skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's nothing wrong with being a ghostwriter, or a session musician for that matter.
It's quite common that key persons(usually in management/business) stay as consultants for a while, like few months to few years, when they're leaving/boostrapping their own company. The company will have enough time to fill the position and train the new guy and the person leaving can keep stuff running and turn over accounts/information/contacts.

Try to negotiate somekind of new contract. It's good to get a solid contract, say for like 6months, which is renewable or terminated if both parties agree, so they can't drop you easily(you can have some income projections) but they cant keep you forever either, and you can terminate it if it doesn't work out.
the flynn effect has leveled off and shows signs of starting to reverse in industrialized nations.
Are there any instances of the child having a greater than the average or either parent?

There are many such instances. And there are instances of children having lower IQ scores than either parent.

More important, it is a rare case when the same individual has the same IQ score over the course of life. IQ can change over the course of life quite a lot. And any two brands of IQ test will not agree entirely in how they sort a group of test-takers into a rank order. And IQ scores don't tell the whole story about all the meaningful mental abilities that a learner has, as Lewis Terman (the first developer of IQ tests in the United States) was very honest about pointing out:

"There are, however, certain characteristics of age scores with which the reader should be familiar. For one thing, it is necessary to bear in mind that the true mental age as we have used it refers to the mental age on a particular intelligence test. A subject's mental age in this sense may not coincide with the age score he would make in tests of musical ability, mechanical ability, social adjustment, etc. A subject has, strictly speaking, a number of mental ages; we are here concerned only with that which depends on the abilities tested by the new Stanford-Binet scales."

(Terman & Merrill 1937, p. 25)
Pirate Bay Verdict: Pirates Win Either Way
Bootstrapping or starting up? Here's some good information on startup stock options
doing a regression analysis shows that while socioeconomic factors obviously play a role, they do not account for all, or even the majority, of the difference.
Last question was not for you, specifically. Was generally asking if there is a way to format a list of bullet points here on hacker news.

Good luck!
Oh I don't know. How is it "taking your chances" if "it will turn out good"? It may turn out bad, in fact, the unconditional odds are against him. Not to be a sourpuss, just being realistic. I think he is quite right to agonize a bit and think his options through for the event that it does not go well, even with millions of unique users. Good risk management...
It is worth mentioning that Muhammad Yunus is not only a microcredit pioneer but also co-created Grameen Phone, the very first mass cell phone provider in Bangladesh. They implemented a very innovative business model to make cell phones accessible to the poor, by allowing the cell phone owner (a villager) to resell minutes to other people in that same village.

What is interesting (and relevant for HN) is that the Grameen Phone experience demonstrates how access to technology empowers people exponentially:

1) The cell phone owner (villager) has a new source of income

2) The other villagers also increase their income, because now with access to crop information and market info, they can run their crops with less waste and negotiate a better price

3) Women is empowered because most of the phone owners are women (who are disenfranchised in that society)
I'll accept "leveled off" regarding certain countries, having read Flynn's work, and I'll accept "starting to reverse" if you are only talking about crystallized intelligence, for the same reason, but do you have any current citations to a disfavorable trend anywhere in fluid intelligence?
It's another Benjamin Pierce project, so you know it has solid theoretical foundations, and it's written in OCaml :-)
I didn't check if his facts are correct, but you haven't disproven them. Population density is people divided by land area, not percentage living in urban areas.
Aside from supporting an existing infrastructure, what are the benefits of choosing Nginx/Passenger over Apache/Passenger in a fresh environment?
Hadoop is built for high throughput not low latency.

That said, the parallel DBs still beat Hadoop at throughput for almost all of the queries, just not the data loading.
Actually we're talking Biz Stone's bank account.
I suspect that the Flynn effect begins and ends with the improvement to diet, as is the case with height. Though really, society has changed in so many ways in 100 years, that it's impossible to say this or that was responsible, therefore let's replicate it. At any rate, there's a serious upper limit to it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Has_progression_en...
I've noticed this too. Along with the everlasting nature/nurture debates. I think there are two reasons why people on HN (myself included) like pulling higher education into question.

1. People in CS realize that the field is changing rapidly and that their 50 year old professors are somewhat losing touch. This contributes to the feeling that one could just as well work and autodidact.

2. People in CS are notoriously bullshit averse and realize that higher education is riddled with social prestige and research projects that are of little value but sound sophisticated.

I would be interested in what others think of these two points. Thanks.
My advice: Get 100% on your startup or don't jump the ship.

Don't fire bridges with your last job-contacts. Keep your friends and be polite with your CEO but tell him you have taken a decision.

Factor Number 1 in a startup is time, if you continue working for your job, you lose a lot of more time in between.
You need to be in the position of having only two options: 1-success or 2...success. You need to be hungry for success. Take money from people you know how they are.
Right, oracle machines are - or can be interpreted as - interactive. However, whatever it is that oracles do - it's often called "hypercomputation" - they're not doing computation, in the sense that Turing used the term in "On computable numbers...", which is why Turing couldn't prove that they are more powerful. The apparent - to me - problem here is that people use a definition of "computation" which is different from Turing's (which is alright), and then say that Turing was "wrong" in what he said about "computation" (which is not alright).

I actually think that operating systems are a good example of how interaction can be less powerful than algorithm - the "oracle" in this case might be a user, and the user might be new to computers, so that in this case the result of the interaction might be worse than if the "oracle" were another (non-human) computer, the interaction with which might in turn give a worse result than if you were the "oracle".
I can't believe a user with over five thousand karma submitted this. What the hell. Flag this garbage.
I'm looking for a copy of the paper that doesn't require access to a university archive. Every link so far goes to the same source.
the name of the paper if you want to look for it is

A long-term rise and recent decline in intelligence test performance: The Flynn Effect in revers
I get silently offended when people think I'm a computer repairman and that is what I went to school for.
Conficker Who?
I question his ability to build strong long-term personal relationships - it seems his obsession with the self & improvement would likely impede the development of meaningful friendships.
if your data isn't relational to start with (e.g. messages in a message queue, being written to files in HDFS), you're better of with Map/Reduce

If you query the data once and then throw it away, then certainly load performance is a critical issue. If you load the data once and then query it many times, load performance is far less important -- trading a longer load time for much better query performance would be a good idea. So it depends on the workload as much as the format the data happens to start in.
In the microeconomic sense you're right, in the macroeconomic sense you're wrong.

Selling off a company based on users that aren't monetizable is basically a ponzi scheme that just passes the buck to the next idiot in line until it all collapses.
Anyone who doesn't like the supposed pressure that exists to accrue more followers can use a Greasemonkey script to strip that data from their page views. I see no reason for them to enforce that preference on anyone else.
Checking out the newer OQO (and the dock) it is as close as you can get currently to an all in one device.

What would be perfect is something just like form factor wise it but with the possibility of some sort of fold out/flexible screen (maybe a a built in laser projector?)

The next 5 years are going to be very exciting in the mobile computer market.
I'm with you. We should be talking about knocking out our incredulous debt before we even think of expanding infrastructure.
Yeah, I noticed the 3G support after posting that. With 3G, though, Skype might be enough... I'm now seriously looking at this thing. Google produced some worrying posts and news articles, which may dissuade me, but if not, I may well buy one shortly.
Startup showdown for $800,000
The one for "LISP" is an idealized Lisp that's just a step above the pure, untyped lambda calculus. See Gregory Chaitin's Algorithmic Information Theory for a slightly more detailed implementation of an ancient but pure Lisp.
Yeah, a foldable e-paper screen (already on a Motorola phone, I think) would be close to ideal. The OQO is much more interesting than I remember it being when I last heard about it. Maybe my needs have changed, or maybe the initial version wasn't so great.
A Framework for Understanding Motivations
But for the purpose of rail what you are concerned with are people in urban areas...
Why would someone get offended by that? Does programmer equate to only codes for $ or something?
High speed train is more of an alternative to flying then to buses. Taking into consideration time spent to get to/from the airport, security checks and occasional delays, trains are better under 1000 km, and may be worth it for a lot more.
Your time complexity of log n appears from nowhere. It is entirely possible that the complexity of calculating the original function F was worse than polynomial in the number of variables, in which case a polynomial/linear increase in the number of machines could not reduce the complexity by more than a polynomial/linear factor, thus leaving the computational complexity worse than polynomial (e.g. exponential/super-exponential). I've made a comment further down that posits an idea similar to yours, though with a bit more precision.
"And just imagine the infrastructure we could have had for the cost of the Iraq war + the bank bailouts"

It's impossible to sell such a huge plan without an imminent threat/disaster. It makes no sense to think of other things we could do with that money.
I know this comment is totally off-topic, but that headline is absolutely killer!

Good article too!
Unfortunately, in the vast majority of cases, it does.
Have you tried? Read any books or even articles on how to do so?
First of all, his Japanese accent would probably be accepted as native which is impressive.

I wish he had discussed his point about learning languages more, because it seemed that he spent more time showing off than getting points across.
1. Glad to see improvements in the Cocoa-Ruby bindings.
2. It is not a Good Thing™ to be able to avoid using Interface Builder! IB is awesome and amazing and reduces code. IB gives you leverage. It lets you do GUI setup via a (wait for it) GUI! It then saves this GUI configuration as a nib file which is identical to if you had hand-coded all of that stuff.

Trust me, I am a CLI freak. I still code in vim and only use IDE's to debug. But purposefully not using one of the best things about Cocoa is just odd to me.
Heh, I didn't know the original paper of Aspect Oriented Programming has the examples in Common Lisp :-)

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.115....

Kiczales et al.
The secrets of really, really lucky companies
It's more a question of who I block. Sometimes I have IRL friends who sign up for twitter and have no tweets yet. If I see that they also have 10000 people they are following, I don't waste time figuring out if I know them.
http://www.fra.dot.gov/downloads/Research/hsr_corridors_2009...

Look at the corridors. They only exist where people are dense.
Please don't jump on the bandwagon of the obsolete maglev technology - we need to put this money toward research into teleporters
OK, but I was talking about maintenance/repair costs. You know, "A boat is a hole in the water you pour money into".
Ask HN: Good resources/tools for entity extraction?
Just wondering if the HN community had any good tips or resources about entity extraction algorithms? We've built our own, but I'm always looking at what's out there. Any open source tools that you would recommend.

The OpenCalais API looks pretty good. Haven't heard much about the Apache product (UIMA?).
Software developer is a broad term as well. ;-)

And the last bastion of respect, the software engineer is not without its enterprise-ish feel.

Researcher seems cooler, but it's all about feeling good and self-esteem in the end. :-)

What about the designers, web designers, front-end engineers? Does it piss them off being called a programmer every now and then?
Making Wireless M2M Easy (video)
It's naming, plus some more: Turing never named his idealized entity a "Turing machine" - that was done by others. He claimed universality for the algorithmic "Universal Computing Machine" he defined, and proved it - for algorithms. Now Akl comes along and says the "Turing machine" is not universal, but he uses interaction, not algorithm, to base his definition of computation on. So it seems to me that he's not only renaming "the Universal Computing Machine" to "the Universal Computer" by ways of "the Turing Machine", but that he is also moving the goalposts in this process.
Announcing the Release Candidate for Ubuntu 9.04
No, why would I be? I am a programmer. You can call it a "developer" or words like that, but to me that sounds like title inflation.
Most people outside of the tech industry have no more idea of what I do other than "he works with computers." I've long since given up trying to explain it to them.
Path to Clojure 1.0
Youtube takes Aim at Hulu
Ask HN: Anyone tried a food-related startup?
We have a good story and product to sell. Unfortunately, we have zero experience selling food over the internet. Any advice?
If everyone who sues YouTube decides to also use it as a way to get TV Shows, it might mean a lot more people canceling Cable.
I like coder or designer or business guy. 'Programmer' seems a bit formal. What I do is design and code and run a business.
This might be the truest statement I've read all day
Nice thing about social media, especially Twitter, is you don't have to friend, follow, or have any contact with anyone whom you don't want to have contact. Sorry Oprah, I won't be following.
But it's the non-obvious discrepancies that I'm more concerned with. I have no qualms about blocking people when their following/follower ratio is off-kilter.
To make buses work in a modern city, you need dedicated bus lanes. Mexico City has em, and they are amazing. Without bus lanes, buses suck for inner-city travel. They are slow, and traffic sucks.

But this is about connecting cities in densely populated regions, not transportation within cities: http://www.fra.dot.gov/downloads/Research/hsr_corridors_2009...

Buses between cities is a terrible way to travel. I know, I took buses from east/west coast repeatedly as a teenager.
Ask HN: What do you do when you meet people with influence?
I'm meeting the minister of Agricultural Development from a foreign country this upcoming week.

My question is what do you think about and what do you do when meeting with someone in a position of power or influence?

This opportunity arose by a fortunate set of circumstances, and I do not have any particular motivations. However we do work in the same fields and this could mean possible opportunities in the future.

Opportunities like these have arisen for me in the past, but I've always felt disappointed that I haven't been able to develop stronger relationships with these people. So if you have any hints or suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
I don't mean this as a dig, honestly I don't, but if you're walking around life getting offended by things as small as that you should probably re-evaluate some things. Getting offended by something, at its root, is just a way to make people feel bad. Either just you (if the person meant to offend you) or you and the other person (if they didn't). Either way, it causes nothing but pain.

That's ok because it's an emotion with purpose in that it drives you to act. I am offended by the conditions in many African countries so I donate to those charities. I am offended by the jokes that person is telling so I don't hang around them anymore.

But if you are getting offended at something like this, where no action can fix it, than you're just causing yourself undue pain.
Don't Fall In Love With Your Model: The Cautionary Tale of my Recent proof that P=NP
Enough of them that they have their own term -- ghostwriters.
Ask HN:  How do you sketch out the design of your code before you start coding?
Do you use a whiteboard? TDD? Pencil and paper? Scratch project?
It is really too bad. I get the same thing, but it is mostly from people who don't use computers. If they use computers, they can at least get to the fact that I write mumbo jumbo that makes the computer do something.
"Different ways of looking at and spreading culture" --- isn't doublespeak just doublespeak, no matter who is saying it?
No, but I'm curious about it. What's your product? My guess is that the biggest hurdle is actually producing and certifying as safe whatever it is you're cooking up.
The five ages of the brain
> In most countries they are subsidized.

As if highways are not!
True dat. Although now you need to get someone to weigh in where the process backfired on them. Volunteers?
Brendan Eich on What the Next JavaScript means to Developers
JavaScript's creator explains what will change for developers when the next JavaScript, ECMAScript, Fifth Edition is implemented.
To call Ashcroft and Mermin the standard text is actually to understate its awesomeness. That book saved my bacon in grad school, more than once.

Ashcroft has a rather different personality from Mermin, but he's also a great lecturer. I took his graduate stat mech class. Man, do I wish there were videos of that, or at least a textbook.
I'm in a similar boat. I have a founder / angel landlord. He recently wrote me a letter saying that he raised rent on everyone but me b/c he likes what I'm doing and know's it's tough out there.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=545530

Sometimes "programmer" carries too strong a connotation of "code monkey". I find it best to just avoid places where this is true.
They cut that for a lot of countries, yet they say they can operate for years. Why not spend that money they are sitting on with innovating their service, creating features that can actually make money.
After one terrorist attack on a train, all of the security restrictions will become just as cumbersome as air travel's.
Britney Spears Fan Site
Britney Spears Fan's Forum Britney Spears Fans Britney Spears Fan Site
Equity is for life. It's a bum deal to trade equity in your company for a small amount of cash, unless whoever you're selling to is a real value-add investor or advisor who can contribute more than money for the LIFE of your company, not 6 months of petty cash.
You could just look at their last 5 posts. Even if it is a bot that only shoots out links, if you are interested in those links, it shouldn't matter what their numbers are.
> ... big parts of the rail system are almost freight-only.

Rail can be a very cheap way to move freight. Slower than truck, sure. But quite inexpensive. I'd love to see more rail freight.

The problem however is that in many parts of the country the same lines are shared by both passengers and freight. This means that for starters those lines are not going to be suitable for high speed passenger rail anyway. But beyond that, Amtrak gets second priority on those lines. This is one of the reasons for the frustrating delays that rail travel in the US always seems to have.
How do you know that THE REAL SHAQ is actually the real Shaq? Because 650,000 people have already verified it for you.

Whilst I agree with you, it should be noted most people thought the CNNbrk account was CNN until yesterday (and only now it actually is). That's 900,000+ people who had verified it.
http://www.battle-pingouin.net/index.php
I can definitely say that Klingon isn't a language you can just jump into. Er... I mean Haskell.

However, being the first functional language I'm really starting to grok I'm amazed at how powerful and concise it is.

Wasn't it Eric S. Raymond that told us we should all learn at least one functional language (namely lisp) in our lives not necessarily to program in, but to make us a better programmers?
Don't Go, Part 2: The Perils of Grad School in the Humanities
The fact that most of Obama's constituency is in blue states (by definition) probably has a lot to do with why we are hearing more about this now.
This, by the way, is of particular interest to me because I'm ignoring the advice given in the article and am in grad school for English lit, as I discuss tangentially <a href="http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-di....
Every spam account I've seen has had several hundred followers.

Mostly other spambots, I'm sure, or other karma/attention-whores, but the point is that follower ratio isn't a very good metric.
And just TWO days ago, I switched two big apps running nginx + thin to running apache + passenger - mainly for the ease of maintenance. If I had only waited two days...
PG is probably referring to a capped convertible note.

On a capped convertible point 5 is completely negated.

Point 4 is not relevant. Since preferred comes first any way.

Point 3 is a reason to do convertible note.

Point 2 is a good point. But you really don't want to be negotiating terms on Series A (which are complex) with an angel that does not deal with them every day. If the angel is willing to just accept what you give them then maybe that is a valid point against doing a convertible.

Point 1. At least at the time of raising the convertible note it costs about 10th of the lawyer cost as a series A. Maybe the lawyer cost is higher when converting it, but presumably you care less about lawyer costs at that stage.
As opposed to what? Developer? As a developer, I don't really see that much of a distinction, or care about it.
I don't really understand why that would carry any stigma. I mean, do we hate doctors who are only in the medical field because it pays well?
And that is just for Q4 2008. Iphone sales are 30m worldwide.
Hmm,

What's your source for this statistic? I believe you and this is something that I would be very interested in having a good source for.
I've started telling people I'm a database administrator just to pre-emptively ward off "will you check why my computer is so slow?" questions.
Here in .au well its kind of like this. Every account has a limit but its much much lower then in the US. And you pay for above that limit. A large limit would be 25 gig or 50 gig per month (most people wouldn't have anywhere near that).

Thankfully, a lot of the good ISPs are making lots of content unmetered - specifically media stuff like tivo downloads and itunes etc (the stuff that would push the limits).
Is one of the best titles I read today!
No. Who cares, there are bigger things to worry about.