skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been a part of Scrum teams and I can tell you from a personal experience that Product Owner cannot do this much in a , say, 4-week sprint. I doubt it. At least, during my stay, I never say Product Owners creating specs, talking to QA and etc.
Thanks for the clarification.

Just a thought experiment: forbidding scientists to submit papers to open access journals would be a bit too draconian, wouldn't it?
Do they plan on rewriting our DNA from scratch to make it easier to change things in humans?
Check out freelancers union.
Anxious Investors Want Biotech Firms to Cash Out
That's interesting, thanks for pointing it out.
I'm just as annoyed as before though. I don't follow why government funded programs cost money if they don't have to. If the government pays then the citizens should have access to the information as soon as possible.
The Innovation Squelch
You're right that most of the time www.example.com and example.com are equivalent. But they aren't necessarily equivalent, which is why assuming they are identical is problematic.

Your suggested modification will be correct 99% of the time, but will be incapable of handling the other 1%. The current system is correct 50% of the time, and can correctly handle the 1% that the proposed modification cannot.

Philosophically the current solution seems to suggest it is better to be less correct on average but correctly handle edge-cases. As another consideration, the userbase can correct mistakes in the current algorithm, whereas they cannot correct mistakes in your proposed algorithm.
Can you provide an example when assuming no sub-domain is equivalent to 'www' is problematic?
Although few sites buck the tradition to have the www subdomain be handled identically to primary domain, it is not a requirement to do so. I don't have examples flowing out of my pocket, but it's just a DNS configuration away from reality.

You could also phrase this as the distinction between being "correct" and being "right". The current solution is "correct", although the proposed solution will typically be "right".
I don't know but that would be cool.
They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street
I guess "Relentlessly Resourceful" is the same thing as "Get sh*t done".

(PGs 'being an animal' is the internal version, while GSD is external.)

I'm not sure it can be taught, after the age of five.

In my experience, it can be latent or simply turned off, usually by social norms [or schooling]. I've seen two cases where people really took off when they were simply given permission to 'GSD'. We managed to bypass a lot of organizational crud by effectively building a startup within a parent company, that was largely independent for the course of the project.

We used guerrilla tactics like stealing, ahem 'co-opting', people who we thought might be good if given a chance. I cringe to admit it, but we also used the unfortunate but necessary contrapositive of inventing nul sub-projects to keep non GSD people busy - those whom we had to have on board for political reasons, but who chose to basically just clock hours - so they wouldn't kill off other good work being done.

I guess in a startup, you publicly give yourselves permission to GSD [the whole S, and nothing but the S! :]
I have a Kindle 2, and a friend has the Kindle 1.

I think the scroller thingy on version 1 likely WAS better than the '5 way controller' on the new one. It allows you to move about more quickly.

The pdf-> Amazon format is kind of hit and miss, which was disappointing. I read a lot of whitepapers and so on, and it goofs up the format. In one case, it took away all spaces between words.

The web interface is kind of lacking, but since it's under 'experimental', I suppose we can cut them some slack. I do very much like the idea of the WhisperNet, but would like it more if the web experience was better.

As far as reading goes, it is a win, as JN says. I forget I'm using a Kindle and get absorbed in the material.

Overall I can't complain, it was a birthday present after all, but there are some thing's I'd be aware of before buying.
> Why not figure out what various genes do and rewrite their implementations from scratch?

Figuring out what various genes do is a major function of research, and will be for quite some time.

> Moreover, we could also try to use redundancy and/or error correcting codes to stop evolution of reimplemented genes.

Have you thought about taking some courses in cellular or molecular biology, genetics or biochemistry? These are not impossible classes, and they would give you a real appreciation for how existing biological mechanisms work, and in some cases why they must work the way they do. And you'll get to take organic chemistry, which is an incredible experience!
well worded, well drafted article. I am currently a founder of a company which took its first angel/seed investment from 5 investors, I could feel every word thats beens said. If I ever make big - or "rich" as you say, I'll be looking to contribute my small %age to the angel investing... Thanks
Gunjan
As a regular user (and big fan) of thesixtyone, I was happy to see this article because now I finally know how to embed songs!

You can email a song link or embed the entire stream on another page. (Although, it is not easy to find these options. You have to click on the tiny “comments” link to open them up). For instance, I’ve embedded “Repetition Kills” by the Black Ghosts below. It would be better if you could embed entire playlists.

Edit: After successfully embedding a song I tried sharing it over twitter, and I have a request. It would be great if clicking Post Song to twitter would automatically convert the link to a tinyurl link.
You need to change copyright year from 2008 to 2009.
Facebook | Ana Sayfa
Wow. With all the fraud and corruption that is being revealed to exist in our financial/political system this, THIS, is what author gets worked up about?

Items like this make be believe a little more in disinformation conspiracies. That this post exists to give people something to talk/think about other than what "they" are really doing.
Would really love this for live video. I know that it doesn't really make sense for gamers but I think their is a nice market in impromptu virtual conference rooms created by sharing a URL.
Technology Review: But Who's Counting?
Are you saying it is impossible to essentially stop evolution for most genes? If so, why?

The goal is to have a human race where everyone has the same DNA sequence except in a few sections pertaining to intelligence, personality, and facial features.
Does this do any sort of relating how one user likes music to how another user likes music?

It seems to me that this would be a necessary element, unless you're willing to cater so thoroughly to one specific defined community that you don't care. (Is that the case?)
IDEA: Let me tell it to connect to an existing Ventrillo/TeamSpeak server.
Hmm... I guess theres that line between getting things done, co-opting people, selling your idea to them on the one hand and on the other hand theres being a manipulative jerk.

'Michiavellian' has some pretty harsh manipulative connotations for me - surely he was resourceful.. but maybe resourceful without 'being good'...
Please review my Twitter API app: Twit Ya - check twitter users out
YUI App Theme
Budgeting for Retirement
The Dirty Job's approach to their show is so perfect. No nonsense, no fear, just show it for exactly what it is.
Here is a list of papers from the "Advanced Distributed Systems" course at UIUC: http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/class/sp09/cs525/sched.htm

Full disclosure: my advisor teaches this class.
I'm hesitant to respond to what seems to be such an obvious troll; but I will give you the benefit of the doubt.

Railroads, in fact all major transportation infrastructure projects, have always been dependent on government participation. It is just not possible to build a project that requires rights-of-way stretching over vast distances and needing planning horizons extending decades into the future without the government being involved, if only to settle the inevitable disputes.

I do find it amusing that Atlas Shrugged idolized the railroad barons and the industrialists who fed off them since in reality their businesses were completely dependent on government subsidies; and would not have been nearly as successful had the United States not been GIVING vast tracts of land to railroad companies to fund their expansion.

But leaving all of that sordid history and ideological self-delusion aside. I would be happy to invest my money in railroad bonds that were devoted to expanding the I-5 transportation corridor with a high-speed rail link.

And as a side note for the Keynesians in the audience, a major construction effort on that scale would be expected to add approximately 40-70,000 jobs for the duration of construction, and provide a measurable gdp multiplier for the region it serves once it comes into operation.
I have enjoyed Microsoft bashing a lot over the years, but a lot of real people have managed to do a lot of real things over the years with Microsoft software.

Maybe it is just as legitimate to say "Microsoft products are more functional than Apple products (designed by industrial designers) and more usable than FOSS (designed by programmers and domain experts)," and that is a better sweet spot for software design? For example, what software is better overall than Excel and Word in their categories, when both functionality and user interface is considered?
Congrats! I'm encouraged to see that others are able to pull it off on their own without cofounders, it gives me hope for myself.

Thanks
Mark
firefox 3 is slow enough as it is, so i never install plugins.

voxli popped by firefox cherry.
Weirdly enough, I didn't much find flow fun... It seemed very flat or boring. And linear. I think the best part of the game was the atmosphere the art and sound created, not so much the gameplay.

And that's not to say that his theory isn't interesting - it is - it's that I think it's very hard to define "fun", just like it's hard to define enjoyable music.
Yea, Sally. I wonder whatever happened to her.
The distinction between functional design and technical design is very important and often overlooked. Some developers tend to miss it or mix it up.

I have worked with programmers who felt they lost all control because they were not driving the functional design. However, they did truly have control, as Joel points out, because at the end of the day they still own and decide the technical design which is generally better aligned with their unique skills.

Good functional design tends to be technology ignorant by being more focused on what something is going to do from a user's perspective versus how it is going to do that something behind the scenes in code (as defined by the technical design).

While a functional design can be written out as a spec, the technical design can be developed and evolve as you write actual code if you follow an agile, iterative style of development. I think writing a technical spec (not to be confused with the functional spec) and handing it off to junior developers is why people get turned off by the idea of creating documentation on how something is going to work by someone who is not going to be the one actually implementing it. (In Joel's article, it is what Charles Simonyi was trying to define as program manager.) Once again, this is not the same as someone who provides a functional design spec.

Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum does a really good job drawing out and describing that distinction between the areas of functional vs technical design (although if I recall he uses different terminology to describe the two but the same concept nonetheless).
So, given that demo, does a single SSD perform substantially better enough on a normal laptop to warrant the expenditure yet? (Last I heard, standard advice was to wait until the price drops.)
It feels like you're deliberately not understanding so you can have a massive row about it.

Tarsnap business has money coming in from paying users, and that is enough to cover the non-human costs of servicing those users.

It's not a claim of amazing success or resiliency or world-beating awesomeness, it's a statement of progress, a milestone, a reassurance that things are moving in the right direction, that tarsnap isn't wallowing in "I have users but still no income" land.

Stop reading too much into it and then arguing about how much of a misleading dirty stinking lie it is.

You're spoiling a positive progress report with a meaningless argument and at the same time implying cperviva is misleading/lying, and stupid/incompetent. In short, you're trolling.
Wrong advice. Copyright date should use the date of the oldest material, not the newest.

Why? The purpose of putting a date on copyrighted material is to help you know when the copyright will expire (althought it's not in your lifetime :-). If you have material that you created in 2008, but put a (c) 2009 on that page, technically you are trying to cheat and extend your copyright protection by a year.

I know, for web pages it doesn't make any sense, but you might as well know what the right thing to do (TRTTD) is.
You wouldn't normally post every thought that enters your mind in real-time as you work to a discussion group/subreddit.
And you'll get to take organic chemistry, which is an incredible experience!

That's a bit of a cruel prank you're pulling!
Hey, Colin: did you take offense?
I wonder how many readers of HN are philosophically inclined rather than pragmatic?
I ordered a Kindle 2 after playing with the iPhone app. I haven't had it long enough to really give the Kindle 2 a good review, but there are a few things that stood out:

1) It's a lot nicer to read on than the iPhone screen. Larger, and easier on the eyes.

2) Kindle UI is clunky here and there, but once you're reading a book it disappears. Easier to turn pages on the Kindle than the iPhone (you get tired of swiping all the time on iPhone)

3) I'm surprised how well the computer-voice readback feature sounds. Probably useful in a car, or if you love audio-books.

4) It's a poor-mans computer for browsing the internet. The iPhone is miles better than that.

5) Nice and light, good screen with light

6) I'm going to read a lot more books now, I can already tell. :)

.
.
.

===== DRM Issue =====

I did have an issue with one of my ebooks, "Hackers and Painters" no doubt, having a DRM issue getting this message:

"The selected item could not be opened"

The message said to go to Amazon.com and I'd find an answer on my "Manage Your Kindle" page. Nothing there, unfortunately. I emailed Amazon about the problem, but solved it before I got a response...

===Troubleshooting===

I tried deleting and re-downloading the book, and de-registering and re-registering the Kindle a couple of times with no luck.

===Solution===

Finally I figured it out. I plugged the Kindle into my computer, deleted the Hackers and Painters ebook from the Documents folder on the Kindle (there were four files for the ebook), manually downloaded the ebook from Amazon's "Manage Your Kindle" page to my PC, and transferred the book onto the Kindle Documents folder via USB connection.

Sure enough that worked.

I bought this book on my iPhone initially, along with another one. The other worked fine, Hackers and Painters didn't. So my initial impression of the DRM is it's flaky.

The other two eBooks I've purchased haven't given me any trouble.
No, but I did wonder a few times if people were deliberately misunderstanding what I was saying. :-)
The Top 290+ Seattle Startups Ranked by Traffic
Why are you using an install program? Why not sign an applet and do something from there? Or use flash? Having a .msi file to install is a bit annoying. Also, your install should show some notification that it's complete. Currently, the install just disappears, making it tough to know if it even started.

Also, there is no background noise, so it's difficult to know if the program is working at all if nobody is talking (like in the HN room).

Furthermore, pushing the push-to-talk button causes behaviour I don't understand. The button pops up, then disappears again. What does that mean? Is it now on? I can't tell.

And finally, clicking the "Add room" button causes a strange message about the room that is not clear at all what it means. Am I now in multiple rooms? Do I own the room? If so, where is the list of rooms I'm in.
CAD for Nanoengineering
My take on the economic stimulus bill
Congrats again.
SoulPancake.com: Rainn Wilson's attempt to make deep discussions popular
Our team applied to YC with this idea so we know there are a lot of prickly issues that come up along the way. Best of luck to you guys!
Arrrggghh ! I, too, hope someone else chimes in with some experience. I keep procrastinating about reading through all the reams of material from Authorize.net then debugging their user unfriendly processes to get to a functioning billing process.

Their reputation for security and friendliness to the end customer seems good, so I think I'm going to have to bite the bullet, but if someone has used another system all the way through to a finished eCommerce product, I'd love to hear about customer satisfaction, etc. (or anything about relative reliability, security, etc.)
Easily one of the best TED talks I've seen. It certainly makes me wonder what I'm contributing to society building GitHub. Not that what I'm doing isn't fulfilling and helpful to others, but rather what more I could be doing.
Looks like an excellent product, what is the plan to generate revenue?
That sounds like it would be a first amendment problem.
Ask HN: hacker ways of fighting anxiety?
Last summer I developed a nasty anxiety disorder. I'm now trying to work on a startup project but I'm finding it very hard to concentrate. It's the typical GAD stuff: constantly worried about health, hard to sleep, fatigued, sometimes feel short of breath and minor chest tightness. Etc. The thing that sucks is I don't remember feeling like this until last summer, and I'd really like to feel normal so I can get some work done.

Was wondering if any other hacker / entrepreneurs have this problem and what you do to fix it.

My apologies if this is too off-topic, but the dedicated web forums for this are a bit sensational and a "hacker" approach seems like it would suit me the best (ala the "Hacker's Diet").
No. Better search does mean beating google.

But you don't have to play within Googles rules..
theres lots of territory between text search [=cool] and Natural Language [=sucks, to a first order approximation].

For example, just treat data as a graph of tagged pieces of text.. and give a good web interface to that. Bypass all the RDF, semantic web hype and just make something workable, usable. A wiki for data.

anyone looking for a co-founder? Im working on this.
I think I just said what you just said.. but then I read your post.

Is this something you'd enjoy hacking on?
Try not worrying about falling asleep at specific times -- such worry is itself a source of anxiety.

When you are tired enough, you will sleep.
"It would be better if you could embed entire playlists."

I can't actually work out how to do playlists - do they support them?
There are a couple of us in there now =)
It's actually quite clever marketing on behalf of Samsung, and impressive to seek them using 'geek marketing' in this way.

However, given that a 64GB Samsung SSD drive goes for about $500, 24 of them (plus RAID card for that many) is still looking quit steep!
Interesting application.
hi guys. embed were sorta thrown together qnd a few months ago, so they're still fairly basic. we plan on redesigning them and adding embeddable playlists in the near future.
Treat your anxiety like you would any coding problem:

Consider your anxiety's symptoms as problems in an issue tracker. For every thing that makes you anxious, stop and think: Is this a true, valid, legitimate [health] concern? If so, address it. But if not -- if it's merely a product of your worry -- then mark that issue as "resolved", "notabug", etc.

It's a logical approach: If there isn't anything medically wrong and you're just anxious about it, then take a moment and tell yourself that it's just a needless worry, and worrying about a bug doesn't fix it.

The more you can allow yourself to focus on other things (i.e. becoming engrossed in a project), the easier it will be to put your anxiety aside.

[I am not a doctor, etc.]
Announcing the Mozilla 2009 Design Challenge
Making a plugin or a separate install program enables the user to use Push-To-Talk functionality while their browser is not in focus. AFAIK, there isn't a solid way around that. I'm sure if you or someone else had an brilliant solution, they'd make use of it at voxli.
I'm sure they're working on it. Ventrilo uses a proprietary protocol that, afaik, has not been broken down yet completely.
The cost of migrating from IPv4 to IPvAndys is more or less equally huge as the cost of migrating from IPv4 to IPv6. If you're going to pay a huge migration cost, you might as well do a thorough job of it.
That was one of my favorite classes at UIUC. Distributed systems are about as cool as it gets, and this course gets to the root of them.
> Long Term Capital Management, a highly leveraged hedge fund whose directors included the two Nobelists, collapsed and had to be bailed out to the tune of $3.65 billion by a group of banks.

$3.65 billion? that seems rather quaint these days.
Wow. Simply -- wow.

I was amazed at really seeing the HD bottleneck minimized this way. I always knew about it, but -- wow.
Gold Secrets Review
False Favourites
It depends on your impatience. The X25-M has already dropped about 2X in price to $400.
Are there regular playlists (i.e. on site not embedded) ?
i use thesixtyone when i'm coding, have a lot of trance and techno. feel free to listen to my radio: http://www.thesixtyone.com/jmtame

i keeps it fresh!
> We have HN, we can examine it and decide for ourselves if HN has been "harmed."

When a clearly political post about the drug war stays on the front page for two days, that's harm in my book. I expect you will see more and more of this over time as the community grows.

Sorry you feel that way about the post, reg. Just meant to be a discussion, and I went out of my way to say positive thingsa about HN. It feels almost like a personal attack the way you stated it here.
- they act as a filter for good music, or at least, music that is likely to achieve commercial success. Take MGMT. Two college guys with good ears put out a demo and basically forget about it. An A&R guy hears it, likes it, and travels out to NY in search of these two college kids. Eventually, he finds them and offers them a deal. 6 months later, Oracular Spectacular starts conquering the airwaves with hits like Kids, Time To Pretend and Electric Feel. If the record label hadn't stepped in, it's very unlikely that they would have broken through.

- Contacts with producers. A good label will have the wherewhithall to get a big name producer on board. Take, again, MGMT, where Dave Fridmann did an excellent job of capturing their far-out, spacey sound.

- Contacts, contacts, contacts. With promoters, with music publications and reviewers, with studios, with other musicians, etc.
> This is a simpler approach

Having a secret cabal of editors, whose behavior and rules are not documented, is simpler than spending karma to vote against things? Really?
I've gone through most of their library of classical. Found many good new artists. My favourite find is definitely Edgen: http://www.thesixtyone.com/#/edgen/

It's "epic" music. Reminds me of starcraft terran background music. This is one of my favourite songs: http://www.thesixtyone.com/edgen/song/Kings+and+Kingdoms+-+D...
yeah his name is justin, i used to do some flash work with him some 10 or so years ago. he's an awesome flash designer/animator, and composes great music. stuff you'd never find anywhere else.
yes, there's a tag-based playlist system -- just favorite a song to begin.