skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Themes and styles for SQL reporting services
Made this a few months ago (http://reportsoup.com).

Think of it as a bootstrap for Microsoft's SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) reporting tool. Lets you share styles/fonts/elements across reports. I also included a few report templates to get you started.

This is my first run at a digital product and I tried to pick something I'm somewhat familiar with and saw a need for myself. Honestly though I'm just happy to have shipped something! While I never had the courage to actually "launch" it... what I actually did is run an adwords campaign for a few days, but paying almost $1 CPC with a conversion rate of 1% seems like a good way to lose money.

I started working on some other projects, then last week 4 sales came in (with the adwords campaign off) and I started getting a little excited.. and couldn't stop thinking of some things I could do to keep it alive:

1. Launch a more efficient adwords campaign.

2. Write some quality content: General tips on designing/creating business reports e.g. color selection, fonts, etc. and get some nice (free!) organic traffic.

3. Hire a designer and build some great looking report templates.

4. Offer a free trial. (I know patio11 would jump all over this one, I was worried about people stealing the templates and sql tables, but I realize now it doesn't really matter).

Or... perhaps I should just opensource it.

Suggestions or comments on any of the above would be appreciated. And don't pull any punches HN!
Last time we discussed this topic, our own tptacek made a good argument for using your local library instead of defaulting to the coffee shop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3607784
Switzerland seems to be the only country in Europe which gets it right. They also have a 'real' democracy(grassroots democracy), which is a huge advantage, because people can vote for nearly everything.
"Religion does have significant evidence"

Faith does not have empirical evidence. It has philosophical arguments backing it. Religion would cease becoming supernatural otherwise. There's a reason why theology is a soft social science and not a physical science (no matter what the Discovery Institute may tell you.)

"Science is a fucking method, not some "whole". "

Science is both a reflection of our current understanding of reality and the method of how we refine our understanding of it.

"Pretending to be objective is self-delusion"
We are not objective creatures there is a vast difference between nature and those who ~practice~ science.
Alain de Botton on How to Think More About Sex
You're quite welcome.
What does it mean then?
I am ok with private businesses or individuals going about their own business with whatever racist, homophobic, sexist policies. I don't care. I simply won't visit them or pay for their service. I read my fair share of Rothbard, Friedman and Block. Discrimination in the sense of making choice so long as the choice doesn't violate the rights of other is ok, even if it is morally despicable.

This issue of universities is completely different. Even private universities get public funding. Universities are inexplicably tied to tax payers including Asians. This is where I see the problem. Either remove public funding from universities operating admission based on racism or stop having a racist admission standard.
To me this is one of the most interesting things about Bitcoin. It is an asset based currency. In a debt based fractional reserve dollar economy you or someone else owes that currency back with interest. The economy is like a game of musical chairs. If a society was based on something like Bitcoin everyone could have assets, there wouldn't be as a strong need to borrow as there is today.

If Bitcoin was a predominant part of an economy borrowing a loan in it could be very bad. In a predominantly Bitcoin based economy everyone could have abundant wealth and there would be no need to be a debt slave.
Look again. I think he did include marketing and advertising as fixed costs, not variable. Top of page 4:

Fixed Costs
... Advertising
You mean before they started getting 80k immigrants a year ?

EDIT: 80k / year represents ~1% of the actual population
Maybe. Or maybe many of those people have paid to have the film made, and now will think nothing of pirating it.
I'm impressed with Sublime Text after trying it out with some dedication — it has a lot to offer, and I'd recommend it over Emacs to someone just starting out, unless they think they might want to learn Lisp. But I think the author was right in saying that Emacs is more serious right now, even though I think Sublime Text will get there.
An "inconvenient truth" is a better way to describe it.
> one has to question then why no vendor made something like Oberon etc "the only way to do" his OS programming.

I reckon it is for the same reason we're still mostly running on PC-compatibles with an x86-based architecture. The only reason for that has been compatibility, not any kind of inherent technical superiority.

> Something as basic as a web browser

I am puzzled at how you can make such a statement. That is definitely one of the more complex programs running on a typical desktop.
It would, but it would create other problems also. If I were to link to a raw.github.com URL on HN, it would be disallowed because the Referer header would be "incorrect".
You can buy a traditional printer for peanuts these days and yet Walmart, Costco, etc still make tons of money printing photos.

For 3D (where the printers will be bigger and smellier and require more technical chops to operate even as they fall to mass market prices) this will hold even more so.
Startup founder confesses to plot to hoax tech press
The tech industry itself is mostly young. Of course, there were developers 20 years ago, but the big increase in number of people working in tech was as of the mid 90s. So there aren't that many people aged 45+ working in the tech industry today, simply because the industry is young. This will change in the coming 10 years, and I believe that smart developers who manage to keep their skills sharp and up to date will still have plenty to offer and will be in good shape in the job market.
I think my dream would be to own a hacker-friendly coffeeshop as my own office. I would run a nice coffee place with fast wifi, lots of power outlets, and big tables, serving coffee, snacks, and simple meals. Maybe also sell some accessories like batteries, stationery, spare chargers, earbuds, etc.

There would be a full office in the back for me and my team to work together in. It'd be the place to meet when we needed to collaborate, but otherwise we'd be free to come out and work in the public area. The coffeeshop needs to make just enough money to run the whole company (the shop itself plus minimum living expenses for the non-coffeeshop employees). That would give us the freedom to work on whatever projects we want at our own pace.

We'd run community events like hackathons, game jams, lan parties, etc. Basically try to build up a public place where people would love to come work and maybe meet others to collaborate with. If the coffee isn't paying the bills, maybe we could charge a membership fee for powerusers, or maybe operate at a loss, if I have a sufficiently successful project that can pay for it.
History and current situation makes the comparison very weak. If 30% of application at Harvard were from black students with perfect GPAs and SAT scores, people wouldn't mind a bit of "racism," or Harvard letting in a few other races with lesser scores.
The point of this Federated Indieweb thing is to move comments (and all other content) out of the Web 2.0 silos like Facebook and Disqus because those companies aren't trustworthy stewards of our data.
> If you are one of a million (Asian) kids with perfect GPA and SAT scores, well, you're likely not going to get in. You are not owed a spot in any sense.

You're owed exactly as much of a spot as anyone with the same qualifications as you, which is exactly equal to that of a Black or White kid with the same qualifications.
Escher for real: creating impossible objects with a 3D printer
And your response indicates that you seem to not understand what the burden for "evidence" for faith is.
Asian-born student life sounds like it involves a lot of after school classes, and group cramming sessions. Maybe this leaves less time for community service and class representative. If Asians do less of this they'd not be chosen compared to all the other 'equally' 'perfect' applicants.
Interesting points.

1. Dynamics

You're right, that would be very interesting. The most obvious way we could have done this is by looking at the spread of our app itself as people started to use it. Unfortunately, we only started recording anonymized stats for the second release, so we've somewhat missed the boat there.

To do it with links and general "memes" would be technically much harder, because we'd have to periodically rescrape walls of all the donors to see time evolution. It was somewhat out of scope of the blog post, given all the more basic stuff we could do instead.

I'd be surprised if Facebook didn't already do an analysis of this when they "cracked down" on app virality a while back.

Bit.ly's Hilary Mason might have looked at this question too, and I'm sure it has been done to death with Twitter, though the demograph info is much sparser there.

2. This not being a scientific paper, we estimated it by drawing on the log-log CDF. Barring the noise that "deparadoxing" the friend's friend count distribution induces on the low end of the distribution, it was very linear over two decades. We didn't think the exact number was all that interesting, so we didn't spend any more effort than that. Facebook's anatomy paper probably has a very accurate number.

I'd heard about the fictive power law stuff. What makes me even more skeptical is that FB friends are probably a poor proxy for 'true' friends. You'd be better off looking at number of friends as defined by some cross-commenting threshold.

3. Thanks! It was a lot of fun!
I agree with you completely; however, if Harvard (for example) wants to find the next "leaders in business, innovation and politics," they are likely seeking people who've shown drive in their chosen fields.

For example, when I look to hire developers who are recent or soon-to-be college graduates, I may glance briefly at their GPA. While I care that they didn't flunk their classes (and aptitude in their language of choice is certainly important), I check to see what projects they did on the side. What open source software did they release or contribute to? Did they launch mobile or webapps while studying? Are they conversant in current events around their field of choice?

To me, passion is more important than grades or even degrees--in business. My question, which I believe is the same one posed in the article, is whether it is appropriate for schools to evaluate on that metric, too.
He's worth about 22million (according to a google search). I imagine much of that might be tied up in stocks/real estate, etc. 3.5M is not a trivial sum at that level of wealth.

He could certainly borrow it (with interest), but why? Fans aren't taking risk-- they are buying something that they want.

Rich/influential people can dodge most risk. Example: the top 7% of the US had their net worths soar 28% from 2009-2011. The rest of us lost 4%. (source: http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-economy-wealt... )
I remember Super Mario Sunshine was much lauded in the games press because of what it did with water and the effects. I absolutely loved the game but you don't really hear much about it any more.
I don't know... their data either has to lag calendar time substantially, or be heavily based on inference or other statistical techniques that might not reflect reality. It may be accurate as a snapshot of a "point in time" but I'd be reluctant to judge any trends based on that, right now.
But race doesn't exist, remember? What does the performance of other members of my made-up group have to do with my performance?
What's interesting to me is that elite colleges are doing this under the pretense that qualifications other than SAT and grades, like life experiences, character, community involvement, etc, matter greatly, but statistics suggest that Asians without the scores and the grades are even more out of luck when it comes to the top schools.

Admissions officers are not some kind of mind reading wizards who are able to churn through thousands of applications and figure out who are amazing people despite bad test scores and grades and who are frauds despite high test scores and grades, merely based on short descriptions of what they did outside of classes. They are underpaid paper pushers forced to judge people who are likely smarter than they are, with very little information. There are two main reasons for the holistic evaluation. One, to give themselves plausible deniability when they need to tweak the student body to fit institutional purposes. Two, to introduce sufficient randomness into the process to reduce the incentive to game the process.

The truth is that top private schools are in the business of soliciting donations from wealthy donors and selling an image of prestig while avoiding major controversies. Having a heavily Asian-dominated student body doesn't serve any of those goals. They are politically weak, not a threat to organize and are seen as foreign by a large portion of the population.
Given that one of the unicorns is a web server I thought it was a spin off from that - good call to change it.
A statistical overview of Pinterest
Wait, what? I asked about candidates who would be accepted, you're talking about candidates who are accepted.
When the whole question is about discrimination in the admissions process, you can't just assume those two are similar quantities without backing it up.
Hang on, I am going to ignore the topic at hand and spend the next 4-5 weeks to discuss every possible constitutional /anti-constitutional scenario just to please you.

sorry for the sarcasm but he keeps going
I think freyr is commenting on the ron unz ("Myth of American Meritocracy") article, not the priconomics blog entry.
it's very strange that in the Multiple Query Tests vertx performed very well with EC2 and less well with dedicated hardware (it's position changed drematically), but not so in other tests...
Sounds awesome. There was a place in SF called Coffee + Power Workclub. They closed before I had a chance to go through, but as I understand, they were a normal startup that invited freelancers to work in their lobby.
Some of the articles you mention are actually op-ed pieces that are published on bloomberg.com. Those types of pieces allow the writer to express their own opinion, whether it be positive or negative. They should not be treated individually or collectively as the opinion of the company, however. Sometimes it is unclear to readers that a piece is an op-ed, so I can see how the viewpoint might be attributed to the company. I can assure you though, there is no company-wide secret agenda to discuss it negatively. My own personal opinion is that the community does not do a good enough job of educating non-programmers about the details of the ecosystem. Here's an example of a good discussion (my personal opinion):

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/bitcoin-is-gold-for-nerds-con...
Many economists believe that the gold standard contributed to several depressions during those centuries. Gold "worked" because nothing better was known, but modern fiat money works better.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/11/yc-backed-clerky-helps-star...
Heh, I've seen this format on one of those "You can buy an iPad for £5" not-so-charity sites my dad tried. Very very clever business model, we often saw things going for much more than you could buy them elsewhere because people were already invested. You had to be the highest bidder for some fixed amount of time instead of the Ebay model of last second sniping, genius psychological trick.
If it was more than an informal agreement, then yes, except for that I don't see a problem.
> R5RS doesn't even have hash tables!

R6RS does, though.

> You can patch together alternatives for Scheme for most of those things, but the fact that they're not built-in causes problems when integrating code from multiple sources.

R6RS has a lot more built-in than R5RS.
The problem with this view is that there are tons of Asian kids who don't fit this mold and it's even harder for them to get into top schools.
But then the point could be made that those thousands of people on Kickstarter would be advocates or "net promoters" for the movie.
I assume you're referring to the Priceonomics blog post, while the comment you replied to was talking about Ron Unz's article in The American Conservative.

In the article from The American Conservative, the claim that Jews are over-represented is rather hard to miss.
I used to live in Switzerland for two years. Switzerland depends on foreigners for high-skilled jobs - they simply have a higher demand for high-skilled people than they currently produce. It seems like a super stupid idea to limit that.
Means or even medians are probably not terribly useful (Stanford and Harvard should be crushing the stats just based on Google/Facebook/etc.). A school which has a lot of people who go into public service or other low compensation positions would also be unfairly penalized.

"Percentage of graduates who live the life they want after graduation" is probably the ideal metric, along with "net benefit to society".

On a pure ROI basis, it's obviously going to go to the service academies and maybe Olin/Cooper Union, too. Good incomes on zero cost.

But all of this also discounts the inputs; I'd consider a school which turns a bunch of otherwise-losers into median success citizens to be a success, while someplace which takes the children of Googlers and achieves the same result would be a horrible failure.

It's complex.
It might be understandable. It might not even be surprising -- it's only a few years since Switzerland last tried to pull off a "let's cut all the permit quotas drastically" trick. But it's also very short-sighted.

There aren't a lot of reasons to actually start new business in Switzerland (awkward regulatory environment, tiny internal market, very high costs). A mostly sane immigration policy has been one of the main things the country has going for it. Sudden changes in the policy make for an increasingly hostile business environment.
The new $100 bill
I never said it was okay (or for that matter, not okay) against Asians to begin with. I was just stating the facts behind the Bakke case, not attempting to take a stance.
Principal-agent problem.

The very first thing that popped into my mind, though, was what happened with ArsDigita. I don't think they've agreed to not use the company's money when suing the company's CEO.
How is that an advantage? Sure, they get to vote on roundabouts in the city, but having that many votes have also led to one of the lowest participation rates, when they vote, in Europe.
Yes Apple can survive without Jobs because he cared about that too:

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/06/business/la-fi-apple...

Here you can see how the people he left in Apple look and talk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7HVt3xgTn4
Yup, these same steps got me there. In my industry the shortage was so bad that after 3 years I could become a contractor and make 100K+.

If you want to make money you have to be a businessman in addition to being a good programmer/engineer or else other businessmen will take the money on the table.
Good point Guvante. Amazon has always had a gross profit. Almost no comments here recognize the vast difference between Ecomom's and Amazon's income statements.

Ecomom: never had a gross profit.
Amazon: has always had a gross profit.

http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Amazon.com_(AMZN)/Data/Gross_... and http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/filing.ashx?filingid=4268...
I wonder what this means for us Swiss citizens working in other EU member countries. Will they reciprocally boot us out?
> Ouch. That hurts. First in the list of "2nd class" ;)

Given the context of what I'm arguing, I don't think you should feel too bad about that! Heck, I don't even mention my school in these discussions (UNC - Wilmington). Then again, I didn't bother graduating anyway.
So, because this article literally says nothing of value, is this guy the one who discovered the exploits, or did he just package them for consumption?
Indeed. This could force Google to move its EU HQ to some other country.
I feel more and more ashamed as a swiss citizen - seeing xenophobia on the rise across the country. it is disheartening to see the growing populism among our politicians, mindlessly fueling the fears in the swiss population and focusing the political deliberations on topics such as immigration, asylum-seekers and highway taxes instead of the real issues in this country.

the swiss citizen need to wake up and realize which century they are in. in the 21st century few swiss people understand the implications of globalization and that immigration for better or worse is inevitable. as a matter of fact the economy of this country would not stand as strong without the constant influx of immigrants. it is time we acknowledge this fact and leave our resentments towards europe behind.

for those who are interested, you'll find more extensive remarks in my blog: http://jcfrei.com
There is a higher proportion of X in Y than there is of X in the total population.
Infer raises $10M to bring machine learning to enterprise
I don't doubt that's true, but even long after the initial rush the results weren't particularly impressive (IMHO).
I know it's cliche, but it definitely puts things in perspective and makes me realize how fortunate I am to have the life I have
The Mill and Ritual Roasters in SF are both famous for not providing public access to their power outlets in order to encourage people to camp elsewhere. The Mill doesn't even have public Wi-Fi.
Quite a bit -- I've been analyzing my own data for years now.

I did some network analysis stuff like this for Twitter long before it was built into Mathematica (rant: someone at Twitter needs to make a 'graph query' API call so that it doesn't take 3 hours to get a single graph of your own network).

I would link to the relevant posts at taliesinb.net, but Posterous is down 7 days ahead of schedule.

I think it can bring out real world insights. You just have to be very cautious and not leap to conclusions because they seem to tell an interesting story. Although it is somewhat disturbing how "gendered" the wall post topic distributions are.
But really most people just stopped printing photos altogether as smartphones took over photography.
>A great show. I'm not sure how well it would have lasted with the traditional US "spin out a series for as long as possible" format.

I think Joss Whedon has shown himself to be capable of maintaining quality in long running shows with Buffy and Angel. There are a few dips in both, but on the whole they pretty much just get better and better.
You're acting like a jerk.

This is a friendly forum for the exchange of ideas, not a peer-reviewed journal.

You're proposing simpler fixes to a completely different problem. And you provided an INACCURATE TL;DR of a seven-sentence article. Hence, the downvotes.

Product development yields things like better vacuum tubes. I whole-heartedly agree with the article's position that companies are foolish to demand that 100% of their developer's efforts are spent on product development. I think any company that tries to be innovative should encourage unstructured development.

Some companies call them hack-a-thons. For one thing, they breed loyalty, camaraderie, and morale among the employees. Look up hack-a-thons, if you have any interest in retaining employees. With your attitude, I'm not so sure that applies to you.
I've been doing Facebook network visualization for a while now with Gephi. Here are some of the graphs I came up with:
http://visualizingpolitics.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/facebook...