skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We don't like them either. Hence, we built what you saw. It is all about the context and that's what we are trying to do. It is about showing an offer at a time when you are most "likely" to make a purchase. It is about asking how your buying experience was once you just made a purchase. Relevance in collecting insights and running promotions is what we are trying to build.
I came here hoping to find intelligent commentary on the article. Instead, it's mostly uninformed criticism.

The most promoted comments are basically "I didn't carefully read or try hard to understand this paper, but everything I think I know up to now says that it can't be very interesting."

I don't really understand the paper either. But given that it was reviewed and published in a good journal, and given that it's by a guy who's evidently quite smart, and given that it seems carefully written, it surely deserves better than cursory dismissal.

If you want to go off half-cocked, try Reddit.
It's worth noting that TV news had the same impact on print as social media now has on TV news. It's very new right now and we're finding our way.
The enterprise is where Oracle make their money. They could care less about enthusiasts (as if there were any of their technology) and they don't really care for startups and small shops.

Their main target is huge enterprise customers where Applets are still used today.
Your comment is ignorant (Chechnya is not a country), off-topic (the OP in no way attempts to explain the Boston attacks) and horrid ("maybe Chechnya is a shitty country because it's full of Chechens"—what kind of person says such things?). I don't think you should exploit this awful situation to excrete something vile of your own.

Not to endorse the OP, which is oddly tendentious and smells of a pre-existing agenda.
> People who believe in proving 'technical inevitability' via probability don't understand shipping a product, from conception, to funding, development, and marketing.

Let me turn that argument around. Every example of a company, employees, management and corporate style, and other similar issues, are subject to probability analysis, and probability explains and/or influences more issues than most people realize.
I have a ThinkPad X201 convertible with the 12" 1280x800 touchscreen. (The screen's nothing amazing; rather dull.) But it's a great device, apart from the repeated fan weardown (replaced 3 times already) which makes it get a bit hot. If Lenovo made a decent upgrade, I'd buy it in a minute.

Anyways, I've noticed no problems working on the 12", other than the lack of pixels for virtual size (like IDEs and stuff). A 1080p resolution fixes that.
I completely agree with the comments here that news coverage has devolved into addictive popcorn munching fare. Sadly, this onion piece hits home: http://www.theonion.com/articles/breaking-has-the-word-break...

Having worked in PR, I truly feel the world of media and journalism needs some serious disruption (hate that I used the word, kill me now). Hopefully some startup is cranking away :-)
That's a bit harsh. Just offer it as a separate download or don't include it in a default install.
Heh, I'm familiar with that problem. I write in both C and C++ regularly, and be assured, the one I'm not using always seems better (maybe Google is just trolling me by showing me the results for the wrong language). I can only find C libraries or tools when I search for C++ libraries, and vice versa.

If you're doing low level work (e.g. the layout of your objects is a concern to you), stick with C. C++ often gets in the way there and you won't be able to write idiomatic C++. If it's midlevel you're better off with C++. If it's high level, neither of these are a good fit, and you're better off looking elsewhere.
142 characters is not journalism and never can be. 142 characters is gossip--some truth mixed with lots of speculation and spin.
Selling beer online CAN be legal if you are selling from a state in which it is legal and have gone through the appropriate licensing necessary. For example, it is legal in New York, a state in which Vermont shares many laws.

However, selling beer online in Vermont is never legal.

Interestingly, it is possible to sell a certain amount wine online in Vermont. Just not beer. Now I know.

It is always illegal to ship beer beer via USPS. It is not against policy to ship beer via Fedex of UPS if you take the necessary steps. I believe you have to show them proof of proper license and pay a fee. Of course, if you do not take these extra steps... I don't think there's a problem. Fedex has destroyed plenty of my orders, but always let me ship more. No refund to speak of though.
They can use Java 7. Oracle can provide security updates for it. And all those enterprise customers can use that one. It's not a problem to have multiple JVMs installed.

The point is, if a Java developer starts working on a new product/project, it is very likely that he won't use Applets.

And one more thing, I know companies, that use Java based tools/apps, where they are not moving from Java 5 or 6. It's too expensive (installing newer JVMs, testing the environment and everything...) and they don't feel the need to do that.
Max,

This is a tiny niggle, but your list items need an empty line between them; otherwise they all end up on the same line like your list of admirable traits. :)
Chess and Go and Bridge and Ambition (self-plug, why the fuck not: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhH... ) aren't truly zero-sum because the hedonic payoff is based on the quality of the game ("the game" meaning the immutable artifact as well as "the game" meaning the specific contest among players) not winning or losing. You still enjoy a truly great game if you lose, just slightly less than if you win. There's an emergent art to the game that is appealing and interesting regardless of the outcome.

Poker is in the middle. I feel like it's more of a zero-sum game because it just sucks to lose. At real stakes, I find losing humiliating. At low stakes or for free, I don't care. The game itself I am not that into.

I see what you mean about PvP. The culture of them (at least, as usually played) makes it hard to enjoy the game for its own sake.
>> He had no choice, really -- this industry works people overlong and threatens them with excommunication if they complain, knowing full well that enthusiastic young talent will gladly come fill in at a lower wage.

Having never worked in the gaming industry, just about every 1st hand account I read tends to emphasize its fairly brutal nature. Frankly it sounds like a shit-terrible environment. Is game dev really fun enough to justify this kind of treatment?

>> And this drama -- this tightrope walk between building virtual violence while fashioning a safe space for the next generation -- was forced to live in the same building that received countless letters, forum posts, YouTube videos, and more from angry gamers that threatened us -- and our families -- if we didn’t deliver them the bloodthirsty experience they wanted, the one they demanded.

Speaking of terrible environments, enter the gaming community. There's something about competitive online multi-player games in that they inevitably seem to breed awful. Years ago I gamed competitively at what would be considered "elite" levels, and all too often many of my fellow top-tier gamers were beyond the pale. Rampant racism & misogyny are only the tip of the iceberg, at times.

I suppose I think there's something pretty "off" with both the gaming industry and the community it serves. Wish I had a constructive solution in mind, but for the time being I simply avoid both.
All true, and you said what I came here to say. Another point: breaking "news" is helpful for those who are affected by the situation at hand. What I think the author of the article fails to mention is that people are following the news because they are either involved, want to be connected (like you said), or know someone who is involved. I have several friends in Boston and I was following the news up to the second because I wanted to see what was happening. I took what I heard with a grain of salt, but I was better informed and more aware of their situation.
That was what I was hoping for. Unfortunately, Jen mainly just scolded me, said I should have done my homework better, and that if it was legal to sell her beer online, she would do it herself.
Note: I'm not a lawyer, so don't take this as legal advice if you're planning on selling alcohol online :)

The 21st amendment lets each state set the rules for the transportation of and importation of intoxicating liquors into that state. So the problem is not so much that it's prima facie illegal, as that each state has its own set of rules/taxes/requirements that you must comply with. I suppose a state could make it illegal to sell alcohol online.
I've thought this for quite some time, but it became especially clear to me yesterday. I was at the gym where TVs were unavoidably visible, but the volume was turned down so I couldn't hear anything. I was there for an hour or so and the picture and headline didn't appear to change at all the entire time. It said something about cops with guns drawn in Watertown...THE WHOLE FRIGGING TIME!

I have almost zero interest in the sports stuff that normally graces the gym TVs, but yesterday I was longing for ESPN. This just leaves me more convinced than ever that mainstream news the way it exists today is actually harmful to society.
Digital physics: a universe mathematically isomorphic to a computer
yeah, I wonder too. I think most people need change and its not uncommon to see people with two careers. But perhaps jobs that are highly specific in the way you get to your output are more so that way. For eg. engineers work on beautiful problems and come up with awesome solutions. But when they are forced to churn out code, its shitty and tough and repetitive process. Same for lawyers who do corp law vs. litigation. I do Product Marketing and because its such a varied job (particularly at a startup) I don't really feel a burn out. Then again, I am only 3 years into working...
"you’ll clear"

Not to mention the fact that the "you’ll clear" is totally arbitrary anyway. How much does it cost to offer support to that many people obviously not being taken into account.
Hugs Increase Happiness
haha, thanks for that. I'm really impressed with the amount of support a first time poster is getting from this community. Something I only dared hope fore before my post :)
Thanks for the clarification, I missed that update.
Excellent point. Those books also get into a lot of detail about medieval food and clothing. He's just very detailed and realistic. (I almost think of IaF as magical realism, not fantasy.)
I won't say that movies with huge fiery explosions are always boring, but there's a pretty strong correlation.

Sometimes, spectacle is worthwhile, such as in Ben Hur, but BH didn't omit the plot.

But I look for movies like Memento, Primer and The Man From Earth, which are entirely plot driven.

I just have no interest anymore in jump scares and explosions.
blinkenlights all over again, good ideas never die.
When your job is to get people to pay attention to you, why would categorize anything as less than the most important? Crowd-sourcing the importance might be better, but that brings us right back to a HN/reddit solution.
Awesome. I love the spider demo, especially -- the way it sticks and everything just feels right, to the point where it's too realistic for comfort. I felt like I was messing with a real spider.
losethos seems to have gotten carried away. Enjoyed the holiday too much maybe?
What struck me was the fact that this guy seems to be actually worried about his career. How fucked up is an industry where saying "I don't want to work on [X]" makes you unemployable? I hope the AAA studios (and Zynga + clones) collapse under the weight of their mediocrity. Let's get to making some real fucking games.
Science requires constant criticism especially when people claim grand things. Don't assume people here are idiots and have not read the paper.

Every year there are dozens of papers claiming a grand theory of AI.
"the reason your business was successful was because you were doing several things that are completely illegal, out in the open."

Absolutely true. There's a huge demand on the product and I was one of the only choices outside of Ebay (in which it is also against policy and risky in that you may lose your account if selling persists)
Can't help but think that perhaps this post is timed in response to the events of the week.

And it reminds me of a thought I had in the midst of the madness: that is, we invade countries for apparently no reason, maiming thousands of our own troops and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. We celebrate violence in movies, music, TV, and games. We have been in a pressure-cooker since 9/11, with a constant, ever-present anxiety about terrorism. We have had a tanked economy for nearly 5 years with massive unemployment and near-constant financial stress for many.

On top of all of this, we have a media that lives for opportunities to incite fear and endlessly highlight the actions of the worst human beings on the planet.

Then, when someone loses it, everyone looks around and asks "what's the matter with that guy?"

It can certainly be argued that FPSes are a drop in the bucket, reflection of society, etc. as some comments on this thread have stated. But, I don't blame the OP for not wanting to risk being a contributor to the problem.

It starts with one.
We can wait till 03/2014 for JDK 8. I don't want to jump on buggy code. Good idea by Oracle not to scope creep by delaying but fixing security bugs and making the code base more stable.
Post that again after you come home one day to a partially burned home and bits of debris with labeled1,2, and 4.
I think Marco has a good point -- that you basically can't expect to please everyone and you'll kill your product if you're optimizing for edge cases (especially from irrational users and especially with a 1-man shop). However, I also think it's important to be gracious to every one of your customers.

If someone paid for something and they're not happy, and if your costs are virtually zero for that customer (and with iOS apps it almost inevitably is), then you should always apologize and offer them a refund. Even if you don't want them as a customer, you can be gracious and they're probably less likely to bash you publicly. That $0.99 is a small price to pay to avoid a negative review. Mitch Hashimoto wrote a good post that serves as a basic guide for customer support:

http://mitchellh.com/apple-the-key-to-my-success
Comments from Dimitri last time this was on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dmitrygr
Of course. ... but I hope my point wasn't lost.
I don't know if I fully agree with this post. I mean its true you don't need every customer but if someone uses your product or service and is upset by specific features/aspects, its important to make them feel heard by acknowledging their sentiment. That doesn't mean you go and build whatever they wanted you to build. But it just means you value people who took the time to say something. I think every customer or user wants to feel valued.
How much of this book is aimed at software developers?
Video describing the boot process: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm0POwEtiqE
Are you able to register a company in a state where it is legal and carry on?
Truly concurrent user interfaces
Second, I challenge you to find any founder/hacker of a fast-growing, successful startup who lives out the philosophy in that book. They aren't compatible. Look for blog posts about when Tim Ferriss spoke at RailsConf a few years back (spoiler alert: it wasn't well received).

You aren't really addressing his point though.

Dmor made a dig at the 'idea' of a four hour work week (that is, the idea that you can just succeed as a founder without putting in massive hours.) The comment to which you're replying is that, hey, Four Hour Work Week isn't saying that its an obvious instant option -- it's a goal to which you can work towards.
> No, that is emphatically not the case.

I have no good evidence for it, I just heard it said. I shouldn't have repeated it without finding out.

> EDIT: I don't see any record that there was an article about you in the French or Japanese Wikipedias... what were the article titles?

Had they existed, they would be titled with my name -- and they don't exist. The Japanese CareWare article mentions me, in text that is a near-match of the English version.

There's another reason I shouldn't be saying these things, apart from the fact that I didn't bother to verify them first. There are psychologists in Japan also, and they might adopt the same strategy as the English psychologists. :)

What I learned by criticizing psychology is that its followers react in much the same way as religious true believers -- sanctimonious and very emotional.
No it isn't, because it would be a huge gift to the defense counsel who would rightly attack any infringement of his civil liberties (eg if they beat him up or worse). I've heard Alan Dershowitz make such 'ticking time bomb => anything goes' arguments but I think they're fatally flawed, both legally and logically.
That's a huge mistake.It means your not a natural and talented CEO or whatever job you aspire to get.A true leader will set a certain path not because he saw it at someone else but because he feels it's the right way.And most importantly what he feels is usually right.That instinct that very few people have, something that cannot be learned.

And you know what?I strongly believe that if Steve Jobs would've tried to become a technical guy he would've ruined his talent.Maybe some will not understand what I am saying but I believe it is true.
Exactly this. The first draft of that sentence included something about big fines on the very first offense. Then I realized it would be rather impractical and unfair. Sometimes you screw up.

This is about "screwing up" alot, to the point that it becomes malicious.
> I'm not questioning your judgement of Steve's personality. But it surprises me that person like Steve can be so successful. Moreover, how did he recruit and manage so many world class developers and designers?

Because he attracted insecure people who would work their asses of on his ideas? That's my theory.

Reading about Steve Jobs, one can find he exhibited psychopath traits, and it's known this kind of personality fascinates some people, who are then willing to follow almost blindly, even if they are shouted to or treated badly (in fact, this reinforces the bond).

Just look up how many famous psychopaths in jail receive letters from all around world of people who worship them, would marry them, etc.
1080px is a downgrade for me - I have a 15" screen with 1920x1200. However, a similar resolution on a smaller screen might be a bit more than I want to subject my eyes to. But I don't want to give up screen real estate, either.
Do you have a better source of information which provides alternate takes on the correlation? Generally people attack the source of information they want to disagree with and say "correlation does not imply causality" when they have no data to counter.

Again, I am unclear on your definition of our citizenship. Are you suggesting that this event altered it?
There is a demand certainly for Vermont maple syrup. I believe it commands a higher price than maple syrup from other regions.

I was considering a business of this sort, but was a bit intimidated by having to keep a large amount of products in-stock and the price that would come with that kind of thing.

I was also turned off by the lack of apparent success of a similar website: http://www.bestofvermont.com/

Any thoughts on these two concerns?
Well, to some extent you already proved that there is a market for extending the reach of micro breweries which I would agree is a significant problem. Have you considered starting over using a different (non trademark infringing) website? Then you could even expand and sell other hard to find craft brews.

That being said...I would be very careful about the legalities of what you are doing. A trademark lawsuit sucks, but a visit from the ATF would be far worse.
As the other guy mentioned, devolving into 4chan, tumblr and reddit are what happens when there is no individual cost--disincentive, not necessarily financial--to polluting the public information pool. The first layer of defense is a scarce publishing profile, the second is scarce publishing frequency and third is individual accountability.

There are very few scenarios where a person can be physically threatened by the nature of their information. In those rare situations, anonymity doesn't protect the individual because the information is likely only privilege to a small group.

To identify content of public importance, you would need to identify which people the information is important to geographically and then determine the demand via market forces and then determine the trustworthiness of the content by evaluating the individual sharing the information.

You end up with a trust structure tied to publishing capability on a geospatial information system.

Already building it!
This looks really nice. Korma serves as an interesting halfway point for those that use Clojure.

http://sqlkorma.com/
Listen to Uncle Ruslan, he is Chechen and Reddit wants him to run for president.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2s38KeoIaE
A lot of it - that's why it's subtitled "a developer's guide to launching a startup". There's some good advice that's applicable to non-developers, but the book revolves around creating an on-line business, and is definitely aimed at people with programming skills. That said, it's probably still worth a look, as it's got a lot of concrete advice in it.

http://www.startupbook.net/
Hmm... perhaps that's a productive definition of "journalism." ... But I guess I don't understand your point.

If you're saying that meaningful information can't be conveyed in 142 characters then I think you'd be dismissing the majority of spoken conversations, chat, sms, etc. A good example to the contrary: https://twitter.com/Boston_Police

But I think I've missed your point...
"The most important input for your pricing is quite simple: are enough people buying it at its current price? If not, you might have a pricing problem, but not necessarily. If enough people are buying it, you face the interesting question: can you charge more?"

Wished he'd defined what's "enough" at least for him.
Hey more anecdotes! I love my Air, it will be replaced with Airs until the patent on MagSafe runs out. That having been said, Apple's fray-prevention on all of their cords is nothing more than "pretty design". It certainly isn't functional or it would look like the same component on other cables... that... actually prevent the fraying in question.
Pain and hunger are the two main sensations that can cripple a person, preventing them from "competing" in the real world. I'm glad Watsi's tackling one of them. In my country, doctors are often equated to God, and Watsi should be commended for serving the same role.

That said, I'd love to see YC fund a company that can create more fundamental and lasting impact. Kalibrr, also from YC W13, somewhat falls into this category, even though it's positioned at a decently developed economic rung of society.

I'd love to see YC fund a company with a scalable model that can uplift a society and affect significant lasting change (doesn't matter if the company is non-profit or not). I guess this would require YC to fund more companies that're based out of developing countries and that have innovative business models. I'd like to think there's a lot of economic gain to be made in the process too.
An order is not a request. That is why you can tell a cop to come back with a warrant, or leave a traffic stop if you are not being detained.