skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Short of a DNA scan, it is hard to see how one could select the best individuals. If one could show that one's parents were big business people, that lends confidence, but there is always a chance someone is on the short end of the gene pool. Would not it be great if we could predict the winners from the losers in society ahead of time, based on some selection criteria. But this is difficult. A DNA scan (expensive in itself) could show health and even cognitive fitness, and that could be augmented by IQ tests, etc., but there is not a sure way to do this. Only markets can determine fitness, and that is in retrospect. Ahead of time, I do not see how we can predict the fittest members of society, which is what this scheme would demand, the ones "most likely to become millionaires". Performance picks the smart from the dumb, but predicting this ahead of time is dubious. A DNA scan is as close as you could get I suppose, to weed out people with a likelihood of developing mental problems later on in life, etc., but still, there is error here. You want to find the Over-Man of Nietzsche. In my opinion the only Over-Man is that what the market determines. And you can't ever know that ahead of time, even with DNA sequencing. That helps your probabilities but you are still playing dice. Frankly I feel there is no such thing as the "Over-Man", there is only people whom markets favor over others, and knowing which ones those are going to be is rather hopeless.
My last computer class was in high school--1968. I have owned a personal computer for over 30 years now. Alas, most of my contemporaries have let the leading edge pass them by. I won't allow that to happen to me.
Your a priori success-rate of 85% is hard to manage and 5-10% annually in return is too low for that risk. I can invest in opportunities with a higher return on equity and have things better under control.

But your scheme is flawed in just another way: You invest in the entrepreneur, but you don't profit from his success. You're just granting a credit (% on capital), not making an investment (% on performance).

And there alread _are_ such schemes, where investors can give money to high potentials and profit from their later income. These high potentials have to take a life insurance for the case they die in the meantime...
You can finance yourself with credit cards for a far lower interest rate than this. If you're betting on your ability to pay back debt, and there's no value add for taking the money (such as an investor with connections), then you go with the cheapest cash available.
If it was used on a massive scale to fight malaria, the side effects might be pretty extreme.

But if it's used on a small scale, to keep people's backyards mosquito free, this could be really awesome.
Samsung has a funny and impressive "viral" ad video showing 24 SSD drives in a RAID array. Sign me up for one of these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs
That the system is flawed and that they tried to keep it secret doesn't seem new. What really troubles me is the presumption on the part of the regulators that the system is safe to the point of just believing the word of the banks when they say the transaction was properly authorized, thus making the customer effectively liable for fraud even though the law says otherwise.
Forget DNA and the over-man. For starters I would take the 200 best rejected candidates from Y Combinator.
I used a ThinkPad T40 last summer, and I was surprised at how much I grew to like it. But one thing drove me crazy: F1 was where esc should be: http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/sc/20947059-2-200-DT4.gif

Clearly, the keyboard layout was not designed by a vi user. Took me a few weeks before I was moving my hand far enough to hit esc and not F1.
The two credit cards I have will give me a maximum loan of $3,000 if combined. If a credit card gave me $100,000, I'd take it.
You know you can get credit cards, right? If you're willing to pay 20% interest, it's not hard to find 4-5 companies willing to give you cards. (Well, perhaps not in this economy, but as of 6 months ago...)

That's the problem I see with this idea: as soon as you start taking debt instead of equity, your competition changes. And there're lots of people already willing to give you money at 20% interest, even if your qualifications aren't stellar. Besides credit cards, you could just go to Prosper.com.

BTW, I'd be far, far more worried about taking on $100k of debt than you seem to be. Companies fail for all sorts of reasons, and while I won't exactly say that they're beyond the control of founders (mine failed do to my own stupidity), they are often beyond the ability of founders to predict when they begin their venture. And while I was lucky enough to get a job at Google afterwards, it's important to point out that the first few firms to offer me jobs weren't all that great, and it was only because I had cash in the bank that I could afford to wait them out until BigCo Coding Job came through.
A good entrepreneur can also get equity financing on reasonable terms, usually.
My endorsement of Dive Into Python:

The author assumes you know how to program, and teaches you how to program in Python. He does this by, at the beginning of a section, presenting a working chunk of code between 10-30 lines long. Then he spends the rest of the section explaining what those lines do, and explaining when you'd want to use those techniques. I liked this approach because I knew where he was going in each chapter, and I could use my own experience as a programmer to figure out what was going on, and skip his explanation if I already figured it out.
Apparently I'm old enough in this population that I will have to end all my posts with "you young whippersnapper." from here on out.
For a start-up proper, yes. But most of my projects are not really start-ups which I can sell equity from.

Imagine you decide to study some cool new technology. You are making a bet: Learning this technology now might get you a great reward in the future, but you can possibly just be wasting your valuable time. So it's a sort of mini-startup, your study of this technology. But you can't sell equity out of that thing.
I think the point raised in the paper about the system being defeated by torture are a bit over the top. If some ruthless individuals break into my home with the intention to torture people just to gain a few bucks... then I'm screwed whether I own a card reader or not.
Ugh. There is no 50% price cut. The author just misread the "Reserved Instances" post on the AWS blog.

Too bad. I actually had my hopes up for a minute there. Then somebody asked for an official statement and the author referenced that blog entry, which only deals with 24/7 instances, and even then wouldn't be a 50% saving unless you committed to a 3 year contract.

So yeah, nothing to see here.
Gandalf was one of the Istari, a race or order of Men sent by the Valar to serve as opponents to Sauron.

It is strongly hinted that Gandalf took on the form of a Man, but was actually one of the lesser Valar, called Maiar.

The Silmarillion explains much of the background of all this.

In a time before Viagra, the significance of Gandalf appearing as an old, wise man would necessarily preclude sexual activity.
I would suggest that Apple is useable because they don't need people to navigate a wide range of products. Just
~7 top level items, then get more specific.

Download, songs.
Buy, iPod
Buy, MacBook Pro

And then they get a world of options. Amazon is stuck because, most of their options don't really help. I want to buy Electronics, Home Appliances> Air Conditioners, Fans & Heaters> Space Heaters > (Showing 1 - 24 of 1,338 Results) now what?

While I do most of my shopping at Amazon, I think the sight is clunky but functional. Type what you want into the search bar or pick one of the nice pictures that looks correct, and is in your price range. Granted it works, but it's not really elegant.
Cool to hear that things are moving on. I'm expecting great things from PyPy :)

Psyco is pretty cool right now, even without generator support (though that would be good).

I'm doing stuff with a neural net built in Python/Numpy right now and Psyco makes it twice as fast. Given that I'm waiting for it to run each time I try something this sort of speed up is quite nice. It's now to the point where pretty much all the execution time is spent in Numpy (which is largely implemented in C) which is cool.
Machine Reading at Web Scale
I'd like to see some data regarding this, actually.

I've got a good friend that owns a tree farm in Oregon, and if you listen to the environmentalists, they make it sound like Richard is some sort of maniac clear-cutting idiot who is destroying a precious natural resource.

The opposite becomes apparent if you actually talk to him about the farm, and look at the money they put into both planning and tree-farming technology. Him, and his family, view their forest as a long-term asset, not to mention an effectively infinite stream of future revenue, and a great place to go hiking.

They go to incredible lengths to make sure that their forest is going to be around, and viably growing, a few hundred years from now.

It seems odd that any large company wouldn't look at their company-owned farms in the same fashion.

Of course, corporate owners can be greedy and stupid as well. So I'd like to know more about how large-scale farming causes soil damage.
Mininova is running on 4 webservers, 4 database servers, 2 search servers,
one NFS server, and one load balancer (plus 5 additional servers for the forum, blog and the ads).

Its probably a little higher than 5K for servers. But I bet the 5 employees includes the 3 founders, so the overall profit per founder is still fairly high.

1 mil - 10-20K for servers/bw - $120K for the 2 employees -10K for misc stuff like office/pens= ~850K

Corp tax rate in netherlands is 25.5% = $633K profit

So if the 3 founders split evenly, each would get €211K euros or $271K dollars. Hardly peanuts, and worth the risk
Ask HN: Marketplaces for mashing business apps?
Other than Salesforce.com's AppExchange, are any business-oriented software marketplaces for add-ons getting traction?

I've looked into WebEx Connect Marketplace (vaporware?) and Google Solution Marketplace (anyone else heard of it?), but other than AppExchange I can't see anyone making much of a go of it (yet).

I expect that more AppExchange-like marketplaces to emerge to provide a more cohesive experience as Enterprise shifts out from corporate hardware to cloud/Saas-based platforms, but am not seeing much action just yet.

Has anyone got a clear fix on emerging contenders?
If the peak is at 22, we are really short changing our children by setting the age of majority at 18.
I wonder how his same talk would be given today. In a post-Harry Potter, World of Warcraft world, the idea of a female wizard no longer raises eyebrows in the same way.

Still, interesting and entertaining.
Bowie bonds are based on an asset that has already been created, not a person's future output.
FYI: Blue ray is up to 400GB/disk (As in you can make 400GB disks that a PS3 will read) and it costs a tiny fraction of what that what flash memory costs. In ~20 years they might cost the same per GB, but that's still a long way from now and plenty of time for the next optical disk format to show up.

PS: I am assuming blue ray disks will cost around 10c per disk in 20 years. So flash needs to drop to 1/10,000th of it's current price to be competitive in that time scale.
precisely, I got a $30K credit card at 0% apr for a year and a half not so long ago. And I get other offers like that all the time.
For more Wizardry / Hacker tales you could read Wizard's Bane (available online here: http://www.baen.com/library/rcook.htm ) a tale of a programmer transported to a world where magic exists.
bSelling is designed to appeal to salespeople by giving them a tool that is directly related to the art of selling, not to mention maximising sales and commissions, rather than the chore of data entry and reporting - which is what most CRMs generally excel at. After all, selling is about understanding customer needs and pitching a solution that meets these needs.
53 here. :)
> Sorry, but that kind of super-hero is a very, very rare breed.

First start-up success is very rare as well, so perhaps it should follow that it involves a rare breed of people.

As for multi-threaded programming-- that is one skill that universities generally teach well as a part of undergraduate computer science programs (although I can only speak for mine). It's also generally about recognizing patterns (consumer/producer problem, dining philosopher problems) and being able to see them irrespective of the implementation (I first began playing with POSIX threads before college, learned the formal concepts in a class which used Solaris threads and am now working through Doug Lea's book about concurrency in Java: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/cp/).

There are many people who go into MBA and JD programs with CS and EE undergraduate degrees (it's excellent preparation in the sense that it's a lot of brain gymnastic; statistics also show many undergraduate engineer majors also go on to medical school as well). So one may not necessarily be a hacker (they don't code for fun) but have a CS education -- or they may even be a hacker (they do code for fun) without being a professional developer (they've never worked in a software engineering organization).

Incidentally, I can describe people that fit all of those molds (many CEOs of big companies generally fit the "has a technical undergraduate background, climbed the technical ladder at big-co, got an MBA and switched to management or sales" pattern; start-up founders frequently fit the "worked on Wall-Street by day, coded for fun by night" pattern).
This sounds a lot like a student loan, except with a much shorter term and higher interest rate.
An app store gives somewhere for vendors to hang up their shingle (like a mall), and -- depending on the barriers to entry -- gives some assurance to "shoppers" looking for apps.

We've just launched a new business app, bSelling - http://bcisive.austhink.com/solutions/bselling, on Salesforce.com's App Exchange for add-ons to Salesforce CRM, and wish that there were more such stores.

It's actually a bit like the Microsoft stranglehold on the old PC software market; there were certainly negative aspects, but the standardization effect was certainly market-making.
Cook's Class Contains Pi
Meet Someone Who Still Wants to Invest in Startups: Founders Fund’s Dave McClure
What's military life like for programmers?
Fusion io is about $30/GB - which makes it more competitive with gobs of server ram and SAN than HDD arrays (RAID).
Can you forge your future self when you never leave the present?
My impression is that they are all platform dependent. I know that people are selling QuickBooks apps, but I dont know if there is any marketplace for them. Maybe something sponsored by QuickBooks. In the 90's there was a lot of hype about components, but I dont think it got a lot of traction.
I disagree. If they are smart and a good developers they could earn €100K in a normal job (10yrs experience lets say).

Is 2-3x increase in salary worth the risk of possible jail time? Also instead they could do other entrepreneurial things and get much higher upside profits.

In general it just seems that if you are going to do gray/black things at least have massively super-normal profits. But maybe they are just doing it out of principle.
Clearly the convention wisdom -- that you can get rich by hosting a site that lets people get free stuff they'd otherwise pay for -- is deeply flawed. Let's find all the people who run their torrent sites for the money, and tell them how wrong they are.
Don't you think it's actually better? Look how nicely Esc is separated from other keys. Just like it should be on a real desktop keyboard.

I stopped using Thinkpads after they started using worst LCD panels in the industry, but i will never, never forget their gorgeous full-size keyboards. The picture you've posted brought a tear to my eye...

And yes, I'm a vim user.

Speaking of laptops: he correctly mentioned unfortunate proliferation of glossy LCDs with limited vertical real estate, but there is more: all laptop LCDs now are 6-bit, i.e. 262k colors only.
Print Media: 6 Steps to Survival
Warning over narcissistic pupils
Actually, I just skipped to the last paragraph. Short paragraphs are one thing, but one-sentence paragraphs are just annoying. Of course, other people may react differently.
Not to mention Robert Jordan's "The Wheel of Time".
There will likely be problems with usury laws in various states that regulate the maximum amount of interest charged on a loan.
a non-geek sees them as the same thing.

Fire up web-browser->enter web address->Log In->Click on new messages

Its the same as logging in to yahoo or aol for them...we see the difference becuase (i imagine) most of us have built mail servers. We know all about smtp and pop and imap. Most of us don't see facebook as email because we're thinking about the back-end of things.
World's Largest Laser System Ready to Produce Fusion Energy
You don't need to be smart and good to start a torrent site. There are thousands of them online at this point.

The 2-3x salary increase is also faulty. A salary is pretty much capped to a tiny raise...year in, year out. Businesses on the other hand grow more or less exponentially. So yeah, 2-3x salary may not be worth it, but you need to take the long term view, a few years from now that # will be 5-6x salary...more or less guaranteed without major effort.

Also, I don't really buy the going to jail argument, these guys aren't in the USA, so they are a lot more protected from RIAA etc. And worst case scenario, they'll have to shut down the site and pay a small fine. And the most extreme scenario where they go to jail...its not like they'll end up with the general population, they'll go to some white collar prison instead.
Won't work, here's why: As an average schmo, I can access (via credit cards) just as cash at a similar rate. And if I fail, I can walk away from it with no danger to my reputation. Credit report, yes, but who cares about that? You are a sucker waiting to get milked.
Are you serious?! I could be making that much money by now?!?!
That's the idea: The error message reveals the server type.
Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline
I did not find a lot of info about his idea (Linked Data). Does anybody knows if there is a standard or something that is written at this time regarding his vision explained in this video?
I see no reason to separate esc from the other keys.

"Better" or "worse" doesn't really apply. What matters is it's different from every other keyboard I've used. To me, esc is the key above the tilde. You wouldn't, for example, put the key for 'g' someplace else. My guess is the person who designed the keyboard figured no one would care if esc moved, because hey, who actually needs to use esc often?
It seems to me that the character of the wizard borrows a bit from the clergy. If you sit through a Catholic or Episcopalian mass, with its incense, music, communion, and ritual incantations, it certainly has the feeling of a magical rite. Also, believers do think that these rites have the ability to effect the world in extraordinary ways outside the normal rules of cause and effect (heal the sick, cast out demons, etc.); so the rites could be said to be magical.

The fact that priests do not marry also adds to the case.
If you hold down ctrl when you click or hit return it will open in a new tab.

If you hold shown shift when you click or hit return it will open in a new window.

For completeness but not useful very often: hold down alt (then click or return) to download the linked item
> I disagree. It's valuable for hackers to see where money's being made on the web.

I know many (probably most) hackers figured this out early on.

> Just 'cause the article is a couple years old doesn't mean that the practice still isn't happening.

I didn't say that. Of course it's happening. We're reminded of this mess every time we need to register a domain.

In my case, a domain squatter registered the domain with my name and lastname dot com and had it in ransom-style for years asking 4 digit numbers to transfer it. Network Solutions lives off this scammers and didn't even bother to help. Luckily I got one of the more tame scammers and he didn't put an offensive page. After enduring this for 8 years they let it go and I could register.

It would be good if the big names stop linking and buying domains from this scum. It would be better if the domain name system is redesigned to prevent this behavior.
Saying stuff like that makes you sound young and inexperienced. That counts more than your actual age :P
The point is not how much you can store and how fast you can access consecutive sectors. The problem is that spinning platters have been stuck at 100 random seeks / second for the past 20 years, and most database struggles have been based on that. The new Intel SSDs can do 100,000 "disk seeks" per second, which means that you suddenly have the speed of a thousand-disk raid on one SSD. That's why SSDs are interesting. Not the storage per disk, the random-access IO. People still use tape (not just .tar formats) because it's really cheap for dumping big backups.
27. I win.
If only his presentation had a "View Source" button...
* no reasonable way to write to a CD (!)

what is wrong with right clicking select new burn folder, put what I want to burn in it, then click the burn button?
It certainly isn't that easy in windows.

* no reasonable way to uninstall software along with its data

Sounds like a wash with windows I don't think I have ever clicked uninstall and actually had it uninstall everything correctly.

not clear whether installing a virus checker and/or firewall is important to people not familiar with macs

It comes with a good firewall more or less properly configured by default so one of those isn't needed and no reputable company makes Mac AV so there isn't any to buy even if you think it is required.

* strange that closing the last window of an app does not quit the app

Different than windows yes. Confusing not really, it is quite uniform and regular. It goes back to the whole better build quality no need to unload apps to keep the os stable and performant.
Graph, updated every hour: http://koldfront.dk/misc/hn/age.png (until I kill the cronjob :-))
nice writeup thanks
I would characterize my audience as non-techies who want to become techies.

Basically, the software programs I have let people create and run websites very easily. I also have some hosted solutions for those who don't even want to have their own server.

That's how I started in the niche basically. I found myself helping my non-techie friends set up a simple website for themselves and figured others would need the same help too.
We've seen this with our site. The difference between getting a personalized feedback message and not is even more pronounced than the 62% cited in the article. And similar to the findings reported, the more a person has contributed the more likely they are to contribute into the future. Though for us, there is a dip in the middle that we're trying to resolve.

We actually came up with what we call an "engagement" curve, which is the PERCENTAGE of people that will contribute at least X+1 times given they've contributed X times to the site.
Great minds think alike! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517447

(EDIT) I deleted my comment, because I like your chron idea much better (BTW, what'd you use for the scraping?)

Here's the direct link.

http://www.whattofix.com/images/HNUsersByAge.jpg

Like I said in the original, glad to update it if anybody likes the 3-D that much better.
> But for the typical Visual Studio developer, this usually isn't the case.

You VS people sicken me. Speak for theeself, heathen! {C-x 3 | Mod-Shift-Enter}
Well honestly, this was a statistical study. Still those of us who are 27 are glad to hear you part anyway! Damn. I don't want to have passed my prime.
Sounds like there's a story there. Care to tell?