skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The study is very eye opening to say the least. Results are based off of and emotion-free instinctive approach to choosing outcomes based on (to a degree) fundamental investment principles. Pavlov's application to investing. I agree with the thread, the most fascinating aspect is the generational improvement throughout the experiment.
I looked at the forum in cofoundr and the first post is titled "Just wanted to say hi".
This is interesting. Great article.
I've seen many start ups fail with the help of friends.
I've seen few succeed with friends.
I've seen wayyy too many fails with only one person working in the start up.
So be safe. Go get a friend
My first thought was, is it April 1st already?

"Since I did not want to make it too complicated, I only used the USD/EUR future to make the rats experts in this specific market segment, but other rats can be trained in other markets as well. I trained the rats for about 3 months, starting with 80 Sprague Dawley laboratory rats, 40 males and 40 females with the intention to cross the best of them to genetically create the best traders through select breeding."

Sounds like a pigeonrank algorithm to me...
Disclaimer: This is entirely speculation as I have no direct experience in these matter. I live in Seattle, WA, have never had a job, nor truly done a start-up.

If you really need money, say for storing and serving terabytes of videos, and you can't get the money all on your own, you might have a shot and getting some local angel investor. Maybe not someone officially in the angel racket, but one with money to invest and a weak enough will. Use your University or other high quality contacts to find out where potential investors are spending time, and go to the lake (or wherever), and make friends with them! Plus, you're only a stone's throw from all of Europe, so you could take your idea on the road to conferences and technological hot spots.

But this all assumes you need this nice bundle of money from the desk of Paul Graham. Ask yourself, "What do I really need this money for?". Is it just living expenses, a web server, and a shiny new laptop? Do you need to pay employees too? Would it be an option to find a job and save up the money? Considered leeching off friends, girlfriends, parents, or even homelessness? (Depends on sanity and dedication, I guess.)

I'm with charlesju on this one: _Build a business and you won't need funding._ We all have ideas that are more interesting than monetizing. You need to compromise this to have a true business. True, the interesting idea can pay off long term (see Facebook for an extreme case that hasn't even played out yet), but you need to think shorter to finance it if this is your path to seed funding for the real project. Which is why,

And then there's the whole location fallacy. This is the internet, not real estate for goodness sake. Just think: I'm sending you letters with zero postage over the ocean like it's nothing. Is TechCrunch really gonna care that you're not 5 miles down the street? If all they want to report on is Twitter, then there is other media coverage out there. I know it's cliche, but there are starving kids in Africa that would love to be in the place you are. And you want to leave? Isn't there an adequate concentration of hacker types somewhere the UK? Maybe I'm just spoiled with Microsoft and Nintendo operating out of my backyard, but in a country with tens of millions, surely you can find investors and a community of to work with. Find a club or organization that draws the kind of people you need help from. Or pass a clipboard or a digital equivalent around and start your own. So screw Silicon Valley! Make your own fucking Fiber Optic Kingdom!

(And, when you've made all that £££ off of Cheeri2.0, you will effortlessly gain passage to the Americas, just like you dreamed.)
But, if it worked for BeautifulSoup, as it existed in Python 2.5 would be suitable for BeautifulSoup to continue as if it were the last good version.... I'm not suggesting it be readded to the standard library, just that it be added to BeautifulSoup.
An intelligent designer would have given us arms AND wings, and a green skin to let us feed from photosynthesis and the sun. The human race wouldn't be more than a couple of feet tall.

Now THAT is intelligent design. But as we know, designers work in mysterious ways...
I admire Steve for just blogging what he wants to blog.

The key to storytelling is to make a point but make it personal. One key to make a story personal is to reveal vulnerability. Who cares about your successes?! (People can't always relate to I-climbed-Mount-Everest but they can relate to I-screwed-up).
A definitive reply to most of that outmoded thinking about g can be found in Nisbet's new book,

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/convention/program_detai...

or in Stanovich's.

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...

Stanovich is very clear on the distinction between "intelligence" (he is a mainstream psychologist in calling "intelligence" what I would simply call "IQ") and "rationality," an aspect of human cognition hardly tapped at all by most IQ tests. Stanovich comes at these issues from the framework of cognitive science, which also informs much of current behavioral economics. He previously wrote a textbook on understanding psychological research that has gone through a number of editions.
I find that xargs is the most convenient way to achieve parallelism for quick and easy batch work. Just write your script to receive its unit of work as a command argument (or as multiple args if starting a process is a heavy operation). Use any language. Utilize all your cores.
I got that the 2nd generation average is 48.7% and the 3rd generation average is 50.4%. I'm too lazy to find the standard deviations.
Is Google Voice bad news for Android?
These people http://www.spinvox.com/ do exactly that. The answer is that it works quite well, but maybe not well enough to rely upon. It struggles with people's names, jargon and noisy environments as you might imagine. Also there's been a few occasions where it missed a vital word and changed the whole sense of the message "Hi, I'm calling to let you know I'm going to be at the station tonight as planned" - missing a NOT. Ooops.
Excellent social commentary.

The rather neat dynastic results table at the end show percentages but no legend; does anyone know what they represent?
I agree with your criticism and downmodded you for TL;DR, because it is the intellectual equivalent of barbarians at the gate.

You hate to say it. The next guy will think he's subverting the meme. The third guy will think it is funny. The fourth guy will do it because he thinks the site expects someone to say it. And he will be right.
I'm talking about a replacement for cash currency.
if HN was on the article, think how many more articles on Erlang would come up? I think Mashable might be more frequented than Codinghorror.
>>>>I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutability is one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific.

>>This falsifiability criterion is what determines whether a theory is scientific, but there is a larger category of theories which are not all empirically testable yet are subject to rational criticism, and are therefore rational, though we must generally hold them with a lower degree of confidence than we do our scientific theories.

The essence of anti-intellectualism is when we say that there are subjects that are too deep or too laborious to discuss. Suppose we say that (1) empiricism is not empirically testable, and then say that (2) empiricism is true, and then say that (3) everything that is true must be testable. Now suppose someone were to come along and say that (4) It is the case that (1) and (3) are mutually exclusive. The shying away from statements/discussions like (4) is the essence of anti-intellectualism which spawns from all manner of modern philosophical beliefs. You'll notice a shying away of this type of discussion in the article. Not inspecting your true core beliefs is what anti-intellectualism is.
I personally like my Aeron chair for 2 reasons. 1, because of it's mesh material. I can sit in it for extended periods of time and not have much fatigue or get sweaty like I can with some of those pleather chairs that you have to assemble when you get them home. 2, for the many many number of ways you can adjust the chair. I'm curious if the ones you've been sitting on are the basic model or have the lumbar, arm adjustments, etc. Also they come in 3 different sizes and getting the right sized model is actually pretty important.

I also find them much more comfortable to sit in but this could be because I have a medium sized frame and because I prefer sitting leaning back.

Either way like noodle said, it doesn't really matter what anyone else says, if you don't like the aeron skip it. We're all different and have different tastes.

Cheers!
Delayed allocation and the zero-length file problem
Ask YC: How are root keys stored in an exceptionally secure manner?
"As the Internet’s leading CA, VeriSign has the following responsibilities

* Storing VeriSign root keys in an exceptionally secure manner"

I've always been curious as to what 'exceptionally secure manner' means. Is this the technological equivalent of how KFC stores its secret recipe?
In all seriousness, doesn't Notarbartolo look like pg in that picture?

:)

I swear, to me, he looks a lot like pg!
Nicely done!

The first thing I notice is that unlike 90%+ of real-time browser-based games (flash or javascript), it doesn't stupidly burn 100% CPU for no reason at all. It takes close to 0%!
The most interesting thing to me was: "They were taken to court ___the following day___ and pled guilty, sentencing to follow."

That's pretty speedy, but I guess it shows how little I know about the UK judicial system / government.
wow. thanks for the info :)
EBS is not the same as having fast and persistent local storage, though.

The whole volatility of AMI images is a big burden.

You can't just make changes to your images as you go - you can't even snapshot a running image into a new AMI.

Instead you have to port all changes back to a local copy of your AMI and re-upload that AMI for updates - which is a cumbersome and lengthy process.

To add insult to injury you have to maintain two AMI-images if you want to take full advantage of both small and large instances. One 32bit and one 64bit AMI is required in that case.

Ofcourse there are workarounds and our AMI-images are, by now, setup in a way where they provide only a bare, baseline system that updates itself upon boot. Still, this remains one of the biggest pain points with EC2 and will drive many users away when viable alternatives become available.
I have used PayPal and Google Checkout on a site, if you sign up for the business/payments pro version of PayPal you'll be able to collect payments in 2 ways on your site. Either via PayPal payment, or credit card. The credit card payment can be transparent to the user if you are either using a shopping cart with PayPal integrated or if you know how to program against the PP API, or can transfer to PP and complete a CC transaction there. The Google Checkout option will require the purchaser to have a Google Checkout Account. This is typically a slight deterrent as it requires someone to create a new account which can sometimes be considered a PITA.

Either way many sites typically support multiple payment methods. But if you're talking about small transaction sizes you may want to do some research into micro payment processors. Not sure how far along they are but one that had been mentioned a long long time ago was NOCA. Think the site is NOCA.com. But there are others.

Good luck.

oh and yes there are always premiums involved. If you go with PP the fee for payments pro is like $20/mo + ~3% + $.30/transaction. Services like Authorize.net and Cybersource will have slightly lower transactional rates but higher monthly fees.
An optimistic article, but I wonder if entrepreneurialism has become cool only in very limited circles - like here.

Out in the real world, with the crisis and rising unemployment, it is once again becoming a sign of life success to land a safe job in a large corporation. It seems that getting hired by (say) Google is even more impressive now than a few years ago.

Another thing that worries me is that there are no IPOs anymore, so the only options for small businesses are to stay small (and unimportant) or sell the business to a large corporation (making them even stronger). And with more regulations and bailouts from the government, corporations might just be getting stronger than ever. I hope it is not true, I'll be happy if you prove me wrong.
He probably means that slicehost only offers 64bit VMs which causes some memory overhead.
Issues with this that I see (aside from the obvious lack of statistical rigor) are that he gives the rats repeated input. Effectively, he is selecting for the rats who best memorize tracks 1-600.
You are by no means a alone. I very much wanted to read an interesting article but I didn't get beyond his example that Romans never really explored?!

You know, besides that whole empire thing that wrapped around the Mediterranean those Romans basically stayed inside their 7 hills.
While I don't really think this is fitting for HN, I do really enjoy the stories that inspired this post. Davesecretary originally posted the stories on a vinyl trading message board (http://board.vivalavinyl.org). I think it's really awesome that those stories ballooned and got popular on Reddit / other social news sites. They're great.
When economic incentives backfire
Intrinsic Quality: Why Testing Takes Time
Hey, it's Friday now! Where are all the Fortran articles? :)
Isn't it forex, not stocks?
This book and its sequel is responsible for wasting an entire summer of my life when I was 12! I miss those days :)
The power of Erlang bit syntax (yes, for real)
Figuring out how to make big organizations run nimbly is the next big challenge. Almost all successful start-up businesses will grow into large ones. Figuroug out how to make that transition gracefully and keep some of the agility is a key challenge for future entrepreneurs.

It's also the difference between millionaire and billionaire.
This Week in jQuery, vol. 1
Pure gold. Possibilities are endless.
From that list only TheFunded seems the most focused on the 'real' entrepreneurs. I wonder how much value does it actually hold.
One of the things about life is that it lack the discreet boundaries of math.

There is no clear, sharp, crisp line in the sand between life and not life.

And it turns out the line between virii and bacteria is kind of messy too.

In fact that's not surprising, what would be surprising is finding a sharp and clear difference, now that would be unusual.

And another minor point, we know of divergent evolution for things as complex as large animals, like echidnas and hedgehogs. And that article talks about all virii sharing the proteins to make their capsule, and implies they all inherited it from a common ancestor. But isn't that an extraordinary claim? Isn't it just as likely for there to have been multiple origins and we're just looking at convergent evolution? For things that simple, how many ways to build a capsid could there be?
US-centric articles on cell phones are sort of like European-centric discussions of baseball. Well, not quite that much, but still...
The Value of Neuroscience
Everyone has to do their first start-up at some point. Just because you haven't done a start-up failed or otherwise by the time you are 30, doesn't mean that you won't ever do one. I think in this economy a lot of people who haven't previously done a start-up full time are finding that an option. I definitely found that was the case for me.
"entrepreneurship ... “the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control”" - interesting
Great minds say more with less.
Awesome!

Spoiler alert, predicting a self aware system like the stock market not so much possible in the long run.

But profiting from the lucky guesses of rodents in the short term - possible and awesome. (As long as it's not your money on the line.)
Do you mean physical security considerations? or digital?
Foursquare goes live - Dodgeball's co-founder new startup
from that list it looks like Bloomberg is the only one who knows what he is doing.
Researchers find ways to sniff keystrokes from thin air
The World Wide Web Is 20 Years Old Today
Here's an example using our tool. You can see that Lost must not have aired this Wednesday by looking at the chart. Also, people discuss Lost 3x as much as Heroes:

http://twist.flaptor.com/trends?gram=lost,heroes&table=1

Another interesting pattern is Lost vs. American Idol:

http://twist.flaptor.com/trends?gram=lost%2Cidol&table=1
CNBC interview with Carl Schramm (CEO Kauffman.org) on how start-ups create new jobs.
Some white papers and case studies that may help grow your business
You may find an idea or two you can personalize to boost your near-term revenue.
The controls should support holding down L/R instead of tapping only.
You may be right, but I approached it with the idea that he had already made one assholish statement and so there was a higher probability that he was an asshole in general. It takes one to know one, I suppose, but I try to limit my assholishness to people who have already demonstrated a good bit of their own.
He traded forex and futures, not actual stocks. Headline misleading.
Same! We need an organized campaign to finally get subdomains in the URL preview.
I put the video links on our company blog so people without Windows could watch our cut of the clips. This was our first TV appearance for our start-up DrChrono.com and a great chance to talk about creating a start-up in this economy. I think this was the first optimistic segment on CNBC in a long time.
Essentially, he made a more complicated version of a moving average quant system.

The more interesting part was breeding top-performing rats to see if they are able to improve their "trading" genetically. You can do this exact same thing using evolutionary algorithms with trading systems that help you to adapt to the market.

Quant finance is fun when you're doing it for yourself, not a bank.
And if you assume that there exists a fractal nature in financial markets, it's not necessarily a problem (sample size is low, but premise applies).
aside from the obvious lack of statistical rigor

I think we've found a very fun story problem for a Statistics 101 class.
Efficient reading of papers in science and technology
Ask HN: Top 30 RSS feed.
Is there a way to make my Google Reader only recieve the top 30 stories of the day?
I have my own start-up in the health care software space and it is a little disturbing to see the rush of companies coming into the space and trying to grasp for government funding attached to Obama's stimulus plan. However, it will probably only be good news for any company already working on healthcare software to have a lot of money and interest coming into the market.
S.F. startup Aardvark personalizes searching
"He asked me to spell my name, and I said: "Y". He wrote "W". So far, so good. I really didn't want these fuckers to have my personal information just because they gave me an oil change, anyway.

I said "e", and he wrote "i". Wow, this was new.

I said "g, g" and he wrote "jj". Cool!"

The guy's first language was apparently French and wasn't good at English.

letters with the same sound in French and English:

French English
é a same
i e same
f f same
g j similar (in french we don't make the implicit D sound)
j g similar (in french we don't make the implicit D sound)
l l similar
m m same
n n same
o o same
q q similar (in french we say "ku" instead of "kiou")
r r similar
s s same
t t similar (té instead of tee)
v v similar (vé instead of vee)
w w similar (double-V instead of double-U)
z z similar (zed instead of zee)
extraordinarily useful variation on existing ideas

So could we postulate that tinkering and creativity are not discrete but rather a continuous evolution (a bunch of variations)?
Unofficial SXSW 2009 Torrents
This discussion sheds a lot of light on benefits and disadvantages of object oriented programming. Having everything be "just a map" means that there are a lot of functions in the library that can work on all your data. A downside is that the compiler won't warn you if you break some constraint that invalidates the model of whatever the map is meant to represent. For example, if you remove a value from the map necessary for a certain computation (Clojure maps are immutable, but dissoc'ing away a critical piece of data leads to the same problem).

Clojure's philosophy with respect to OOP is to provide most of the pieces of OOP, but in an orthogonal way so that the programmer can pick and choose the parts he wants. So polymorphism is provided by multi-methods, but with a dispatch mechanism that does not require any type hierarchy. It will be interesting to see if Clojure code starts to look more like "traditional" OOP code, or if Clojure coders find they are fine without traditional OOP.
Yeah that is just goes to show the demographic on Twitter now. Not of the mainstream. The MySpacers are now just moving to Facebook, but if the mainstream was on Twitter, that chart would favor American Idol.
Believe me, I was surprised as you are :).

(I wrote the article)
Yeah, I've been through all this too. Sounds like you want something beyond "ec2-bundle-instance" which will bundle your running instance but won't snapshot the VM from "underneath" as it's running (EBS snapshots can do that though). Another way we address issues like this is to create VMs on a local cluster (with Nimbus which is a local EC2 API compatible service that supports persistent storage) and transfer them to EC2 for big launches of the "finished product."
This seems very likely - I imagine a lot of prosecutors are as careerist as people in any other profession. Given a choice between "high probability of successfully prosecuting someone who might have been set up" versus "low probability of successfully prosecuting the real criminals", they will, of course, pick the former.

In a way, everyone wins here - except the insurance companies, I suppose. The criminals some money, the prosecutors make a career.
Great, thanks.

What did you use to generate that output?
Police departments keeping public informed using Twitter
A few years ago there were some papers about logging keystrokes by recording the sounds of the different keys in the keyboard.
Keyboard Acoustic Emanations: http://www.truststc.org/pubs/3.html
So how would you separate "lost wast good last night" from "i cant believe uconn lost"?
An example of Tokyo Tyrant in PHP
Top Life Tips: #10
It does for me (Safari 3 + Webkit nightly)
The Unfinished
This is a great point. I feel like soldiering on, especially if costs are low, can be the easy way out.

I mean, its not easy to go month after month with little or no positive feedback, but it doesn't require facing up to the hard choices figuring something like this out exposes. Hopefully there is an opportunity in this dead end - perhaps not the millions you were hoping for, but perhaps a way out, a way to end things with honor, maybe for a smaller payout, maybe rethinking your approach will reveal a smaller market opportunity, but something attainable, or get you to focus on winding it up rather than pressing onwards until you run out of steam.
It does support it. Using Firefox. It's perfect.
We don't want HN to get hammered, please don't submit this kind of "fluffy" stuff.

Save HN! :)
How can you write a 1,000-word article about a new search engine and not include the flipping URL?

"Using an algorithm program..."

"Ventilla said the service is more personal and reliable..."

Never mind. The author hasn't used it, doesn't know his ass from his elbow and is just parroting the CEO. Tech Journalism at its finest.
Apberget