skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
whining? are you really serious?
if thats how you realize my comment I don't even have to lose my time reading what you just said.

by the you can downmod me how much you want. i dont care about my karma. i dont say anything here for karma anyway
Does the Copenhagen Interpretation strike anyone else as eerily like lazy evaluation?

My other thought is that once you're doing 'thought experiments', you've become rather unmoored from science as I understand it: Observation, Hypothesis, Prediction, Experiment, and so forth. Hopefully, the 'thought experiments' will lead to something testable.
Playing the devil's advocate, I think large severance packages can be good for the company. A phenomena you see in the military, and I would expect any other place with large responsibilities, are leaders unwilling to make the tough calls. Why? Because a bad decision can cost them their career, their family's livelihood, and may even mean a court martial.

So, in the corporate world, a large severance package can encourage the CEOs to make those tough calls. Of course, the other side is that taking away repercussions can lessen the gravity of a decision, and a leader may not exercise due diligence. Hence, large severance packages are more a balancing act than something we should direct our moral outrage against. In my opinion, it is often better to make a tough decision, even if it is wrong, than to wait in paralysis.
Eek, I was thinking it'd be nice to arrange some sort of YC night out. That doesn't sound like it'd work for Monday night and tomorrow would definitely be too short of notice.

Next weekend might be a better date for something along those lines. SF is a nice place; how about postponing your flight? ;)
Thought experiments can reveal profound results beyond what current instruments are capable of measuring.

In 1935, Einstein and friends published a thought experiment that basically said "Well if all this quantum theory is true, then locality can't possibly be a principle." It turns out that locality isn't actually a principle of physics and now we have entanglement, Einstein's "spooky action at a distance."
Yeah, but my first thought was, how are you going to get all that energy out of orbit through the atmosphere to the ground without losing most of it?

Granted, I skimmed the article for this little tidbit, and all I saw was that NASA said it was technically feasible, but not very economical.

I remember that E&M transmission through air lost power exponentially. Maybe when they say 'beam', they mean an actual light beam. The space elevator is powered by a laser aimed from the ground, so I suppose that's not entirely infeasible.
NASA scoops up planetary details on Jupiter flyby
Somebody help this man...I think he may be dying from a lack of humor (or maybe I'm not nearly as funny as I think I am...that's also possible).
Dell: Microsoft warnings haven't hurt Linux uptake
Their technology is cool and innovative, but the article suggests users are required to broadcast 24/7? Is that true? Wouldn't it be better to allow people to broadcast only when they think something interesting is going on?
Yes. Silly people think you're non technical, but they get over it pretty quickly (I spent four years of my life walking into rooms of people twice my age to tell them about Linux, I'm used to having to prove my merit). Managerial folks think you're somehow different to your colleagues, and if you're congruent with it - ie, you let your ideas be known when most of your colleagues would rather have a quiet grumble, and say no when you mean it, they'll respect you more often. I've had a continual stream of project managers recommending me for architecture jobs to my superiors, asking for me for other projects, and a whole bunch of beer couriered to me as a work expense.

It's not how you dress that makes you, but how you are. Dressing well, however, is a good way to show people that - provided you back it up with something real.
To the extent that thought experiments suggest real experiments, they are indeed valuable. I disagree that they can 'reveal ... results', however. For instance, Einstein's thought experiment was designed to 'prove' that QM was wrong. Obviously, that result was incorrect.
"There are different interpretations of QM (e.g. bohmian mechanics or GRW/stochastic collapse) which don't have this problem. If you are interested in QM, I strongly suggest looking these theories up."

I respectfully disagree. You can spend years reading about interpretations and the gain in terms of your understanding of Quantum Mechanics will be zero. For anyone interested in Quantum Mechanics, I strongly suggest actually trying to learn it, instead of dabbling into confusing popular articles the authors of the majority of which have never studied theoretical physics themselves.

Please note I'm not saying that you don't know Quantum Mechanics. I just think your advice is bad.

So here's my advice to anyone out there who feels that they want to know more. See the Schroedinger equation. Learn how to calculate energy levels for the harmonic oscillator and for the hydrogen atom. Read first six chapter's of Paul Dirac's "The principles of quantum mechanics". The time spent reading about interpretations and philosophical implications of QM is wasted. People who do research in theoretical physics devote very little time to such considerations, or no at all.
Ask YC: Are any of you interested in China / international business?
Are any of you interested or involved in international business-related startups?

This week I am in Guangzhou, China for the Canton Fair, a huge exhibition for Chinese manufacturers. These are the folks who actually make the stuff we all see in Walmart (think: obscenely low prices, and just-as-obscene minimum order quantities). Walking through these isles is kind of like walking through your grandmother's garden and seeing where everything you eat (/consume) actually comes from. It's the biggest show of its kind in China.

Have any of you thought about anything along the lines of Alibaba.com (which Yahoo paid $1 billion for 40% of)? Connecting international buyers/sellers? Related services? Importing/branding/product-design?

I've been living in China for 10 months. Just interested in whether any of the community here has dabbled in stuff like this (or wants to).
Ah, what it must feel like to be in a position where they have to bring in a consulting firm just to figure out how to pay you.
Solar Cells Crystallized Out of Molten Silicon
Oh, the plane traveled over me about 64 miles ago!

Im a web/graphic designer, eager to learn some coding skills and now coding humor too :)
I find

http://www.usability.gov/pdfs/guidelines.html

to be a worthwhile resource, particularly owing to its being based on research.
I thought it was also a clever play on "just in" as in "this just in".
i've been considering international business for a while, particularly with China. It doesn't fit well with what I am currently working on but I'm keeping an eye on developments in China for future ventures.
I went to China (Beijing) on a two week program with Pitt's School of Engineering after my freshman year and it was really eye opening. If I didn't have startup things going on here, I would love to take a year to go to China and learn Mandarin.
Power an LED light from your phone line for free
I'm in my third year of Mandarin study, and I spent last summer in China. I'm not very good at speaking the language (but I do try). I've thought about business in China, but I have so many problems with their government that I'm not sure if I could actually do any business which resulted in a benefit to it (taxes). It is certainly an interesting place, and I'm going to keep learning the language, though.
:) Maybe next time, hopefully I get to come back for the long haul.
just because facebook will support professional networking doesnt meant that people will use it. Most of my linked in contacts wouldnt be caught dead on Facebook due to Facebooks reputation. Also the world of business networking is different from that of highschool and college students writing junk on their walls. LinkedIn has a revenue model that doesn't depend only on adds since business users don't stick around a site too long, after all they have some task to accomplish. This is significantly different from Facebook's current model of trying to get users to spend all of their day on the site. We'll see how it plays out.
Any fans of Couchsurfing?
can you get me into your next batch as well? Thanks.
I guess the NYTimes could find nothing else to report on. I'd rather read about a puppy being rescued from a pipe. Hell, I'd rather watch that happen than watch another "Startup Dot Com" crashing live before my eyes.

I hope this ends up as badly as weliveinpublic did.
An important point to remember about Artificial Intelligence technology: Stanford's Stanley robot, that won the DARPA Grand Challenge by driving across a desert course, was based on a conceptual revolution that started 20 years ago in 1987. The Bayesian revolution. It wasn't based on a big new idea, it was based on a big two-decades-old idea, the Bayesian revolution, which it took that long to finally get right.

The latest cool robots an' stuff that the media wants to report on, are generally based on AI ideas decades old; and the newest most brilliant ideas of AI today, may not yield impressive technology for years to come.

If PARC developed Powerset's ideas 30 years ago, that might just be par for the course.
For H1B you need to pay prevailing wages.
I'd be interested in importing/exporting things to Italy, because I speak the language fluently, but it's not something I've really pursued, because I don't think simply speaking the language is enough to really get into that kind of business. I do have some ideas for Italian things I'd like to import to the US, but that will have to wait for when/if we return there.
How does self-improvement (ala lifehack.org) fit it? I personally think it fits very well. The trouble is that these sorts of personal development blogs are still mainly in it for the money and they aren't scientific enough (e.g. they'll tell you what to do and maybe how to do it, but not necessarily why to do it.)

Also, they often focus on superficial behaviors instead of underlying thinking patterns. For instance, here's a way of thinking that I've found to be useful: 99% of the time, there's no logical reason to feel fear in any social situation. Whatever happens, when all is said and done, it really doesn't matter what other people think of you. If that seems like a "no-duh" way of thinking to you, think back to when you were in high school.

A superficial example of this behavior is learning to meet new people. But someone who hasn't grasped the underlying concept will have a hard time meeting people, no matter how often they read about how to meet people on personal development blogs.

Besides money, another reason for this personal development blog bullshit is that a lot of the bloggers are themselves in the process of figuring out how to be successful, etc. It's much easier to write instructions for someone else than yourself, so they start blogging about what they think will work for them without necessarily having tried it for very long. Thus the field of personal development can be something like an echo chamber, where the same ideas are repeated over and over.
I stopped watching after they interrupted each other for the fifth time. I'll never get that two minutes of my life back, dammit.
Why Facebook sucks
That assumes that air resistance is indeed increased. I doubt that, but I'm not a physicist... Maybe it depends on what is next to the motorways now?
Josh Harris, was it you that downvoted me?
Uhhh...maybe I'm missing something, but who cares about Facebook being an address book?

"Reddit sucks -- you can't use it to reserve seats at your local movie theater! You know what else you can't do? Thwart velociraptors. When is someone going to release a social news site which allows me, the user, to outwit a raptor? Google is, as usual, our only hope."

I dunno, maybe I wouldn't be so flippant if I had invented RSS and was, apparently, in constant contact with Robert Scoble ;)
We're doing some business with Chinese companies. We recently added Chinese translations to a pretty big chunk of our product, but it's still a long way from being a comprehensive answer for Chinese customers--so it's only a few technically savvy hosting providers that are using our stuff.

But, after the US and Europe (French being the most popular non-English language, so far), it's where we spend most of our internationalization efforts.

I'd be curious how folks reach the Chinese market in a reasonable way and on a small scale. Our current Chinese customers found us, but since we don't speak Mandarin, we have no capacity to reach out and find new ones.
Hrm. So what would you do for the 3 months? Do you have the team you need to build what you want to build?

FWIW, I'm not a hacker, either. UX, XHTML, CSS, JS, SEO and other assorted acronyms are my bailiwick (though I can dork around a bit with rails/PHP/etc). Of course, I've also dabbled in accounting, sales, etc.

In my experience, a solid designer can easier keep pace with 2-3 coders (it's just that much harder to code something than it is to design it)... Which means (in my book), that a non-coder had better be prepared to do other stuff in the early phase of the project (notably SEO, SMM, and public relations).

(by the way, checked out your portfolio-- nice design work!)
GoF patterns in ruby
Richard Stallman: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs
Apple just bought a big plot of land from HP in Cupertino. They've spent a good 50 million renovating 4 to 5 buildings out of a 12 building cluster. In 5 years, all 12 buildings will be torn down to make way for a brand new campus extension from Infinite Loop. Going to SF? Hah!
California court tilts towards mandating web accessibility
I had such a surprising response to my recent project outside the US. It definitely opened my eyes. I've decided every one of my new projects will have an internationalized interface from the beginning. It's so easy to do if you start early and such a pain if you don't. I can't recommend it highly enough. It's a huge competitive advantage for a such small investment.
I'm hoping Facebook will acquire the same stigma that AOL, an older data roach motel/walled garden, did.
The real point is that it doesn't give you control over your data while profiting off of it.

Others have said this in different ways before but it bears repeating.
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I do think there would be serious security implications in exposing read-only access to even a limited number of tables via arbitrary queries from clients. DoS would be trivial and unexpected data leaks easy. Having to explicitly expose parts of your data only as you intend is a great security precaution (and good use of abstraction).

But I don't think the intended use is to have client browsers hit DBSlayer directly. My understanding is that you send SQL from your app layer via HTTP to DBSlayer then it hits a DB and returns JSON.
Maybe, but the thing is...Facebook is pretty awesome.

I know that probably sounds a little juvenile, but that's the attitude that most of its users have. They could care less about having control of their data. The vast majority have no clue that Facebook could give them control of their data, and even if it happened they wouldn't know what to do with it.

"Hey neat, I downloaded my Facebook. I wonder if I'm supposed to play XML files in iTunes or Powerpoint..."

The only thing that millions of people would (not could) potentially do with their Facebook data is: move away from Facebook, given a better alternative. I haven't yet seen a solid argument for why Facebook should open up that data. Maybe there are decent ethical/moral/rhetorical reasons, but none which make business sense for Facebook and the majority of their customers...
SpudWare Cutlery made from potatoes
I'm convinced that people who slate facebook haven't really used it. It is currently my most effective means of communicating with friends and family. And I don't think I've ever come across such a polished application before, web-based or otherwise.
Agreed. They're better stewards of my social data than I could ever be.
I am a long time reader of hacker news and reddit, Chinese is my mother tongue, I think there are so many opportunities here, like "Go West" days in USA.
If you did do business in China you would be supporting the government with taxes but on the other hand you would be providing a portal through to the west through which new thinking and opportunities could flow. This 'western portal' isn't as squeaky clean as it might once have been but on the whole its still probably a good thing.
We're building e-commerce tools and would be very interested in talking with these chinese manufacturers - please get in touch, harj AT auctomatic DOT com
Skinny ties are becoming en vogue.
To me, the idea that they went back to a thirty-year old algorithm is the one credible thing in the whole story. Almost nobody reads old papers in computer science.

Somewhere out there in the libraries are the computing equivalents of transparent aluminum, but you can barely get researchers to look at this stuff, let alone Joe Javahead.
He's not arguing that facebook isn't an effective means of communication or a good web-app.

His (valid) point is that users put all their information into facebook without being able to take it back out when they want. There's an imbalance there and it does suck.
Brilliant... I suspect that quite a large number of similar projects already exist in non-open-source fashion.
How do you go about acquiring a parked domain?
I was wondering what the best approach to aquiring a parked domain is. What is a good initial offer? What techniques or tactics are there, if any, etc? I appreciate that the situation can be different for different domains and different vendors but if there is any generally applicable wisdom it would be much appreciated. Cheers.
I concur, and ignorance is bliss :)
Well the article is entitled 'Why Facebook Sucks'. I personally don't agree that the point is valid. What you have in Facebook is a list of contacts for other Facebook users. It wouldn't be that useful outside of Facebook.
I would have preferred a link to part 1 of a 2 part video :-)

Here's part 1: http://www.podtech.net/home/4360/facebook-fanboys-are-you-pr...

It was sort of like watching a Reddit thread conducted in meatspace.
Big Visible Charts
Implore YC: Refactor My Code (uses Ruby and continuations)
This is a real (if sanitized) problem that my start-up has, ready for refactoring (on refactormycode.com which I love and am unaffiliated with).
What about the API? It wouldn't be at all hard to make a "Facebook-exporter" application using that. The question is: why would I bother doing that? Facebook is crap as an address book, it's the other bits that are useful...

Whatever other reasons there are to think Facebook sucks I don't think this is one.
Forward-thinking CSS float-clearing
It's against the TOS to export data using the API.
Nigeria denies Bill Gates visa
Here's an oldie, but goodie from our favorite director of AI.

http://norvig.com/design-patterns/

It's a talk on design patterns in dynamic languages, how most of the GoF design patterns get simplified or just go away. I can't iterate through each pattern and tell you how, but as anecdotal evidence, this has been my experience as well. Closures and first class functions, as well as dynamic typing gives ways around certain patterns.

That's not to say Ruby doesn't have design patterns. The more I look at metaprogramming constructs, the more I see the same tricks that people use. It's just not yet been enumerated by the Next GoF.
Thats unfortunate for them (in the sense of style) but obviously a sign that they are expanding, which is good. The typical Valley IT campus surrounded by parking and separate from any local experience, such as the ability to walk a block or two to select from 20 different restaurants, is a bit depressing to me. Being able to walk outside (and note the mode "walk" rather than being forced to have to drive everywhere) and have a sophisticated cultural experience outside of the cubicle is a key factor, for me, in staying mentally fresh.
This hasn't been news for about thirty years and it's been in archives since at least 1999:

http://www.phreak.org/archives/The_Hacker_Chronicles_II/phre...
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.phreak.org/archives/...
Would it then be possible to fashion solar cells in a crystal? Something that captures light, and makes it bounce around inside a medium so that the cells would have more chances to absorb photons?
I speak German (as well as a bit of Japanese) and plan to have our app available in German soon after we publicly launch. Since I also am doing an architectural project in Romania with help on the project from Poland, those languages also may be possibilities.
Do a "whois" on the domain to get contact information for the owner, call them and ask them if they'd like to sell it.

or

Get Go daddy or another service to do the same thing ("Domain Buy Service"):
https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/broker/landing.asp?ci=8995
http://www.sedo.com/

They also have a domain appraisal service
http://www.sedo.com/appraisal.php3?tracked=&partnerid=&#...
If it was possible to export that data there would be apps to help people to process it further. No need to stumble around in XML piles. Your "makes no business sense" argument is not even Web 1.0 ;-) It's the ages old argument that was brought forward wrt Office file formats, pre TCP/IP network protocols and an endless list of other lock-in strategies. Even Microsoft has shed that retro attitude to some degree exactly because it does not make business sense in the long run. You need third parties to build on your stuff and that means you must set the data free.
The de Young is trumpeted as an architectural triumph - there's even a silhouette of it painted on the wall at the airport next to the GG bridge. I consider that building banal with the exception of the tower which is a bit interesting, but even that is compromised with the sunscreen they have that is right at my eye-level, so I have to lower myself just to look outside from the top of the tower - a bit ridiculous. It is a big box with almost no real effort to explore indoor/outdoor continuity with the surrounding park and has no relation to human scale, and the glazed little internal garden areas that humans are not allowed to visit depresses me. The number of awkward spaces is also unfortunate. That's not to say that the jazz wouldn't be good :) (And the cafe has decent food in spite of their strange dishes) The park itself is beautiful (the largest man-made park in the world).