but I didn't see him mentioning the ioDrive at all, or did I miss it in the haystack ?!
To correct your analogy: imagine a world in which humans needed to be constantly told their math skills were awesome (I don't know, maybe as confidence building for middle-school girls). In this world, we might have calculators which were designed to provide the wrong answer, so that people would type in 36 x 50, get -7 as the answer, and say "Hah, I'm much better at this than you are."

In this world, which parallels the MMORPG use case, yes, its cheaper to keep a calculator to be the whipping boy than to keep around a human who has been instructed to perform math poorly.
Facebook could kill Google by 2012 says Analyst
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The point for me kind of is that a fully patched OS X can be hacked easily.
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I have an idea. Please comment on it. Idea is about a personal info mgmt site. The system allows user to define any number of entity like Contact (Name,Address, Phone No, ..), CC-Txion Info (...) in easy steps (like online form creator but easier) and add data to it. Allows to download data (Excel) and cleanup the data if needed. Common search feature to search for info across all entities. Basically this system lies between Unstructured wiki (Easy) and Complex website generator (Online form/page builder) (Complex).
While I was cooking dinner after posting this, I came up with an awesome solution to OCZ's dilemma. They're driven to boost streaming large-block bandwidth so that they have big numbers to advertise, but they're doing that at the expense of crippling random small writes. So they should do do this:

* Offer two different lines with the same hardware but differing firmwares optimized for each.
* Sell the IOPS-targeted one as 'Enterprise Grade' for %50 more.
* Release regular firmware updates for both, and ensure that only a trivial (but *WARRANTY VOIDING*)
modification keeps you from flashing your consumer drive with the 'enterprise' firmware.
* Bask in the glow of heavily-dugg tutorials about how to 'mod' your consumer drive for low-latencies
* Have vendors purchase your cheaper-than-intel 'Enterprise' drive for CYA reasons.
I like thesixtyone. I wish we could start over with music and eliminate all non-free music from the world. Sure, there is the one or other old gem I am still attached to (Radiohead for example), but the sacrifice would be worth it.
The irony is that these "bonuses" aren't meritocratic like your good teacher/bad teacher scenario. These are retention bonuses contractually agreed to by AIG and their employees.

Last year, back when AIG knew things were hitting the fan, they decided to offer a carrot to employees who would stay through the storm. Turns out, AIG is "too big to fail" so those that decided to stay with AIG through our current adventure appear to be getting rewarded for incompetence.
Not when the navigation is so absurdly awful, and with all the informative images present in the print version.

There's no fucking way I'm going to link to something that requires 62 clicks to page through the article.
For proper reading width, check out http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
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I doubt I ever convince you of anything with any argument. So in conclusion, I only offer the observation that the most significant prior managerial experience of the current chief executive of the United States government was running his own campaign for the position, and yet he seems to be doing no worse than his predecessor. I offer, with the observation, a humble and limited hypothesis: that there is a fundamental difference between the talents needed to be the chief executive of a company and the chief executive of a country, and that this difference counters Mr. Greenspun's point, which I originally commented on.
I don't think he's specifically referring to POSIX compliance in the current OSX, but I can certainly attest to my experiences with A/UX (the original Mac OS/Unix hybrid OS) and say that POSIX compliance was also a minor issue - perhaps not so much for a Unix, but it's other stuff that they let slip. I don't use OSX as I don't have a Mac but I wouldn't be surprised if they're focusing on the insanely great bits to the detriment of stuff under the hood, as has happened before.
I found it on reddit. I thought it might be relevant and interesting to some of the people here.
"In comparison, California is the worst. Unless of course, you’re in technology and/or looking to raise venture capital — when it comes to those two categories, the Golden State tops the charts."
You're right -- there's a lot of stuff Wattvision can do with the data we gather today. There's no reason we can't make smart conclusions about what's running (as gojomo suggests) or or eventually expand to per-device sensors. We're just starting simple.
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