skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had to do some research for a paper a few years ago that reminds me of this - I learned that juvenile delinquency statistics could not be correlated across income level, race, or geography. However, once family situation was taken into account (stable two parent households vs. other situations), a correlation was found.

I definitely believe parents matter.

And, as an aside, some parents have no choice but to raise children single, and they do a great job. It just isn't the ideal situation, according to research.
Just go to logoworks, plunk down $400, get a pretty decent one, call it a day.
If you haven't seen Chad's excellent series on how to capture all the different ways a process can terminate on windows, I highly recommend the previous installments:

http://aegisknight.org/2009/04/imvu-crash-reporting-plugging...

http://aegisknight.org/2009/03/crash-reporting-in-imvu-last-...

http://aegisknight.org/2009/02/reporting-crashes-in-imvu-c-c...

http://aegisknight.org/2009/02/reporting-crashes-in-imvu-cal...

This is some advanced mojo. I think it's a huge lost opportunity to ship internet-enabled software but not have it report back on exactly what went wrong when it crashes.
Twitter is a walled garden. Laconi.ca isn't, you can subscribe and respond to users on laconi.ca installations on other domains. It doesn't even have to be running the laconi.ca software, you can communicate with any domain which adheres to the OpenMicroBlogging protocol (there is atleast one other implementation out there).
You say that, and yet I see numerous designs on there that I think are fine. Not mind-blowing, but when you're starting out, your design and logo don't have to be incredible. Design should be iterative too.
Get a good designer and trust his/her intuition. A client of mine once paid for a logo and 10 days later got two squiggly lines back. How underwhelming! We kept it and sent for the letterheads and other office supplies to be printed. When they came, the thing looked JUST right on paper. Nice, crisp and to the point (we didn't know the logo went into a certain area on paper, it wasn't centered like in our printout.)

One logo might look OK on a printout, but imagine being in an office where nearly everything has that logo? The two Squiggly lines had space around them and stood out. Anything meatier and we would have gone nuts. Looked gorgeous on their custom lamps too; they had reading lamps made of a murky glass bowl, except the logo area was see through. The whole thing just looked pro.
So...where do you work?

:)
True, but: If you don't know what to look for, what good does talking looking at prior work or talking shop with them do? For all you know, they're completely making everything up as you go along in the conversation.

Getting recommendations from people is the best thing to do, but people are much more likely to need a dentist or an electrician then a writer or musician for something. So solid recommendations may be slightly harder to get.
Overheard at val's house
Face Recognition Demos
This company has an online face recognition demo that will pick out people who are the same in two images. Seems to work best with frontal faces. They have a downloadable demo as well.
Perhaps we should now define our terms very carefully, I am using the word consciousness to refer to the state of having a subjective experience. So states without a subjective experience-- sleep or anesthesia or death-- are unconscious. Do you disagree?

It's not at all clear to me that you can have subjective experiences while you are asleep. Usually dreams are considered a subjective experience and this is interpreted to mean that you experience a dream, and upon waking you remember that experience.

But consider this alternative hypothesis: There is random brain activity during sleep, but no subjective experience of it. Upon awakening, the brain has to make sense of this nonsense activity and shoves it all into memory. This is, in a way, a "false memory". Thus you wake up and "remember" a dream that you did not experience.
Regardless of any legitimate grievances you may have against illegal fishing or dumping in your waters, hijacking ships full of international goods owned by people and companies having nothing to do with this (hell one of the hijacked ships was carrying aid to Somalia) is neither right nor prudent.
Can Bill Gates make the electromagnetic combustion engine a reality?
"I'm not a pirate, I'm the saviour of the sea"
So the fact that Google has a bunch of loosely connected tools that hypothetically could form a social networking site if it was pushed a little harder suddenly makes it a "Facebook-Killer"? Please, the strategies that this article is suggesting would only make a Google's site a hacked-up clone of Facebook. Even if they could find a way to unify all the different interfaces, it wouldn't give Google anything new or different.

Facebook has messages, pictures, video, notes (not quite blogging, but good enough), chat (again, not the best, but useful), and a good event system. These aren't provided by apps, they come built-in with Facebook. On the other hand, Google has a different app for each of their versions of these services. Just because they set up a minimalist profile page doesn't change much.

Hey, here's an idea, can we break out of the mindset that everything has to turn into a social network? Think hard, what else could Google do by consolidating services? At the least, one meta-service that seamlessly combines everything would be easier to market and manage. What makes a social network different from simply a collection of profiles is that people have to interact with it. They discuss topics. plan events, have fun. Well, the services are already there, so it is possible for Google to track much of that information. Personally, I'm a little intrigued by the insertion of the map, maybe this will be a geo-based service, who knows?
It's a fair point. But I think he's unreasonably optimistic if he thinks the problem can be ameliorated, or that it doesn't exist in other countries.

That financial companies bend financial legislation and regulation to their benefit is just a specific example of a more general phenomenon. Mancur Olson and other "public choice" economists have theorized and attempted to prove that democracy tends to produce policy which has concentrated benefits (Washington's "special interests", one of the more honest political monikers) and diffuse costs (paid from general revenue).

Concentrated benefits and diffuse costs explains why the article's 'financial oligarchy' controls policy. It is worth the while of financiers to put a substantial amount of resources into effecting policy, because the benefit is large to them. But the marginal cost to an average voter of that policy is quite small in comparison. So the average voter does the rational thing and doesn't try very hard to change things, and the average politician does the rational thing and serves the special interest.

But this effect also explains a host of other issues. Think about why politicians are killing the DC school voucher program, despite a recent studying showing its effectiveness and the fact that the vouchers cost one-fourth the amount of educating a kid in a public school. Teacher's unions are a concentrated interest, they benefit substantially and directly from maintaining a de facto public monopoly on education. The lower quality and higher cost of education that results from this monopoly is spread over a large population, and it is indirect and hard to notice. So, poor kids are kicked out of cheaper and more effective private schools and back into some of the worst public schools in the nation.

But it also explains lots of other programs. Ethanol. Military boondoggles. Bridges to nowhere. Occasionally democracy produces policy in the public interest, but it is somewhat by chance. That's not what the incentives of the system were designed to do.

So, yes, I think the economist in the article has a point. I also don't think it's going to change. And I don't think the problem is limited to finance. And I don't think it depends on which politicians are in office.
Predicting the Next Twitter
Can One Really Become A Millionaire Through Online Opportunities?
Today, the recession is choking us financially and all of us are trying to look for innovative ways to make money. Those of us who are already holding two or three jobs are trying to maximize their profits while those who have not ventured into any form of business is looking for ways to make money to ensure that they are not buried deep into debt and for new ways of achieving their financial freedom faster. To all those who are searching for money making ventures, the internet is promising a bright future and it promises to make them a millionaire.
Several years ago I was stuck in a data centre over night upgrading our systems with other team members who were working remotely. I was desperately tired and done my part, but had to wait around to monitor things while the rest finished up. Instead of staring at the screen, trying in vain to keep my eyes open, I put /dev/audio to good use by writing a simple script to wake me when tcpdump picked up the traffic I was looking for. I was able to lay my head down, guilt free, and steal 20 or 30 minutes of precious sleep between testing sessions.
Can you share the URL to the relevant part in the tax code that provides for this?
Fair internet voting is generally an unsolvable problem, unless you have a voting list from a more reliable source and you can authenticate people on that list. Despite best practices, any high profile "best person in the world" poll has a pretty good chance of being won by moot/Lowtax/gimmick-meme-of-the-day.
"There are lots of things I don't understand — say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out."

-- Noam Chomsky
Make sure you think and talk about your idea so much that you understand it so intimately and can visualise it so vividly that you get really excited at the thought of it succeeding. Talk to as many people as you can, and learn what you have to say and how you have to say it to get people excited at the thought of how much better the world will be once your product exists.

Brilliant! Congratulations on your successful first step!
Dynamic Window Management plus some slick as hell visualization for finding and grouping stuff together.

Category instead of hierarchy based filesystems.

Wham. Bam. Thank you, Ma'am.
What about the deductions for mortgate interest rates? Or dependents? Or deductions for business expenses? For the government to "include" those would mean the government is more intrusive, I would think.
But they have taken in more capital in the two years which means they would have been better off selling. They have taken $475m in VC since then, vastly diluting their internal holdings. They have taken all this cash and are no more valuable but many of the share holders are invested at a higher valuation which means they are unwilling to sell.
Anyone who cites any part of Office 2007 as in any way an example of good or effective design has lost my vote of confidence.

I am forced to use it at work, have been using it for nearly two years, and it still takes me 10 or 20 times as long (no exaggeration) to get something done in that as it did in Office 2003 or 2000.

Amazingly bad UI.
thanks owkaye

re people getting twitter accounts
- if they do thats great - i see TwitterGrep.com more in the vein as channel surfing twitter - or like just looking at the front page of the NY Times to see whats happening
- not as serious as getting a account and following all their tweets - just picking a bit hear and there type of browsing habit

re how will they find they site
- good question - im doing my best at PR'ing the site :)

re why they would wont to
- why do people go to nytimes.com, news,ycombinator.com etc..
- they want to see whats happening re stuff they are interested in
- if you want to see whats happening in the tweetosphere check out TwitterGrep.com

cheers

Justin
the add placement of http://TwitterGrep.com has been toned down

just one slot on the right in between user comments

thanks again for the input

Cheers

Justin
But without having to shop around I know they are near the lowest. Within a few clicks I can have it on my door in a couple of days--no time wasted checking around. I buy tons of stuff on Amazon (literally the jeans I'm wearing now to the pans I cooked dinner in).
An amazing story, congrats to both of you. I do think your long time friendship (and 6 years in business together) gave you and will continue to give you an advantage. That's even apparent from your writing and I'm sure it emerged through the interview (such as when your friend "rescued" you and viceversa). Good cofounders are rare. Good luck!
I'm surprised by the direction this conversation is taking. I assumed the confusion came from a misunderstanding of what MapReduce was, since it's a much less known technology. My comment was intended to clarify this confusion. I didn't expect a disagreement about what a relational database is.

I've never heard of Greenplum and Teradata. I had however used a number of RDBMSes for five years at three different jobs. I read a book and took a class on relational databases. Persistent storage and concurrent access were central features of any database I've ever used or learned about. The databases the authors of the article use seem to be of the same kind. For example, they first load the data into a database and then use SQL to query it.

There are no equivalent concepts in the MapReduce framework. It doesn't make any sense, for example, to talk about loading data into MapReduce. A map reduction is typically a process that takes input from some place in some form (could even be a relational database), performs some computation on it, and writes the output in another (possibly identical) form. I don't see how you can say the two are competitors, any more than Perl is a competitor to MySQL.

I actually know quite well what MapReduce is typically used for, and I strongly doubt relational databases are used for precisely the same (or even somewhat similar) tasks.
The idea of a non-hierarchical file system means that I just can't go find something when I need it.

Not appealing to me at all.
Don't settle!

The privacy excuse sounds bogus. Probably they just don't want to look bad when a student makes a better website than theirs in their spare time. If you just give them your opinions, they will nod politely, take notes, and then never make anything better, because it's the laziest, easiest thing to do.

Find a way around the block and keep your site running!
1. I'd probably invest at a valuation of around $100M. Why? Facebook has no road to profitability that they've created. Sure they're popular, but lots of things have been popular and faded into nothing. Geocities, a myriad of search engines, Friendster just to name a few. If Facebook would accept a buyer for less than a billion, they'd be able to unload the site, but the longer they run independently, the harsher the reality is going to become that they have no real plan for making any money. I'm not saying that it doesn't have value - more that it has value that's damn hard to monetize to the point that it's more useful as a piece of someone's portfolio than as an independently profitable product. To clarify what I mean a little: something like Google Maps is a good thing for Google to own even if they loose money on it because it keeps people around and thinking of Google for their needs.

2. Because there are some people that are willing to wager their money on a 1% chance that their money will become 10x larger. It's a terrible bet, but people make it all the time. I mean, if you are investing in Facebook at $15B, really someone has to buy it for a lot more than $15B for it to have been worth the risk and I don't see Facebook selling in the $50-$100B range. The fact is that Facebook is a much riskier investment than a company that has already been in the black. It could potentially just flop as a business. Google might not become as profitable as you expect, but it isn't just going to flop. So, Facebook is this really risky investment that can never sell high enough to justify the valuations they seek. At best, Facebook continues along nicely and makes some money. They aren't the next Google.

Seriously, what are the odds that Facebook is going to sell for a lot of money? If you place it at 50%, then you really need to be thinking it will sell for $30B to justify buying in at a $15B valuation. If you place it at 25%, you really need to think it will sell for $60B eventually. And how likely do you think that is?

Facebook is more like a YouTube than it is like a Google and what Facebook wants its valuation to be just can't be justified by what it has going for it. Companies will buy popular things just because they're popular in the sub $1B range - sometimes even slightly over that in the YouTube case. But they won't spend the $30B that would justify a buyout to the VC who have invested at a $15B valuation. I mean, those VCs don't just want to break even on their investment. Unless Facebook can find a way to be profitable - and hugely profitable - it just won't be bought for such a substantial amount. A $30B buy would put Facebook at a third of a Google and it just isn't that.
For starters, they didn't apologize. They also didn't "tell everyone to fuck off".

I'm assuming from your statements you are of the camp who thinks digg was trying to "steal" content, hoping the DiggBar pages would outrank the original pieces in Google. I'm also guessing you don't like digg in general, and are quick to criticize anything the company does. Please correct me if I am wrong.

I don't see the DiggBar as unethical, or even unusual. Google's image search also frames the source website in iFrames, so where are the pitchforks?

Personally, I think the DiggBar is a smart feature, and it seems to be overwhelmingly popular with their users. I think we can all agree that the execution was initially botched from a technical standpoint, but I don't think it was intentional. Digg made a strong effort to keep the DiggBar pages out of Google - they used the no-index meta tag, and the brand new RelCan tag. This should have worked, but Google's algorithm ignored these tags, presumably because of the enormous authority of the digg.com domain. This is the first case I've ever seen where no-index tags were ignored en masse.

Bottom line, digg pushed out a popular new feature in a rapidly developing space. It had nuanced technical issues which have been addressed, because the digg staff took the community's concerns seriously. I'm impressed when I see a company take positive steps in response to criticism, and if that puts me in the minority, so be it.

A final thought for those who seem so quick to demonize digg:

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
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No doubt, but what you don't hear is that these "pirates" pretty much trained on catching offending ships. This has been going on since 1992, and you didn't hear much about it because the ships they attacked had no reason what so ever to announce the matter and attract publicity. I wonder why? hmmmmm.
The govt wouldn't have to to include them. Those options will just be listed out on your form. You simply log in and make the neccessary changes for yourself.
If Firefox does away with tabs, then I will do away with Firefox.

No reason to use it if it does this. Other browsers are already faster, more elegant, and better in many ways. What most of them don't have is extensions.

But even with the strength of Firefox's extension model, expect mass abandonment if they do away with tabs.

I doubt tabs are the be-all and end-all of browser UI, but what they want to replace it with is certainly much, much worse.
Isn't SQL a standard? I know Access and SQLite are a bit quirky, but for all the big stuff I stick to the ANSI SQL standard.

Well, I did, until I moved to a Lisp object store :-P
A lot to respond to there, but I'll keep it to this for now:

"Those who are of the Austrian prediction have successfully predicted the recession for quite some time now."

...and radical Muslims have been predicting the downfall of American superiority for the past fifty years based on the theory that God will take us down because we're godless heathens.

If America falls into a pit of poverty at some point over the next 20 years, does that mean that the radical Muslim theory was correct, and it happened because God is punishing us for our sins?

If not, then how can you possibly take a recession (which tends to happen like clockwork every couple decades anyhow) as evidence for a theory of economics that has considered America too socialist to thrive since the inception of the theory?
You have never been acquired have you? Intense talks followed by an underwhelming exchange of goods for money, and you turn around to see your baby relegated to irrelevance by the buyer, passed around between departments and neglected by everyone. You almost want to stick your neck back in and tell them what time she likes to nap, but the door is quickly shut and you're left to ponder what to do with your life :-(
How do skydivers do it?
Tata Indigo Vista likely to roll out by early 2009
That's the thing, it's useful if you're a Digg user and it's annoying as fuck if you're not. They should have realized that from the beginning. Sounds like someone at Digg tried to pick virality over usability. You've gotta look at the big picture.
Yep: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/04/15/diggbar-fix
Critical thinking about vendor lock-in is not very common.
Japan does that, even further. Your employer not only files for you but also calculates all adjustments and pay you (if you paid too much tax) or deduct from your wage (if you owe some). If you work for one company and have no extra income, which had been typical for majority of Japanese until recently, you'll never have to deal with the department of taxation.

But I think it has downside. Those who do not touch their own tax calculation don't tend to think about taxes; most of my acquaintances when I was in Japan had very vague idea of how much they paid for tax. After moving to US I noticed that people are much more aware of tax they're paying, hence how the government spends them.

I now even think Japan should make everyone file, like US.
Industries that don't produce anything are probably worth eliminating
Analogous thing on Linux: http://tombarta.wordpress.com/2008/08/01/c-stack-traces-with...

But all this is all moot for production code since there's Google Breakpad: http://code.google.com/p/google-breakpad/
Nothing is _required_ but lack of a demo will make it much harder to convince an investor that your team gets the market and can build the right product, especially in 10 minutes. You'll have to compensate for that somehow.

If it's a hardware gadget, can you produce renders of the device and mockups of the UI? How have you been able to convince others so far?