skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a good motivation, but it's plunging right into formulas, which is wrong-headed. Even the mean can be completely meaningless without eyeballing a plot of the data. Given that this is aimed at non-statisticians, it's critical that these points are made in Big Flashing Letters before we start handing out formulas that make people act like they have "superpowers".

The first superpower is to look at the data and see if it makes sense using your eyes and your brain, not to start spewing confidence intervals.

As other posters have pointed out, it is even more irresponsible to start waving around things like the t-test without discussing the parametric assumptions that these things depend on for their validity.
Not to detract the discussion, but 10 atoms or less? Ethanol is about as simple as it gets and that's 9 atoms. You're setting the bar way too low.

If you start to look at possible drugs that have molecular weights of less than 500, we haven't scratched the surface of what's possible.
Other than Honorable
I think it depends on the extent of the API... I'd start with a monitoring program that logs all info sent or received and transmits a copy of that to various people at death, (family, coroner's office, law enforcement, my Doctor, donated to medical research institutions).

Morbid? Maybe, but it might help solve my death, and my data would also be available for research.
A database is going to do a query like that in one of two ways: scan over (all of|a column family of) the data, or look in some kind of index on "someproperty".

In our approach this kind of functionality is the responsibility of a higher "layer" of the system above our key/value API. There are lots of ways of organizing and indexing data with different tradeoffs between search and update performance for different kinds of queries. We support pretty much all of them-- not by building any of them into the core, but by providing a general transaction facility that permits arbitrary indices to be updated.

For example: in a database like Mongo, queries like that one don't scale linearly even if there is an index, because you have to ask every shard to look in its local index. In FoundationDB, you would store the index in the database as keys like (someproperty_index, "123", _id) and an index read would only need to go to a single server.

It can be a hassle to create all the higher level functionality yourself, though! Over time, we and others will be offering more "opinionated" layers to save you time.
ZooKeeper and the Distributed Operating System
I switch between autonomous Marxism, anarcho-communism, or post-{anarchy, communism} depending on how I'm feeling and who I talk to, so I know that feeling.

Labels are useful, but your emphasis on building is absolutely accurate.
I believe over that limit goes towards your 15gb limit (unless you pay for a plan).

Side note, if you are grand-parented into a google storage plan (which is great, $20 a year for 80gbs), the recent gmail/other storage merge does not apply to you, I believe.
It may be hard to legally define which companies should pay U.S. taxes on products made in Taiwan and sold in Japan.
How'd you get the rights to 1) the music, and 2) the video clip that's used?
> "What they often leave out is the second part of the story, that Apple is one of the largest tax avoiders," said Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), who described Apple as the "most egregious offender" among U.S. corporations trying to avoid tax bills.

That's ludicrous. Apple followed the byzantine tax rules that Congress put in place to benefit their friends and punish their enemies. The correct interpretation of McCain's statement is that Apple is the best at obeying the law in a way most favorable to themselves.

I don't think anyone has a moral obligation to pay more taxes than the law says they owe. If the tax codes are poorly written - as ours most obviously are - then fix those instead of blaming the entities who are working within that framework.
Quora Blogs:

"You must sign in to read past the first paragraph."
Seeing every tech blog in the universe carrying this story in my Facebook feed this morning got me really excited. So I actually went over and tried to log into my old Flickr account.

And so encountered Yahoo's terrible login system for Australian users. No 1TB for me.
Hope he's having a beer with Jim right about now. God bless.
But, couldn't I just coerce any data to be an image and then just use it as a general store?

Certainly. I imagine flickrstore.py in my near future - it'd be like megaupload (was) without the nagware.
Actually, "I could care less" is a transplanted idiom (from Yiddish), and is correct. It implies "... but that would be too much work." It is an Americanism, though, and is not generally understood outside of the lingering cultural influences of the "borscht belt".

English -- any natural language that's progressed beyond early creole, for that matter -- is not, and should not be treated like, a completely self-consistent system of formal logic. "Me" (or other "object" pronouns) in a compound subject is correct, as are double negatives, split infinitives (English doesn't actually have an infinitive, it has a form of phrase that occupies the function of one), and so forth. The prescriptivist dictates of Lowth, Murray and Cobbett are an artificial imposition on language that rejects them at every turn. It's time to use the real grammar of the language, rather than trying to structure English on some formal (and, it would seem, rarely spoken) version of Latin or Greek.
There is a useful distinction to be found between creation and enabling: permitting someone to toil your field is significantly different than actually doing the toiling.

Capital infrastructure is one input among many to any industrial process. I place about the same value upon it as the electrical and sewage infrastructure we build our businesses upon. No reason to revere it more than our other infrastructures.

I would deny both the sewage system and the capital system the verb "create" in this context.
Noblesse Oblige is dead. The ultra-rich hoard their wealth. They won't even invest in their own country by paying their taxes without tax shelters. What makes you think they would invest in something that might benefit others?
Yahoo! bought Geocities on or about Jan 28th, when their stock was at $44. Two and a half years later, after peaking around $108, their stock was trading at $4.

Hope the Geocities founders cashed out in time (and weren't locked into unvested shares). I'd hate to get a tenth of the agreed upon price for my company.
> I would like to amend your statement from "guys are creepy" to "guys are easily perceived as creepy".

Well, both are true of course -- there are actually large numbers of guys whom I think it's fair to term "creepy," and there are many guys who are not really creepy, but because of the former group, they don't get the benefit of the doubt.

I try not to be creepy, but inevitability there are circumstance where something I do, even if well-meant, ends up looking kinda creepy, and I'm only too aware of it. Oh well, at least I try... TT
Optimal Brain Development Requires Being Wrong a Lot
It is.

We are in the process to build one of the best ressources on Product Management on the web right now and Ken's essay was a perfect fit. It's really hard to find good advice on hiring Product Managers so I've reached out to him re re-publishing his essay :)

Also make sure to check out what they are doing over at the Google Ventures Design Staff blog:
http://www.designstaff.org/
It's $49.99 a year, though. As a fairly heavy flickr user I could easily see spending $4.16/month to remove ads.
I see this as a pretty viable alternative to cash. I don't like carrying any cash, and pretty much rely on my credit and debit cards alone. With this, I can simply Square Cash via e-mail the few establishments/recipients that don't accept credit card. And from what it looks like, it seems to be independent of the sender's e-mail service (unlike sending money via Gmail). Neat.
I am a pro user, but I don't have a recurring subscription, I just rebuy it every 2 years, now I'm going to have to pay double for no ads, seems like I got screwed most of all.
While Apple likely isn't breaking the law (at least not seriously) what you seem to be missing is that as an American, you are liable to pay income tax regardless of where in the world you earn it. 'Technicalities' are allowing Apple (and many many many other companies) to avoid a large amount of the income tax fairness suggests they ought to pay. The article states that Apple pays little to no income tax to _any_ foreign government.
Brilliant.

Doubly useful seeing as I hardly ever contribute to everything.
"David would come in with a grand new feature idea, and I’d tell him which parts were infeasible or impossible, which tricky conditions and edge cases we’d need to consider, and which other little niceties and implementation details we should add."

David was the lead developer or?
Congrats to all the folks at Tumblr
I like the idea.

Initial thoughts is you might run into issues using the exact "kickstarter" name. Maybe change it to a more generic "crowdfunding" or something similar.
I'm surprised by this - I'd have thought the more Google knows about a user's purchase history, the more effective Google's ads would be for that user.
>>>Even though Tumblr was never a one-person company, it usually felt like a one-person product.

That.

I didn't stay with Tumblr long -- the limitations eventually got to me -- but I always had the sense this was a product with a personality behind it, not a committee.
The other old saying goes: "success is 10% talent and 90% hard work". Which is both compatible with real life experience and more optimistic than what the article says: "without talent you're screwed". I strongly prefer the former way of saying this!
I think the point is that they are managing to avoid paying tax to any overseas governments on the income too
Apple dodged all the taxes they could, and saved $1.9 trillion overseas. When they got called out on it, they hit it right back and said "go right on ahead, fix the loopholes we're using, tax us more, let us help."
I had a similar experience. The CEO even warned the developers to find work elsewhere since the companies products would probably be dissolved since all the bigger company was interested in was some of our technology.

I was smart along with a few others. The rest of the employees rolled the dice and lost. They discontinued the entire line of products and canned any of the employees who came over with the acquisition. Within a year, there were no traces of our startup, just a few new products using our technology.

I'm still bitter about it. . .
I'll be updating the content of each chapter and the book as a whole (the plan is) on a weekly basis.
Yes, you'll have a cease & desist as soon as Kickstarter sees the URL and site name.
As a reader I'd usually would like to see what I should want. Then I get some value.

Unfortunately, what I should want according to others is generally "news that'll make them richers", while I think I just want neutral information ;-)

And that's why today what I see is tumblr/yahoo merger stuff everywhere.
> If Facebook did the equivalent of putting a chessboard between us

Spot on!

Facebook's addition of games to the platform was obviously a way to address this issue, but a failed one, because the 3rd parties have to earn money themselves, and can't just benefit from the additional data that users may generate/reaveal when playing, that can be used for improving the advertisement platform.

I.e. if Facebook as you said, made a chess game or perhaps a social game, then it could involve friends of friends, and thus make a user expand his or hers friendship circle. Meanwhile, this new data about what connected them, etc, etc, could be very valueable to the ad platform because it would show what made the user give in to the uknown.
My 0.2 $ (1.16 kr. DKK)
Unfortunately how?

Amazing person doing amazing things has an option to not take the money and have 100% of the upside of his amazingness.

What people seem to forget is that it's about risk.

VC investing is high risk. For every 10 investments, 1 is wildly profitable and the other 9 are failures or low returns.

For that reason the ROI for that 1 out of 10 success cannot be "fair" by your metric - VC has to make enough to cover the 9 losses and some profit.

What the amazing person gets from the deal is knowing that even in the likely 90% case of failure, he won't sink in debt to fund his work.
Do they actually do fulfillment of real rewards, or only of schwag like tshirts?
Go 1.1 performance improvements
I'm not sure it is a good idea to store backups in place where they can be deleted anytime due to violation of terms (data disguised as photos != photos).
I meant AT&T or other buying twilio. In terms ogf government, the auto bailouts set a precedent for others to follow.
And the logo used on the page. Bizarre.

Anyway, this has been an obvious opportunity. Good to see someone jumping in on it.
One would certainly hope that reflects the business direction. Ideally it always would...
Yep, brilliant for 5 year olds and the "Pocket Edition" tablet interface is a lot easier for young kids to handle than the mouse-keyboard version on the PC. Plus the world is smaller, which makes it a lot harder to get hopelessly lost.

PS: People who live in brightly-coloured woolen houses shouldn't play with buckets of lava.
Let me guess, google wallet will require g+?
But then GE would have to pay those taxes too. And with the campaign contributions they make, we can't be having that.
CHANGE THE WORLD
That's a rough flow though. Assuming the external browser finishes itself when the auth page calls window.close you still have a bunch of ugly activity launches in between; you probably see the last thing you were browsing for a few hundred milliseconds, etc. Not very polished.
Not "might" run into issues, rather "definitely". This is blatant trademark violation. "Kickstarter" is a registered mark[1]. Given that trademark law requires the holder to defend the mark or risk losing it, this is like painting a target on your back.

[1] http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4808:va...
If he wasn't a real founder, it would be very rare for him to start with more than 1% and that wouldn't be anywhere near that after ~5 years. I doubt he has more than .25% after all the VC funding rounds and the associated dilution.

Then there are the likely VC liquidation preference multipliers where they'll get a larger piece of the pie.

He's been gone since 2010 so I'm guessing any options he had were exercised so it should be long term capital gains. Figure in taxes and take away any previous exercise costs and I bet it's around 1-1.5 million that he's cleared. A nice sum, but definitely not "yacht-and-helicopter money".
Interesting, this is like the second Kickstarter support company I've heard of in as many days - a KS I supported is using BackerKit[1] to help manage their fulfillment.

There's also Topatoco's Make That Thing[2], though that's currently invite-only, mostly to people who're already part of the Topatoco empire.

This is definitely a new flavor of B2B service opening up. If I wasn't so busy working on the content for my next comic-book kickstarter, I'd be trying to see if I can come up with a spin on it myself...

[1]: https://www.backerkit.com
[2]: http://makethatthing.com
Somewhat relevant talk by Milton Friedman that I found enlightening when thinking about these tax matters (economics of tax shelters, tax cuts being the "product" politicians "sell", etc.): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TruCIPy79w8 (I strongly recommend watching all of it, but around 5:50 in he talks about why the tax system will remain complicated if you have an internet attention span).
And now I have to work harder to avoid PayPal.

I think I'm going to start looking into my email setup, just in case.
On Defending Against Unintended Consequences
Perhaps you should have a look at pigz, a multi-threaded implementation of gzip. It uses the same flags as gzip, so -# specifies speed (-1 runs the fastest with the least compression ... -9 runs the slowest with the best compression), and by default it spawns as many processes as you have processors. I've never done any formal benchmarks, so I'm not qualified to speak as to its efficiency, however.

Based on your late-90's upload rate (and assuming you're working with large files that compress nicely), I'd say the more time you spend on compression, the less overall time you're looking at. That 100kb/s (theoretical) limit is really the first bottleneck you should be fixing, though.

[edit]: I completely misread that as kilobits/s. Point still stands minus the 90's bit.
Google Checkout Phasing Out
How Should the Law Think About Robots?
The fact that the site is so blatantly infringing on a trademark speaks volumes about the service in general.
If you give 'em your email they show you a price list for t-shirts, and say "Contact us for 3D prints, postcards, stickers, posters, hats, …". They're not a one-stop fulfillment shop.
Thanks, We are planning a visual refresh of the site and Stripe will certainly be part of the new offering :)
babushka - http://babushka.me/
well there goes freedom of the press. Because who will talk to the press now?
Man, that would have been useful in college.
That free 1 TB of storage is a big deal. 1 TB of storage on Google Drive is currently $49.99 a month! (DropBox is even more expensive). When Google lowers their prices too, we'll quickly arrive to the situation where we can have free/cheap unlimited storage for life. That's amazing.
http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...
Cool article. I'm a big fan of noQuery. One thing you could improve is regarding appending, using insertAdjacentHTML instead of constructing the DOM manually in a document fragment. It's significantly less code and should perform better.
Thanks! This is exactly what I was missing. Hopefully they keep it around.
Lego Duplo will become the Next Lego Technic.
Quantity will become the Next Quality.
The Public will become the Next Elite.
Let Google Reader users tremble at the Google+ revolution.
Working Men of All Countries Unite!
Does the fact that no one has left any comment yet indicate that not many people here use app engine?
one can only dream...
This reminded me of an idea I mentioned to a friend a couple months ago. The thought creeped him out a bit, but he didn't think it went to far.

Basically, I told him I expected something like 4square to come along that tells you not specifically who (strangers) is at certain locations, but give a profile of the overall group that has checked into the location. The easiest example could be just showing what bars in an area are currently filled with liberals, and which ones currently filled with republicans. Maybe even a sliding color scale that shows just how political they are or how heavily the population of the bar swing ones way. However, I would imagine it to include a much wider list of attributes to include things like what type of movies and music I like etc. and point out what locations are filled with like minded individuals right now. Or even based on moods. Or even things like what I want out of the night (show what percentage of the population at a certain bar is looking to make new friends so you don't end up at a bar full of people who want to be left alone). There was more to it than this, but I haven't thought about it for awhile.

A second thing this reminded me of was the idea of an icebreaker app. You go to a bar, coffee shop etc., check in, and then the app asks you an icebreaker style question. You then type in your answer. After you give your answer, you get a list of every answer by everyone else at the bar (but not their identity). You then get to pick one of those answers as your favorite, and the author's identity (or maybe just picture, leaving you to still ask for the name) is revealed. Basically it reverses the introduction process. Rather than thinking of something clever to say and going around picking people to say it to, someone picks the clever comment and gets to approach that person.

Finally, what this article made me think of that hasn't occurred to me in the past is the value of these networks to connect me to people in IRC chats / forums etc. The basic thought is to create chats accessible only to people 2, 3 degrees of separation away from you etc. (or with x amount of common interests, or whatever FB thinks would be a good match). You then have an option to start a chat, and then anonymously chat with strangers that are reasonably close to your real life contacts. This means if you hit it off with a random person on the internet just based off random interests you share then you have an actual ability to reach out and get an introduction in a safe way.
what happend to peopre actually trying to solve REAL problems you ask?

I have been wondering the same. This article is a breath of fresh air to me. So are the people such as you, sharing the sentiment.
Question: if jQuery 2.0 only cares about modern browsers, can't they drastically improve performance by using these equivalent native functions behind the scenes?
I don't believe they idled their factories. In fact, there was an article about how they had to find parking for all their newly assembled airplanes while they were grounded:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/realestate/commercial/to-b...
Why would you assume it would be hostile? Ultimately either someone's going to buy Tesla, or Tesla's going to buy a legacy automaker that's in trouble. Setting aside dealership issues in the US, it doesn't make sense to rebuild an entire worldwide distribution system from scratch when the innovation is the car, primarily. Either that, or license the Tesla tech to a major car manufacturer and let them serve the downmarket while protecting the Tesla brand as high-end and innovative. I don't think Tesla wants to become Honda.
According to Apple they are paying tax on everything somewhere; they just refuse to have the same revenue taxed in multiple countries.
Bill Gates? Warren Buffett? Laurene Jobs? Zuckerberg? Ron Conway?

I don't know what qualified as ultra-rich, but "investments" the wealthy/rich bracket in SV (including new-comers) also fails to back up your assertion.
Genius. Stupid. And Genius.
I wrote a WordPress plugin that allows you to use the WP_Query class as an iterator:

https://github.com/cmwelsh/zesty-wp-query
Although Google Checkouts is shutting down, Google Wallet for Digital Goods still lives on (https://support.google.com/checkout/sell/answer/3080449). It offers pretty much the best pricing on the net (most favorable of 5% or 1.9% + 30c (USD) per transaction is automatically applied.) and works in way more countries and currencies than Google Checkout ever did (https://developers.google.com/commerce/wallet/digital/faq).
It's funny you posted this using Google Finance and not Yahoo Finance - share price versus mind share.
Ask HN: Pre-school educational software
Hi all,

I've recently come into a bunch of older computers (P4 and up, 1GB RAM, 20-60GB HDD typical) which I'm planning to fix up and donate to my son's daycare's kindergarten and pre-kindergarten classes (ages 4-6).

I'm trying to convince them to not buy MS licenses, and I'll install Ubuntu for them (standalone machines only).

Does HN have any suggestions for educational software packs for linux (ideally free) that's age appropriate and proven? Also, has anybody done this, and have advice to give on setting them up to require mininmal tech support (which I would likely have to give)?

Thanks!
I think labels can be useful when they are used to facilitate communication and understanding. But they can also be used as weapons and to manipulate people who have trouble communicating and understanding. I suspect we're on the same page. :)