skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple did not learn its lesson - it still has a closed platform. One could argue that the main reason it got overtaken in personal computing is because Windows 3.1 made it so easy for 3rd party developers, and did not impose any restrictions. Same thing happening now -> Apple restricting its developers, preventing core access to the OS, censoring apps, etc.. Prime time for Windows Mobile to eat Apple's lunch.
You realize that's just a matter changing the value of ONE constant right? (no comment about the fundamental changed to the twitter identity)
More like the other way round. It was while writing this one

http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html

that I decided what to put on the t-shirts.
I think this concept applies to startup ideas as well, I found this post to be a great high level summary of the top post on HN as I write this (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591607). One of the problems with young web entrepreneurs (myself included) is that we aren't "close" to the problems we often try to solve.
"Can you please teach me something?"

I only use it when I'm interested in the candidate, and the interview has progressed to the point where we're both comfortable.
You don't have to do the @thing. We have nested comment threads.
The Woz didn't want anything but to own a computer. He couldn't afford one, so he designed them on paper, and then he found out that his designs are far superior to what was being sold. Then he sold some kits, and then he built the Apple I.

The brilliance of the man is astounding: http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html
>Two weeks later, after the public comments and at least one reporter contacted Google, the old Japanese maps were suddenly changed, wiped clean of any references to the buraku villages.

What else was Google supposed to do? They don't want to get involved in these crazy cultural wars. They just make information available: it's the culture which attaches weird connotations to it.

>There was no note made of the changes, and they were seen by some as an attempt to quietly dodge the issue.

Circular. Who are the unnamed "some"?

>"This is like saying those people didn't exist. There are people for whom this is their hometown, who are still living there now," said Takashi Uchino from the Buraku Liberation League headquarters in Tokyo.

Bizarre. If Google Earth did not exist, would these people cease to exist?

>The League also sent a letter to Google, a copy of which was provided to The Associated Press. It wants a meeting to discuss its knowledge of the buraku issue and position on the use of its services for discrimination.

Google has no knowledge of the buraku issue, doesn't care like you idiots do, and are in a much saner headspace than the lot of you.

Quoting ekiru: The information about discrimination against descendants of burakumin in Japan does somewhat justify their oversensitivity, but prejudice in Japanese culture is no reason to suppress these maps.

-- right, while they are totally unable to actually fix ongoing prejudice, and can do nothing in the face of large well-known companies following the same discriminatory policy, they target the one company that probably truly does not discriminate based on their pet issue.
I don't know what happened to the top of this post: Nokia 8500, Nokia N97, Samsung i8910, Sony-Ericsson Xperia X1, Sony-Ericsson Idou, HTC Touch Diamond.
Because PG has finite time, there are two fundamental possibilities at work here:

(1) PG can find more "great groups" that he would want to fund than he has the time to work with. This, I expect, is almost certainly the case; PG then has to determine which amongst these groups of founders with whom to work. The question becomes, what function of the group of founders selected should be maximized. If you "give an additional point or two for being female founded" then the function you are optimizing is not just a matter of competence and dedication--either you aren't actually altering your behavior towards female founded groups, or there is some sufficiently pathological example of groups being very similar in which there is a female founded group that is slightly less competent/dedicated than a male only group competing over one remaining slot, and the slot is given to the female group. If no such example ever occurs in practice, then there is no point in giving female founded groups "an additional point or two" since it never altered the decision.

(2) PG has more time available than "great groups" with whom to work. In this case, taking on additional groups simply because they are female-founded, in addition to being discriminatory, seems likely to be a net negative, assuming the original meaning to the term "great groups" was set to be at whatever level is necessary to have positive expected outcome.

Looking at this dichotomy another way, we can think of PG's time as a market resource. In the first case, it is scarce, and should sell to the highest bidders (those with highest expected value, measured as utility for PG). In the second case, it is abundant, and every consumer gets what they need/want. In reality, it is probably either directly scarce (falling into the first category), or made scarce by the presence of other high utility alternatives (e.g., spending time with his family).

In summary, there is no "in addition to" as far as criteria with respect to which you want to maximize. There can only be "instead of", or a (possibly zero) conversion factor.

As a side note, in another comment on this page (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591537) PG noted that they don't ask the gender of founders when considering funding.
Uh, when I say casual games, I really mean people playing scrabble on facebook or the games on yahoo, or things like bejeweled. I have a sneaking suspicion they enjoy a much broader demographic than half life 2 and its ilk.
I'm with you about those other stories, but I disagree with your general premise. Where do we draw the line for posting release notes? There are probably enough applications that this community cares about to constantly occupy 3 or 4 slots on the front page.
Definitive proof that just having the t-shirt doesn't mean you're cool. I don't know whether to be depressed or amused that a degree from Stanford is good for becoming an internet mall cop.
I am planning on spreading even more. I'd like a rack in the UK or eastern europe. I do plan on getting rid of some of my current locations once I move the customers, though. but it would be nice to offer some low-latency options to our friends on the other side of the globe.

My next rack will probably be around here, though. Some place that I can get a cheap dark-fiber connection to from svtix, or maybe even within svtix, but I'd like to offer my customers the option of buying VPSs in different locations.
Bootstrapped and in the valley of death
"Finally, who wants to play video games at their desk when they can play on their couch instead?"

You may be surprised. IME, the more hours per week someone plays video games the more likely they're doing it on a computer.

But I think you're spot-on about "a recompile away." Being able to reach 2 large gaming platforms at once is a big selling point.
In Yahoo Messenger I believe that emoticon is performed as such: $-)
U.S. Media Companies Look From China to India
That would be an interesting AI problem - "Does this picture contain a female areola?" ;-)

Although, it does kind of raise the sexism question - why is a topless male OK but not a topless female? Didn't NYC recently lose a lawsuit for that same sort of discrimination? I understand that facebook is a private entity and held to a different set of standards, but even so ...
Are you asking as someone who has had a baby, or as someone who hasn't had a baby yet?
Splitting ownership exactly 50-50 risks deadlock in worst case scenarios. Give someone 50+1 or give a mutually respected third party a tiny share to break ties if all else fails. You probably won't need it, but it's there just in case.
As the article states, Facebook is trying to bill itself as the social networking application for everyone. Like other pursuits dependent upon the majority, pandering to the lowest common denominator is a required strategy. Since the at-large societal norm in the United States is that female nipples are inappropriate, so must Facebook align.
"Simple != Easy", :)
I agree. I was referring to the prejudices of some Japanese people, not Google's.
Now this issues are being discussed publicly. I think that's a good thing.
What an intentionally terrible photograph.
It's similar in what it does to your life. But startups are intellectually hard in a way that taking care of newborns isn't.
No babies. Am I wrong about what its like to have a baby? If so, then my parents were unprepared!
Is there only one internet?
If Facebook or Twitter were to shut down their public APIs it would upset a ton of people who have come to depend on applications built on them. I'm definitely not suggesting that public outcry would itself be enough to dissuade a company from making bold decisions (as Facebook has shown with the TOS and redesign debacles), but it is a little bit of insurance. Whether you choose to build an entire company (or invest in one) that depends on that little insurance holding up is a valid question. I definitely wouldn't.
The iphone and the TPM
"Since the site tracks the geographic locations of log-ons..."

Wow, that's scary. Did you know that Facebook has a database of every location you've logged in from?
Actually, I've seen a few attempts on this problem. I wish I'd saved them now, as my attempts at googling them are failing me. It certainly would be an interesting problem to work on, but it would probably get rather dull after a while, sadly.
> The 26-year-old Stanford grad is one of some 150 people the young company employs to keep the site clean—out of a total head count of 850.

I wonder if a Stanford degree was a necessity for such a job.
Swine flu may 4,2009
That is a misleading analysis. The credit you are referring to as part of the money supply is bank credit, which is created by the central bank when they introduce currency units. Credit has been moving from the private sector to the public sector. The US govt has already run 1T debt in Q1. What they couldn't borrow from abroad with treasuries, they had the fed print money to buy the excess treasuries. Now we're hearing noises about how the fed wants to issue bonds. Inflation is coming, just have to figure out what to hoard.
When our apps were running 50K+ visits a day 99% of my time was spent policing our users. And I wasn't even on salary :(
I think it's funny how people who pay nothing and contribute nothing to keeping something alive can find plenty of time to bash it if it doesn't live up to their expectations of leechability.
"The Nipple Patrol: Kelly (front) and team"

"...Max Kelly, 39, a former FBI computer forensics analyst who is now the site's head of security..."

Decide for yourself whether he's a tool or not, but he's a bit more than a porn cop.
I don't even get the dinner party reference. Does he actually expect anyone to say "no we can't eat because that's an arbitrary reason"..?
I think there are as many successful companies started by careful market analysis as there are company's started by an entrepreneur's mission to solve a personal problem.

Jeff Bezos coldly examined markets and decided books were the right entry point into ecommerce. However, these don't make the best pr stories, and so aren't told...or in some cases, the story is just fabricated after the fact, such as Pierre Omidyar building ebay to sell pez dispensers.
Microsoft do a lot of things well, like sales and marketing, but I'm not sure technology is one of them. I cannot think of any technology they have done really well. Browers, phone/computer operating systems etc.. IUnknown - please! I guess c# is a well designed and thought out language, but I've been a software engineer for 20 years and thankfully haven't had to go anywhere near a MSFT technology in many years. I have nothing against them as a company, they just don't make anything that I have found to be relevant for quite a while.
This is very common, essentially the default, it's just a matter of whether a site uses the information or not.

Consider, by default apache logs have IP address, and IP address approximately equals location. Actually, that article probably means IP when they say "geographic location".
This was already on HN when it was on RWW a couple of days ago. ;)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589049
Is everyone looking at a different Yelp than I am? I see the same ratings distribution as Amazon on Yelp, as well as a "trend" graph that tells you how the ratings changed over time.

Here's a screenshot:

http://img.skitch.com/20090504-n2jsr44y1py38pbd5wgcqs5uyn.pn...
i dunno, it gave me a chuckle. and then a good laugh. and then a hearty cackling. it's a gift that keeps on giving.
The ‘Face Book Fad’ Is More Than a Century Old
Storage Units
Local Self Storage Units provider
I guess Newsweek doesn't realize the irony of a porn 'cop' wearing an old school hacker mag t-shirt :-) Excellent. The dude gets props from me. I hope his coworkers realize the awesomeness of sneaking that into the photo and buy the drinks for a week or two :-)
Hm, then in that sense, FF is more of a competitor to HN or Reddit than it is for Twitter. Never thought of it that way, but it makes sense...
as time approaches infinity, the opacity of the layer between the digital world and the analog (biological/evolutionary) world approaches zero.
This is likely because you must open two separate windows -- one for the article, and a second for the comments. often when i read an article in a separate window, i want to make a quick comment but decide it's not worth the effort to find the comments page again!

of course, this is remedied by some FF plug-ins, but i doubt most users have those installed.
Do you think you could measure something by the frequency of reposts? There must be some function with a component of memory and freshness of content that could tell us something about the course of a news aggregator.
While I agree with your point, some releases are more groundbreaking than others (it's not everyday we get a new FreeBSD); So shouldn't the voting system take over at that point? There has to be a reason this ranks so highly here...
You must not read enough math ebooks. It's all djvu from here to Königsberg.
Quite honestly I think that guy is a grade A loser.
I just wrote about that earlier. Paypal locked me out after I logged in from 3 different countries in less than 48 hours (I wonder how they handle their Benelux users.)
To be fair, this is really a problem which should be fixed server-side. Happens all the time and it's really annoying.

Long strings in a "code" box should either be broken up programatically (spaces inserted slashdot-style?) or put in a div with a scrollbar.
?

Maybe I'm being a bit dim, but I have no idea what that means. Care to expand?
Predicting Flu Vectors With the Aid of Dollar Bills
Real time conversations are so 50,000 BC - 1970 AD
In addition to typically not commenting without reading the article, comments on HN overwhelmingly take the form of (1) expanding an argument (rare), (2) asking a question (less rare), or (3) expressing reasoned disagreement. Thus, the presence of an interesting article without comments that is at or near the top mostly indicates a reasonable level of agreement between what was written and the people on HN at the time.
They studied 18 years of US data and then make statments like:

_It suggests that any kind of policy will be very inefficient," says Yakovenko. It would be very difficult to impose a policy to redistribute wealth "short of getting Stalin", says Yakovenko, who will talk in Kolkata next week._

As if the research wasn't abstract enough, this level of generalization and political inference makes him sounds like a crackpot.
Is there somewhere that these T-shirts are available for the general public to buy? I would totally snap one of those up.
The article made me think that they use a one-dimensional star count (could be because of that image), so my reply was formed around that idea. I have to admit I never checked what kind of rating Yelp actually uses.
What about the Wilson score confidence interval mentioned here?

http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....
You can always put Felix Dennis' "Mexican Shoot-out" clause in place. If the owners are in a deadlock, one can chose to execute the clause. When that happens, each owner places a sealed bid to buy the entire business. Whomever has the highest offer, wins... Brutal, but fair.
It seems a complicated way of saying something surprisingly insightful. Here's how I interpret it: our "real" world is being increasingly shadowed by a "digital" world, where information instantaneously available and immediately actionable.

Right now, that information now includes weather, game scores, stock values, bank accounts, people's whereabouts and activities, pictures/videos, and conversations. Soon (security being one Big Problem to solve), it will include people's blood pressure, heart rate, your bath's temperature and water level, your home's water consumption, your caloric intake, number of steps you've walked, the book you're reading, etc.

By immediately actionable, I mean a ubiquitous spread of what we now call API's - although I imagine they won't just be for applications or programs. Your iPhone will control the elevators you're in (and your children will have trouble imagining the insanitary notion of touching buttons a dozen other people have touched), start your car, fill your bath, serve as your communications tool, etc.

Already, the first thing I do after turning off my alarm (before getting out of bed) is check/answer my e-mails. That's kind of neat, if you sit and think about it :)
Well, downmodding isn't allowed.
I am offended by your disrespect for Erlang.
true, BUT... 3 digits are generally the norm and he original poster didn't specifically mention that he wanted percentages.
i would say slugging percentage is another good example because you can go into the ideas of how it is actually determined. the arbitrariness of it. leads into lots of other wonderful esoteric basbeball stats, vorp and all the rest.
Ask HN: Best free SEO tools?
What are the best free search engine optimization tools?
NIN Reaction to iPhone App Store Rejection
A better link:

http://forum.nin.com/bb/read.php?9,651569,651569#msg-651569
It's a tough economy in which to find a job and Stanford doesn't have any pre-professional majors.

We should all consider ourselves lucky that we have a skill-set that is in high demand.
I agree - it's for sure an apples to oranges comparison, but unfortunately I have a feeling that most users (and main stream media outlets) will gloss that over and pronounce it the "non" Google killer. I also agree with you that the potential lies in something we may not be able to envision at this point, but if developers get turned on to the platform it might be really successful.
When the fuck did "killer" replace "competitor" in the English language?
+1 to this - we're not "very profitable", but we pay all salaries each month plus have extra money to work with. Completely self funded too..
what andreyf said.

In longer words, what I meant was that as technology advances, we are going to see less and less of the distinction between it and our own skin, or our own blood. Our blood may not even be what we think of blood today, but a synthetic blend of water, nutrients, gases, hormones, protiens, and other items that our bodies need.

For example, there was a time when everyone wore spectacles. That technology that improved the wearers' vision was obvious and on the face. Now some people wear contacts, which most of the time are invisible except to the wearer. In the future, our eyes will be replaced with advanced photo optics, night vision, and a frame storage rate much higher than our minds can currently comprehend. We'll play it back like Tivo today, which will also be a thing of the past as well. We'll just play movies on our mind.

The goal of the technology is to make itself invisible -- an intangible benefit to the quality of life. The kind of quality you just "get" but don't have to quantify, because it is transparent.
Hey as long as he's not breaking a law, it's a free country he can do whatever he pleases. I think I understand the origin of this sentiment - $tanford has people beating down it's doors to get in and 10 ambitious amazing kids were rejected so that this guy, who ends up doing a job anyone could do, could go. I for one hope he ignores all of this social pressure to do what other people want him to do with his life. It sounds like there's an attitude of noblesse oblige towards smart people with prestigious degrees here. Give the guy (and everyone else) a break.
A triumph of form over content.
Linking at the Speed of Light
Why must it be? Who is to say not having equal proportions of men and women in engineering is bad? If women choose not to go that way and instead choose what they like, who are we to judge that it is wrong? Being ourselves is more important than any artificially imposed equality. And recognizing and celebrating this uniqueness is in no way a 'bad idea'.

And attentiveness to fashion is not merely a 'cultural difference'; in every culture in the world, the female gender on an average gives more importance to such concerns than the male. Cultural differences do exist, but they form only the base level; the females deviate positively from it more than the males.
i saw a news story the other night about a graduation ceremony at northeastern was prohibiting congratulatory handshakes b/c of fear of swine flu. This speaks to the cowardliness learned men and women. They are the most sniveling cowardly and pathetic people on this planet. The students at the ceremony should have all held hands and mocked the professors/administrator. What buffoons!
Sure, but how did you get that from the FriendFeed article?
Big-screen Kindle coming from Amazon this week
when i first moved here from reddit i ran into this problem a lot. then i got slightly annoyed at having to have twice as many browser tabs open as before. i still don't use the plugin, but it has ceased to be a problem. my friends and i joke about having to get through all our tabs before getting down to the brass tacks.
Unless specifically stated otherwise most major sites would be tracking and storing IP addresses.
I think it's important for them to hire people from the same demographic as their most valued users. Policing content is very culturally loaded, so you can't just automate it or outsource it to a low-wage country and get the same results. They mention knowing the difference between pot smoke and tobacco smoke, but I'm sure you also have to recognize every celebrity photo and "the shocker", and 1000 other culturally relative things.
Build something someone will pay for.
Would this argument apply to a library as well? Would you want this map to be removed from the library? A map store?

Google not like a publisher. A publisher would be the one that ordered and funded the creation of this map.

Google is more like a library with a really fast full text indexed card catalog. They take the content from the publisher. "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"

Google just created a link to this data in Google Earth. You can add context to the data in Google Earth.
Buckminster Fuller wrote about this. He called it etherealization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherealization
Windows 7 on sale as early as October 2009
Well, no. But I wouldn't necessarily want Mein Kampf on the recommended reading list for school chilren. Not without any context, anyway.