skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
video chat will _not_ be the next killer app. Sorry.
...like all your friends do.
BBC News 'Low Graphics' Page
I would buy it, really.
Slicing and Dicing on the Command Line
We can't blame the author for his shortsightedness, just look at what people write about twitter. Also there was no google or wikipedia then, and the internet was still mostly a collection of static html pages. There is nothing interesting about a giant stack of document.

edit: But still, not that he didn't make a fool of himself :D
Fixing “:focus” in Internet Explorer
Au contraire.

http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/07/turns-out-por-1.html
Barry Diller wants to invest in local search (video)
I think a problem in these discussions is the tendency to ignore how different "open source" projects and related experience is.

Of the six programs I list on my CV, five are free software. For two of those I was paid full time to program, and the other developers were all likewise paid. One was a personal hobby/learning project I released the source for because there was no reason not to, but never build a community around. The last two were community oriented, in the first I was the project manager, integrating contributions from all over the world, but writing less than half the code myself. In the other I contributed a large and potentially disrupting change to a high profile project that required active adaption from the other developers to be successful. Here the social engineering was as important than the code itself.

They represent four very different types of experience, and grouping them as having "Open Source Experience" would be unhelpful. The only common element is that it is easy for a would be employer to see the code, but that might even be possible for non-free code if I owned it myself, or had permission.
The point of my post was that coincidences happen. I had an off day (which we all have) that also happened to coincide with an interview. I usually don't need energy drinks or the afternoon (although many software engineers perform better in the evening).

I usually can represent my abilities, and execute on them just fine, in any context. This day was a statistical outlier compared to my average day. If this was routine for me, it wouldn't have seemed so unusual.... but screwing up really badly once after nailing it 30 other times seemed interesting to me.
Obama Unveils Plan to Fund High-Speed Passenger Rail
>> Don't rely on this working to sub-minute accuracy, though. Email flight times can be significantly longer when things go wrong.

Yes, this is exactly what I was asking...what do you do when "things go wrong"...and they do with email, occasionaly. So this I see as an issue...whether you can rely on it.
I've never lived on a boat, but I spent a few weeks sailing the Mediterranean in high school... After a few days you don't really notice the motion that much unless it gets really rough.

That being said, I'm not predisposed to sea-sickness anyways, so I may be a bad data point; my point is just that it seems that your system adjusts to the constant motion (you know, getting your sea-legs and all that).
The video itself isn't particularly exciting. I just posted it because Barry Diller (the media guy) says he has billions sitting in the bank and he wants to invest in local search. I thought that could be interesting for some here.
I lost my phone last night. Are there any online prediction markets (perhaps based overseas) that have an estimate as to when the next generation iteration might drop?
I concur. Employee option pools should be 10-15%. This seems to be pretty standard, especially when taking investment money.
Turing's computer was an idealized human - to him, computers were humans who did computations for a living - who were granted infinite time and tape - that's the idealization - to solve exactly one problem. Anything that talks about "x problems per hour" has nothing to do with what he said.
I have half a preserved brain sitting behind me on a shelf (seriously.) I think I'll make a sign with that phrase on it :-)
I bought this kit: http://tubedepot.com/diy-k-8ls.html a few weeks ago and planning to start building it this weekend, time permitting. It's got vacuum tubes and requires soldering. I want to run the audio out of my desktop Ubuntu machine through it.

Disclaimer: I do consulting work for TubeDepot.
Yet while this view of I.Q. as overwhelmingly inherited has been widely held

He needs this straw man for the article to work at all. In fact, the belief that IQ is "overwhelmingly inherited" is considered socially repugnant, and has been for some time. All of the things he lists are just duplicates or variations on things we've already been doing, and mostly failing at.
How To: Customize Ubuntu A-Z
Water Front Apt. in San Mateo will trade for equity in Y Combinator startup
Are scientists and engineers necessary anymore?
To be fair he was coming off 4 hours sleep after a cross-country flight to CA. Most people would need a few Red Bulls to think clearly for a tech interview in that situation.
Sox (http://sox.sourceforge.net/) is your friend. In particular, check out the "synth" and "filter" command line options.
I'm leaving my day job. But my CEO doesn't want me to leave.
I work at a company of around 600 employees. I was planning to give my two weeks notice on Monday (to work full-time on my startup), but the CEO caught wind of my thoughts and would like to know if there's any way we can work together rather than having me jump ship altogether. This is a multi-million dollar company in the media business, owned by a multi-billion dollar parent company.

My ideas would be:

1) My CEO becomes an angel investor.

2) I leave my job for 2-3 months so I can work on my startup, and they make it easy for me to come back if I fail (I don't think I will, so this isn't that important to me).

3) My company invests and becomes an small-percentage equity owner and lets me leave, happy to know that at least if my startup succeeds, they will be hundreds of thousands or millions richer.

I guess I don't have to work with them at all, but it seems like a 'blank check' or sorts that I would be silly to pass up. What would you ask for?

This is a fairly established startup with a few million unique users but no revenue as of yet (exploring a promising freemium model).
This conflates "just one device" with "make everything simpler", and sacrifices the first for the second, while it's the first I care about more. I don't mind having a Linux box with a filesystem and a command line -- I actually like that -- I just want to have all of my data available all the time, and all of my connectivity available all the time, and I'd prefer not to have to sync a bunch of devices and figure out which ones to take or leave when I'm out.

Right now I'd be happy with a device that had a dongle that you could connect DVI to, and accepted a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Higher speed internet than my 3G is a nice-to-have, but not essential.
Did you read the first paragraph?

...they're also competing with a nearly infinite supply of free, amateur videos from countless user-generated sites

e.g. youporn.com

Consumption of porn is recession proof. The business of professional porn generation is not. Like other produced content, it is suffering from democratized tools of generation and dissemination.
Flagged. At no point should a blog post ever have stick figures shooting at each other in the masthead.
Hmm, re-reading things, I seem to have been caught up in a thread here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=565038) and in my mindless annoyance I mistakenly applied the thread logic to the post. Apologies.
what if you went from a full-time employee to a contract/freelance worker at maybe 20 hrs/week? more time to work on the startup, and you'll still have a separate steady paycheck (edit: while you work on monetizing the startup).
So you had monthly revenues in the tens of thousands? Why aren't you still doing this (or are you)?
Don't need the employee discount... It's all free.
Tim Ferriss on his approach to learning [video]
I wouldn't buy it (right now in my life) but think you should go for it. It sounds like a great product idea.
which in your own words is almost the same as YC

Where did I say that? My point was that we were lucky to get a subset of YC.
It is quite unreasonable to talk about variables that change with time in the context of a Turing machine. If a "Universal Computer" is one that deals with variables which change during the computation due to interaction, then it is not what Turing was talking about. And if he wasn't talking about it, he can't be wrong about it.
... That better have High-Speed Wifi!
A blog that's only available by invitation? Doesn't that sort of evade the point of blogging in the first place?
Is your startup in an area strategic to your current employer? That presents an opportunity for their formal support but also a risk -- are you certain they'd have no claims on the work you've already done?
I could be wrong, but I doubt he has any desire to invest in your business (and if he doesn't meet accredited investor requirements, you might not be able to legally pull it together anyway).

More likely, he does not want to deal with backfilling your positions and training a new person.

The probability is that he is being selfish, not helpful to you. I would look for some sort of work-from-home or part-time arrangement. Let them "fund" your startup by allowing you to keep a portion of your paycheck, not by actual investing.

Don't count on option 2, either. I've seen many cases where a "super critical" employee leaves with much concern, and 3 months later it's like they never even worked there.

I don't mean to sound negative, just realistic...
Data Breach Investigations Report 2009
Clever. If anyone takes this deal, do it as convertible debt, which makes the paperwork much simpler and avoids setting a valuation.
Cryptic consciousness
I'm pretty sure he means "work together to keep you here" not "work together on your new project".

Noodle's suggestion of offering to stay on as a consultant for less than 40 hours a week is probably the best suggestion.
The work from home or part-time arrangement sounds OK. He has already hinted at that. As someone else has said, I worry a bit about IP in that case (although I never signed any agreement with my employer).
Yes, it is. They could offer a lot of promotion, but our biggest challenge right now isn't exposure, it's (no surprise) revenue.
The author is a 'she'; and her main point is relevant, even today. We've found ways to counteract it, but we still get bitten all the time by nonsense that just anyone can put on the Internet.
Google makes more money than it spends. Facebook does not (yet). This is a crucial difference.

> Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.

-- Charles Dickens
Good suggestion, I'll have to think about that.

Then again, the startup definitely has enough work to keep me busy full-time, and taking a 1/2 cut in pay to work 20 hrs a week on the startup is almost worse than going to $0 pay to go as fast as humanly possible.
> At a time when the legitimate world's favored system of government was unconstrained monarchy, early 18th-century pirates were practicing constitutional democracy.

... and at a time when the legitimate world's favored system of government is unconstrained "democracy", modern pirates are practicing refreshing market anarchism.
Yes that is the point you can do it yourself or you can use the application.

In this case(You have to remove 15 spaces and capitalize 17 letters total 32, do you still want to do it manually? :) ).

YesThatIsThePointYouCanDoItYourselfOrYouCanUseTheApplication.
Oops! I haven't been reading HN much lately and hadn't seen it. Thanks.
Just to put this in perspective - we currently spend $12 billion a month in Iraq. For roughly that amount, one month's Iraq budget, we can have high speed rail.

Pretty mind boggling.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

Do we need a CS equivalent?
So when my mom asked, "If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?" I wasn't merely being snotty when I said "Yes!"

I was right, too!

Instead she'd have been better served by asking, "Do you realize that out of dozens of friends and hundreds of peers, only 2 of you thought that was a good idea?"
Evils of the For Loop in Ruby
4) You ask your current employer to match the position and potential financial upside (with far less risk of course) you would be getting at the start up.
Yes, interactive computation is proven to be - statistically - more powerful than algorithmic computation - sometimes. It's also "less powerful" some other times, and since it's not computable at which times interaction is "better", it's not a general advantage. But Turing never considered the case of interaction in his definition of computation, so Wegner is talking about something else.
Exposure can be a catalyst for revenue (of course), so that does sound handy.
The paper is written to sell Vertica, which is quickly becoming less appealing given the rise of open source parallel DBs like HBase and Hypertable.

Hadoop is built for high throughput not low latency. If you read the paper, Hadoop runs circle around Vertica etc for data loading.

It's entirely possible to build a low latency map-reduce implementation.
I have often wondered about this. From an employer's perspective what would be more impressive, minor work done on a large open source project or major work done building one's own app from start to finish? By "minor" I'm assuming here that starting in any large well known open source project means you have to work your way up to get into the small core set of developers that really have a say in the project and as such most of your contribution will be minor at least initially.
Would you accept equity from the iaccelerator program participants as well? How about trading it for some karma on HN? :-)
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/ombuds/

The Ombuds is an impartial dispute resolver who strives to see that faculty, staff and students at the university are treated fairly and equitably. Any Stanford faculty, student or staff can seek the advice of the Ombuds Office. The Ombuds is impartial, neutral, and confidential. The rights and interests of all parties to disputes are considered, with the aim to achieving fair outcomes.
Here's some info on Freeman's profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/freemanmurray, you shouldn't be surprised he understands YC and the power of equity!
None taken, we all have our off-moments ;)
This is a neat thought experiment, though it strikes at the heart of what makes coding so interesting as an economic activity -- that once you get a valuable process 'right', the code + electrons lets you keep milking it for value at a larger scale, or for a longer period, with negligible marginal effort.

A milder form of the practice could be to apply code review to not just new code, but the oldest code in the system -- just in case opportunities for high-payback projects are being overlooked.
http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
The privacy concerns that he had were that because they assure employers that post jobs that they don't share contact information with anyone but students that visit the site, and I was making browsing by employer possible, that their policies were being broken.

I think that the right thing to do right now is try to work with them to get their site up to par, because I could help many more students by proxy than I could with my site. However, if they fail to act in a timely fashion after I speak with them, I will definitely try to work around their block.

Right now they are just blocking incoming traffic with a referral from my site. What is the best way to get around this? Could I just forward traffic through a redirect from a different domain I have registered to the same server or is the block most likely the whole ip? (I'm at school right now and can't test anything out but it would be great to get some ideas bounced back to me)
Just to put Iraq in perspective, the government has already spent or committed $12.8 trillion this year alone to hold off a deeper recession:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=armO...

As a taxpayer, I think I'd prefer if we hold off subsidizing useless infrastructure like trains when we already have cars, buses, and airplanes.

Edit: Geez, this drive-by down voting is really getting out of hand lately.
They can shoot each other all they want, but audio is crossing the line.
I'd buy if I knew it wasn't BS (tough to do with an ebook). Publishers provide a useful filter; a certification that the book isn't utterly pointless garbage or just some guy trying to get my cc#.

Maybe I'd chance it if it only cost a couple of bucks.

Don't get me wrong, I'd pay to learn about this. Ebooks just don't fill me with confidence.
Phusion Passenger now supports Nginx
something like http://www.oqo.com/products/index.html perhaps?
News Clipping Services, Solicitation Number: ITC-RFP-09-0003
I'd rather have trains move people than cars. One can hold many more people than the other and doesn't clog up the highways and most likely produces less pollution...
His logo example uses bad typography, questionable color choices, and is too busy. But it also fails one of the most basic, objective tests of logo-ness, which is: Can it be scaled down easily?

It can't. There are too many fine details. This is an incredibly common rookie mistake. If you're having a logo done, just think to yourself: would this logo work as well on the spine of a CD cover as it would on a billboard? Someday you will need to print your logo somewhere small.

Apple logo, Nike swoosh, facebook's "f", twitter's "t", etc. - Recognizeable at any size.

Also ask, would this logo work just as well in 2-color? Because you'll be printing it that way all the time, on invoices, etc.
Growth Rates Don't Matter: How Userbases Don't Always Confer Profit
It would be difficult to overstate how major this is for the Ruby web app community.
Could be a bookmarklet and could offer compressions other than CamelCasing, such as vowl-drppng.
Gladwell is citing several academic studies on priming-- they aren't "arguments". That said, of course, studies can be biased. But there's a pretty healthy supply of scary priming studies.

> Priming has similar effects as hypnosis, and is increasingly believed to be linked.

I don't know if there is any link between priming and susceptibility to hypnosis (do you have a source for that?). Even if there is, it certainly isn't a solid enough link to say that people who are resistant to hypnosis are always immune to priming. I have a degree in psychology-- but it's admittedly dated.

> We have to be careful of the unconscious effects of priming we place all around ourselves, because the conscious use of priming in wide civilization will likely have the opposite effect of what we desire.

Well, the REST of us do. You don't, due to your special mind powers. ;-)
Interesting ideas, and they've definitely covered some important points.

But I think a public revision control system is the "ideal" interface. The data that you'd read at data.gov, should be exactly the same vault that is maintained for actual government use.

With, for instance, a public Subversion URL, you automatically have complete revision history "for all time" and established ways to tie into the data (e.g. existing pretty-printers and diffing tools). Most important, you can see what is changed, by whom, and when.
Engine Yard releases new version of Solo with Nginx/Passenger support
SaaS, and the decline of self-hosted software
Also useful is getting enough calories every day.
why would you agree to a simple 1:1 ratio paycut to hours worked? minimally, you need to cover taxes, benefits, etc. that the company was covering previously, so your hourly rate should be higher from that. but since you're the one inconvenienced here, you should be asking for more on top of that.
Sure, but then how do you prove you did any work on the project? A lot of companies won't let their source code out of their site so you can't brag about some clever hack you wrote. With an open source or free software project, you can just say "look up revision 12903810938 and the file is awesome.c" and voila, your example of clever hackery is there.
i am about as pro-green as it gets.

However, I am really uncertain about whether passenger trains are a good idea. In most countries they are subsidized. the upkeep costs are high...the US is a very geographically sparse place...

I'd much rather have them spend money on alternative energy, electric cars and funding startups at an arms length by investing in VC firms. (or running an independent VC arm)
Browsers usually limit themselves to 4 simultaneous requests at a time to the same server.
And just imagine the infrastructure we could have had for the cost of the Iraq war + the bank bailouts!

Anyway one thing I'd like to mention that never gets highlighted is that buses are BY FAR the cheapest public transportation solution. Its not sexy but the good old fashioned bus is great since it can use the road infrastructure already built whereas trains need right of way and a lot of construction before they can be used.
There is absolutely no benefit to taking a train instead of a bus. Name one. (And I'm not talking about subway vs. bus)

Buses cost less, are equally as cramped, and take less time to arrive at their destination.

99% of people don't care about pollution when deciding to ride a train or bus. They're asking "how long will it take and how much will it cost?"
Nobel Laureate Develops Low-Cost Health Care System for Bangladesh (cost is $2/year)
What about physical junk mail?
"71% of college graduates are unable to read proficiently"

huh? according to the link they cite: http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/kf_dem_edu.asp looks like college graduates are amongst the best.
It's an amazing product idea, if you ask me. There are definitely lots of ways to market it, as well as multiple price points for the same ebook.

Say mixmax writes the ebook, and it comes in at x pages of general information. He could add a few pages on "how to catch fish at sea", and a chapter on "boat safety". Now that exact same book that was previously being marketed to the "boat-set" who want to know how to live on a boat can also be marketed to the survivalist movement that's growing (in the US at least).

Since he knows that people who are considering living on a boat as travellers have less discretionary income than your average survivalist, he can price the book to them at $9.95, while marketing to survivalists at $19.95.

He can then take the exact same book, add some information about how to make international calls while at sea, maybe some information about satellite technology and a few paragraphs about how to send and receive photos while out on the water and turn around and market the same book to people who are retiring and thinking about getting a boat to tool around on for a week here and there. Well, who wouldn't pay $19.95 for a book that tells you how to find a boat, the basics of repairs, how to do basic things when you're away for a little while, and it also tells you how you can send pictures to the grandkids?

Of course I'm making a lot of assumptions about the actual data here, but I think my point is clear(ish) - there are lots of people interested in the basic subject; and it can be spun a ton of different ways.
Doesn't it seem like having a high speed train network that connects the major metro areas is at least somewhat of a good idea? This is a good hedge against peak oil since trains can be powered by electricity.

Also, arguably if the trains are used to move goods they can get trucks off the road and really decrease road maintenance costs. If you look into the wear and tear vehicles make on pavement, each extra pound is exponentially more damage. Trucking companies actually are heavily subsidized by the road infrastructure but nobody notices it ;)

I do wonder if we need high speed trains. Regular trains might be a better long term bet.