skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If someone has pledged the majority of what is owed to me in collateral, it is wrong for people to imply that the 10 billion flowing through the government was just some windfall flowthrough.

I didn't say that it was a windfall. I said that Goldman was made whole by the US govt via AIG. If other folks are losing money in similar circumstances, it's fair to ask why Goldman is being treated differently.

And, even if everyone is being made whole, the question remains - why should the US make them whole? Why shouldn't they lose money for taking bad counter-party risks? They were planning to keep the money that they made for assuming said risks, so why shouldn't they take the hit when things work out badly?

If I buy something that turns out to be worth less than I expected, I take the loss. Why not Goldman and other banks?

> They got what they were owed, and the taxpayers got their 7.5 billion in collateral back. If the taxpayers did not pay the 10 billion

I'll pay $7.5B for $10B.

> In either case, whether AIG was allowed to fail or not, they would have been made whole.

Maybe, maybe not, but in any event, not by the US govt.
Want iPhone Notes Sync? No Problem for Evernote
Somewhat unrelated, but are there any good graphical Git clients for OS X?
Excellent! This is great for small to medium sized projects.

I see very little reason to use anything other than GitHub for new open source projects.

Here's an easy improvement: how about integrating a CLA submission form, so contributors can easily e-sign a project's CLA, and project managers can easily see who has signed the CLA.
Sodium is important to brain function. It's recently been linked with antidepressant properties:

http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/salt_may_be_...
IPhone App Giveaway Spree: Hundreds of Promo codes. Here. Tomorrow.
If Amazon issued "amazon bucks", that would probably be a viable alternative electronic currency since they offer a convenient single payment system and according to the recent thread may already account for up to 1/3 of US ecommerce.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=564080
Try GitX: http://gitx.frim.nl/
Youporn makes money via affiliate programs with VideoBox, AdultFriendFinder, a live cams producer and then other general traffic programs with various adult companies. I have no idea if they're profitable or not, though.

I suspect that you'll see a gradual drop-off in the number of adult tube sites because there are only so many affiliate programs around and if the conversion rates continue to drop, especially for mainstrain porn they just won't have enough money to pay their server and bandwidth costs and still make enough money to survive.

Some of them have hybrid business models, some just host blatant pirated content, some are trying to do things right...it's a real mix out there.
> First, there is no point looking at current prices, because it is a service running on relatively unsubsidised ifrastructure.

Umm, if it's actually cheaper, it doesn't need subsidized infrastructure.
Whoa, that's awesome! My advisor got to take Emag from J.D. Jackson himself - Taking a course from the author of a famous text is truly the kind of thing that you get permanent bragging rights about.
Map of today's Amtrak network: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Amtrak_ne...
Google: We'd love to supply ads for Twitter
Go man go!
quite a frogtal.
AOL’s Plan To Take On Facebook Connect With Lifestreaming and Chat
Here's the secret: there is no secret ("There is no spoon, Neo.")

GE's hiring practices, although touted quite a lot in Topgrading (which was recommended to me by Mint.com's CEO), may not necessarily work in your case. But the underlying principle of "hire the smartest people" is a theme throughout the book that ties into a bunch of general themes I've seen from many start up success stories.

I don't actually like to read books on this stuff, I'd rather study the people who started the company and hear it directly from them. Across the board, I've heard a pattern of things. I'll grab a few from this: http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html

1. Hire smart people (#6)

2. Launch fast, iterate a lot (#8)

3. Be frugal (#12)

4. Hustle like crazy (#18)

5. Don't be afraid to take risks (#16)

* This is not a deal breaker.

Use anecdotes for inspiration, nothing else. There are way too many variables that you aren't seeing or accounting for.
And others get offended when I refute that exact same thing by saying "Nope, I'm not a computer janitor." :)
Any idea how this will work with forks and branches? Right now it looks like it's a separate set of issues for each user/project combo. How will that work when u merge somebody else's commit that says "close #1"?
It also says nothing about "mass texting"

They're only talking about texting. Not twitter.
People must think that network admins at major corporations are retarded! Besides, what is there to tweet when you're at work?

"Boss took my stapler again :("
Why Bankers Would Rather Work for $0.00 Than $500K
Technology Is Not Neutral: How Bible Technology Shapes Our Faith
Investment in early stage companies: down but not out
So much for recession proof: U.S. video game sales take a 17 percent dip in March
Facebook fbFund launches YC-style incubator
Ongoing discussion on using SQL for local browser storage
"In some cases this works, in your example it doesn't as 'real intelligence' is undefined, yet we are expected to accept that this undefined and unmeasured form of intelligence correlates with IQ."

So do you think (general) intelligence exists?
Or even "don't say things to people like 'don't say things to kids like "don't stuff beans up your nose"'"?
> Sometimes "programmer" carries too strong a connotation of "code monkey".

You write that like code monkey is a bad thing.

> I find it best to just avoid places where this is true.

It is good to avoid places that look down on code monkeys.
The TechFellows Award - Investing in Startups
Not to mention the impossibility of learning a language without actually programming in it.
I think Hadoop and M/R seem to be best for:

"Take the data, transform it into another form ONCE, query the transformed using a low latency scheme many times".

(E.g. building a web index or in my case, building per ad/per user/per publisher key/value pairs for ad targeting).
You might want to check out Bolt Bus. Between DC, Philly, NY, Boston it is now my preferred method of travel. Power outlets, wireless for the laptop, trips every hour, good city center locations, online booking, and super-low prices make it essentially unbeatable.

Edit: I'm not arguing bus over train; just trying to help folks out by presenting an interesting alternative
"These assessments are confirmed by the actual experience of high-speed rail lines in Japan and Europe. Since Japan introduced high-speed bullet trains, passenger rail has lost more than half its market share to the automobile. Since Italy, France, and other European countries opened their high-speed rail lines, rail’s market share in Europe has dwindled from 8.2 to 5.8 percent of travel. If high-speed rail doesn’t work in Japan and Europe, how can it work in the United States?"

The author who wrote that has in all likelihood never traveled by train in Europe. At least in Germany, high speed trains are a huge success and often overcrowded when I use them.
The issue "voting" feature seems to have been inspired by HN!
Samsung i780 Black Unlocked
Samsung i780 is the new reconstructed handset of Samsung with many features and amazing look. A well prepared handset with GPS feature. Some more features include with the phone are Pocket Office Word Excel PowerPoint and PDF viewer.
Ok, I think I get it. It's really about entropy. When you create a UTM at time t=1 it's only universal at time t=1, because at time t=2 the information content of the universe has increased, and now you have the TM formerly known as universal.

At first it struck me as absurd: "you can't build a computer for functions that don't exist." Um, right. But that's exactly it. Tomorrow there will exist functions that don't exist today.

Or, from the classification/sensor perspective: "choose any number, I can then add 1 to it and my number will be larger than yours." Um, yeah. But again the UTM is part of the universe and therefore can't contain more information than the universe. Tomorrow the quantity of information in the universe will have increased and your formerly universal TM will fail.

The speed issue is kind of a red herring. If you created the ultimate cisc computer that could compute the entire universe in a single clock cycle it would be constrained by size rather than speed. And tomorrow it would fail.
Omega-3 needs to be balanced against Omega-6, but there isn't agreement on the ratio. They're polyunsaturated fats, which I try to limit. But I aim for a 1:1 ratio.

Omega-3 is anti-inflammatory, the Omega-6 pro-inflammatory. They're both essential to bodily processes, even though O-6 is pro-inflammation.

Good sources of O-3: Fish Oil, Krill Oil, Salmon Oil
Brad Feld on the Entreprenurship Ecosystem
"They moved me to the basement"
I usually assume that a statistic is more accurate than an anecdote, unless you have done some research that shows his statistic to be wrong.
besides the fact that for point 2, your Series A investors will most definitely renegotiate to whatever they want, anyway.
Ask HN: MemberGate -- Worth It?
Hi everyone,

A client of mine just got back from a seminar. Apparently, a company (looks like a CMS) was pushing their product MemberGate (http://membergate.com), which costs around $5,000

What do you think? I'm leaning towards it being a knock-off/rip-off. There's nothing on them online.
Only collaborators can close tickets, so if you merge in commits from someone without permissions the 'close #1' will have no effect.
How To Nail An Interview
Right, well, that may be true -- however the craigslist posting really only mentions "free rent" in exchange.

A real advisor will get stock in your company in exchange for connections, advice, and an ongoing relationship that includes stock vesting.

Caveat erus.
Well, sure, okay. I'm quite happy to be called a code monkey by someone who respects what we code monkeys do. ;)
thanks pclark!

I'm a big believer in twitter (and socially created news) as news services - and created this startup to prove it can work

let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions

Cheers

Justin
- http://TwitterGrep.com
A word of warning for all those who would read this. Employment is understood to be a lagging indicator in economic circles, and this principle is well reflected in the graph data. We now know that the recession started in Q4 07, but you do not see red in the data until '08.

Hence, it is perhaps better to read "X jobs created/lost nationwide since YYYY" as "We were creating/losing jobs at a rate of X per year in YYYY".

Why? The data represents the number of jobs lost or gained At That Point Since The Year before. I know it says it on the graph, but I find that this is easily overlooked.
I understand that I am responding to a sockpuppet troll, but if anyone else would like to explain how you come to that conclusion, I'd like to hear it.
Whats interesting about the model of selling minutes is that it is now used almost as a currency in some countries (specifically in african countries) where a cab driver will accept a transfer of minutes rather than money because he knows he can resell those minutes to someone else.
I go to a fairly difficult school and I work 25+ hours a week at an internship. So routine is very important to me, a lot of time Diet, Sleep, and Exercise go to the wayside. It seems I will get a good routine going of eating well and exercising but then I go on break and I loose it.

Thanks for reminding me.
Similar in spirit: Bemmu posted this idea on Hacker News some time ago, but to the best of my understanding, he had to pull out. http://www.coworkthailand.com/
This is the wrong way to go. I would guess that high-speed trains will only reduce people's reliance on airplanes, which are themselves a form of mass-transit. This particular change should be easy to effect, as many casual travelers will be swayed by the (hopefully) greater convenience of train travel versus the airport hassle.

However, many who are over-reliant on their cars will continue to be so, as they are less likely to be the people traveling frequently by plane. Also, people will have no incentive to reduce their car dependence so long as they still have to drive everyday for work/groceries/practically everything, unless they are lucky enough to already live in one of the rare (at least in the USA) cities with public transportation that could be rationally argued as superior to individual cars.

So, I would argue that massive investment in intra-city public transport infrastructure would have a more significantly positive long-term effect, as its availability would be relevant to more people, and has a the potential to cause a significantly larger reduction in the number of miles driven per person in the USA.

Unfortunately, the negative stigma that seems to linger over public transport in many parts of this country would likely retard these benefits. The real utility of the simple bus systems that would be a reasonable first step, as opposed to metros/subways, would not become apparent until the use of mass-transit reached a critical mass, at which the density of cars on the road would be reduced to a point allowing buses to travel quickly. Though, the importance of reaching this critical mass, which creates a sort of chicken<->egg problem, could be reduced by dedicated bus lanes, as some others have already mentioned.
The operative phrase being "except in the case of adoption."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Twin_Family_Study#The...
Here you go: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/4548943/B...
this is awesome... now to figure out how to upload our retrospectiva issues list into it :)
Evidence suggests first zombie Mac botnet is active
Mermin's book "Boojums all the way through" (mostly about writing about physics, the same topic as this lecture) is well worth reading.
Is there a page that documents how merge tracking on bugs works right now, and what's on the roadmap? Good merge tracking could push me over the edge for signing up for a paid account.
Have you done some research that shows this statistic to be correct? Perhaps you might want to take a look at who is sponsoring this "statistic":

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/cato-institute
Be a remora on a starving shark.
Agreed.

For a presentation he didn't present very much. I kept listening for him to wrap up his points and drive home a message, but in the end all I got was 16 minutes of how cool it is to be him and a generic platitude about fear and learning. Not very helpful
If you have a point in your discussion of my first point, it escapes me.

For your discussion of the second point and third point, let me tell you the term to Google: "g factor". You can take that argument up with psychologists themselves.

Your arguments against correlation are pretty much what I was trying to cover with my parenthetical. You aren't decrying correlation, you're decrying popular misapprehensions about correlation, ones which I don't share. The correlation is present and the statistical analysis is simple; nobody can point at the g factor in one single test, but the statistical tests that show it is there is Statistics 101-type stuff.

The science is clear. Take it up with the scientists. You can start by searching for "g factor". (I recommend the quotes be included.)
Ask HN: How many of you use ad blocking on most websites?
I keep seeing threads in which people refer to online ads, and I realize that I hardly ever see online ads anymore. I've been running an ad-blocking add-on for Firefox for a long time, and it seems to work pretty well at keeping ads invisible from me. I also do various forms of cookie clean-up periodically to keep my browsing behavior from being tracked by advertisers, and use multiple layers of email spam filtering.

Do you like to read advertisements on websites? Do you click through on them from time to time? What ads do you like best? What ads am I missing that I should know about?
So facts from people we don't like are to be ignored?

I just know that you're not making the case that there are special groups that we can trust with statistics and special groups we can't. Because that's an insult to our intelligence. Sources have bias. We multi-source to eliminate them. No need to impeach the source. Argue the facts.
I have ClickToFlash, which almost amounts to complete ad blocking nowadays. The rest I don't mind, though I don't often see an ad worth clicking on.
I'm actually on his slow-carb diet right now. I'm eating lentils, mostly. Today is day 4 out of 30. It's an exercise in mental fortitude.
I chose the word 'should' intentionally; the existence of solitary confinement as punishment is evidence of the failure of a small fraction of the population to be deterred from certain crimes by the prospect of complete separation from society. It would be unreasonable to expect any deterrent to be effective for 100% of the population.

It is not a failure of the criminal justice system, that criminals-to-be do not evaluate the potential consequences of their actions. Nor does the pleasure of a perverse subset of guards cause individuals to perform actions resulting in solitary confinement.

...and stop tacking the word 'torture' on the end of 'confinement' as if repeating it over and over proves some kind of point.
Try traveling those routes on a holiday weekend when traffic on the highways is barely moving. Even without heavy road traffic, though, the train is faster. Plus you can get up and walk around on the train, there's more legroom, and food service.
> In fact, the belief that IQ is "overwhelmingly inherited" is considered socially repugnant,

Yes. A lot of people believe that inherited intelligence is socially repugnant. That is why they like to dismiss it with articles such as these. Steven Pinker called this the “is” versus “ought to be” dilemma. Most people want intelligence to be based solely on the environment (i.e. changeable through education) and not inherited (almost like no people wanted the earth to be round 600 years ago).

It is interesting to me that he used IQ tests instead of g-loaded tests such as Raven's progressive matrices. The reason for this is that RPM is a better measure for the general intelligence and thus will not serve as his little straw man.

There are several studies that show that general intelligence is largely inherited. A good example is twin studies in which two twins are reared apart (i.e. in different environments). Several studies have shown that it is not possible to “boost” the general intelligence factor through education. Several studies have shown that general intelligence is influenced by the physiology of the brain (a good review article of this is “Positron Emission Tomography Studies of Intelligence by Richard J. Haier).

From the article:

> One gauge of that is that when poor children are adopted into upper-middle-class households, their I.Q.’s rise by 12 to 18 points, depending on the study.

> Another indication of malleability is that I.Q. has risen sharply over time.

Uhm... It is widely known that the IQ increases among children given extensive education. What is also widely accepted is that IQ tests is not a good measure for general intelligence – factor analysis or g-loaded tests are.

Also, it has been shown that the effects of boosting the IQ scores of children largely disappear when they reach adulthood.

Also – children adopted at birth do not have IQ scores that resemble their parents or their other siblings.

> University of Michigan, has just demolished this view in a superb new book, “Intelligence and How to Get It,”

He should maybe other top rated researchers still holding that view that he demolished that. Most of these points he raises in his books have been known since the 70ies. Also, the debate on intelligence is good – but it should be based on peer reviewed research, not books. It is sad that public perception is formed by only one side in the debate.

> The implication of this new research on intelligence is that the economic-stimulus package should also be an intellectual-stimulus program. By my calculation, if we were to push early childhood education and bolster schools in poor neighborhoods,

How much is spent on the bottom 10% of children versus the top 10% of children? Wouldn't extra money be better spent on the top 10% (who is currently neglected).
The main challenge in building facebook apps is figuring out how to monetize a user base that doesn't pay or click ads. It works for facebook itself because they have an unholy amount of traffic. But your app won't.
woo sensationalism. why is this on the front page?
That is why adopted children and twins are studied.
4Chan's Plan to Game Twitter (The Race to 1 Million)
If the Flynn effect was true, then our great-grand parents must have had average IQs that would have categorized them as mentally disabled today. Clearly, this was not the case. My grand parents in their prime were just as smart as my parents, and my parents and uncles are just as smart as my cousins.

It's also interesting that measures of vocabulary and numeracy have been flat over the past century. More evidence that cognitive abilities have been flat.

emphasize "culture fair" tests such as Raven Progressive Matrices, which were presumed then not to include item content that is taught by compulsory schooling,

Here is the problem. Doing a Raven Progressive Matrix is just as much a learned skill as math or vocabulary. If people went from learning no math in 1900, to learning lots of math in 2000, scores on math tests would go up, even without any gains in underlying cognitive abilities.

All the Flynn effect means is that people have much more exposure to the type of puzzles in the Raven Progressive Matrix today than they did in the 1950's. Numeracy and vocab are actually better measures of historical trends in IQ, because environmental exposure has been more constant between the two time periods.

When people try and measure intelligence, they are trying to measure the underlying cognitive abilities that allow people to learn faster and achieve higher levels of cognitive skills. Unfortunately, there is simply no way to measure this directly. The only way to measure it, is to give a person a skill test, and then control for environment. This will always be fraught with potential for error.
It works for Facebook itself? That's news to me.
HN/YC BBQ -- Saturday April 18th
I like Gitx better, but check out gitnub
Oddly enough, it allows lossy bidirectional translations. The general setup is that you have an "abstract" representation of some information, and a "concrete" representation that may have extra details in it. Then the three key operations are:

"get" abstract info from a concrete version;

"put" new abstract info into a concrete version, returning a new concrete version;

"create" a new concrete version from abstract info, presumably filling in extra details with defaults.

The running example in their tutorial is a database of information about composers. The "concrete" version is an XML file. The "abstract" version is something more compact, one entry per line, which omits the nationality data in the XML file.
There are outliers, Zynga for instance has people paying for fake poker chips.
I call myself code simian all the time. I am beautiful no matter what you say!
Really? From watching a few videos and some blog posts?

Tim is a friend of mine. It's hilarious how many people take public blog posts, video presentations, etc and assign all these deep meanings to them (i.e., he can't "build strong long-term personal relationships").
Never use ad blocker. As an entrepreneur, you should keep your market sense(IMO, blocking ads is against it.).
And/Or gitnub: http://wiki.github.com/Caged/gitnub

GitX is more useful, but I prefer the IA of gitnub for history browsing.