skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed, the article is discussing interplanetary navigation, but the title is hyping it as interstellar. Whilst pulsars might have the reach to cover the local bubble, I would hardly call it interstellar. If your travel between planets only includes a handful of stars it would be far easier to track them than use this system.

Probably the best way to navigate on a galactic setting is to use the galactic core as a type of sundial. There's very little point of navigating off the galactic point, unless you'd prefer to die in very empty vacuum instead of merely empty vacuum. So all you need to do is select a set of galaxies aligned with the plane that are bright enough to track from anywhere in the galaxy. The core obstructing one of these galaxies would put you in a (relatively) very narrow band of space and the obstruction of two would define your position even more. The pinpoint accuracy can then be computed over time by triangulating between the remaining visible galaxies.

To be honest, it's not like you're going to need instant information updates in interstellar space. To even use a visual measuring system you have to be travelling at non-relative speeds, which then means you don't have to worry about hitting that star in front of you for at least 5-10 years. I'm sure a pocket calculator could compute the angles to find your position in that amount of time.
If by "people behind the LLC," you mean the investors, then, yes, their liability is typically limited.

I write "typically" because investors can be liable if either (1) they participated in the infringement or (2) a court decides to "pierce the corporate veil," which is rare, but can happen if an investor abuses an LLC (undercapitalizing it, disregarding corporate forms, etc) for the purpose of avoiding liability.
The Why of Lambda
Well, the general liability is the financial liability. So, if the LLC borrows money, the lender cannot come after the assets of the individuals (unless they give a personal guaranty). This also applies if the LLC is sued.

I suppose the point here is that a smart person will sue the individual in addition to the LLC. Even if you are sued only as an individual, your ownership stake in the LLC is at risk.
Like many things, Stats is a vast field. Would you call a class about the basics of groups and rings anything other than an intro to abstract algebra, even though most places require both calculus and a fair amount of mathematical background?

This is sort of Zed's point. It is an intro class into a field with a great deal of depth. All you can do in one undergraduate semester is touch on a few of the most important parts.
Gift tax would apply, even if it were an individual.

You could induce a period of low valuation to make a stock transfer though, thus costing less than the $3.3M.
I like it, however, if it becomes popular, people will try to game it. Wonder what that will do to Twitter, and how to deal with it.
Very true. I'll work on it.
Sunspot: A Solr-Powered Search Engine for Ruby
News Cycle lately looks like this:

Twitter. Iphone. Facebook. Twitter. Iphone. Facebook. Twitter. Iphone. Facebook. Twitter. Iphone. Facebook. Twitter. Iphone. Facebook. Twitter. Iphone. Facebook.

ok you get the point.
> Topsy is the first real implementation of a large scale reputation network for the general public.

What if you never have, don't now, and never intend to "Tweet"?
http://f055.net/article/the-140-character-webapp-challenge/

Real apps which do stuff...
...she replied that, amongst other desirable traits, they got good grades. Needless to say this does not apply in any western society I've been a member of. Rather the opposite, in fact.

No, I'm European, been to school in both east and west Europe, and America, and the above is true for Europe as well.

The most popular kids are always charming AND smart. Only in America does it seem like good grades are bad thing.
But make no mistake socially challenged kids with straight As are NOT popular. The key is to be both socially and academically smart.
I think in their TC video they talked about adding new data sources including your blog, and your facebook feed etc.

That is a tough question for every repnet out there though, what about people that don't have a digital footprint. Maybe topsy will start indexing the real world too, at some point ;)
Hmm, so maybe the hypothesis here should be "guitar playing gets you laid, jazz piano doesn't".

Damn. I just started to teach myself piano...
How reliable are these numbers? In particular, I'd like to see a precise definition of an active user.

It seems odd to have such a sudden switch with no external factors. To add 1.5M active users in a demographic in Feb and March and end up with just over 2M at the end of May seems fishy

"When asked for comment, a Facebook spokesperson responded, 'Bear in mind that these tools gives out estimates, not real-time figures.'"
Yes, and surface albedo is only one of many factors affecting the global heat budget.

Dr. Schneider's site is a reasonably good point to start understanding the complexities of climate change. http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/index.html
I hate reading about bullshit a VC might be thinking but not saying. Either it is generally true and VCs aren't honest, or it isn't and there is either a personal problem with the VC or founder writing the post.

I tend to think there are enough VCs that you can't generalize easily. Just the other day I made the mistake of generalizing VCs saying they suffered from short term expectations that hurt innovation. Then I recalled how biotech is funded.
Motorola A810 –A Black Beauty
A dream come true with Linux-based Motorola A810 to get a full-featured, touch screen mobile device at an affordable price, now it is possible to connect with friends or family and share important moments.It is having the stylus for touch screen and user-friendly interface allow for quick text entry and easy navigation that make it simple to manage your busy professional life, while an integrated MP3 player, FM radio and video recording/playback capabilities help stimulate your senses during downtime. The photoeditor capability in the new Motorola A810 helps users edit photographs taken with the 2 megapixel camera and rich in feature including easy pairing with Bluetooth enabled accessories. So catch this complete package of Motorola A810 at unlockcell.com.
Mine goes to 11... literally. I wonder if they did it on purpose (they could have chosen any value).
Time Inc.'s Gimmicky New Personalized Magazine Is Actually Awesome
Coming to a twit near you
hey stij, thanks for the feedback! regarding specialist data, point taken and something for me to think about. there are a number of content aggregators out there, especially in the best of category. sort of the point of qrisper is to aggregate opinions and link to specialist data. if specialist sites want to partner up, well then that's another story.

the color scheme i think will remain a hot topic. people either like it a lot or find it rather offensive.
You miss out
Will the US adopt a national sales tax?
> Functional style in languages such as Scheme, Lisp and the like tend to nest functions. Which makes readability a bit hard, ...

Hard for whom? People unskilled in functional programming?

People skilled only in the English language find Greek "a bit hard", too. This truth is so well established that it forms the heart of a colloquial expression, one used to confess a speaker's inability to understand a subject in general: "It's all Greek to me!" And yet I trust that you haven't fallen into the trap of thinking that this expression, no matter how much it is repeated by English-language speakers, reflects poorly on the Greek language, itself.

The ancient Greeks, after all, didn't seem to have any difficulty using their language to great effect, and with remarkable clarity.
"One wonders who the losers are here: the entrepreneur who can't pitch a VC, or the VC who picks teams based on guessing how well they can perform and only hits one in ten."

Huh. As an exercise, take the next batch of YC companies and try a ghost portfolio. See if you can pick the ones that will provide enough of a venture return in 7 years to pay for the losers PLUS 7 years of salaries for everyone at a small VC firm.

I've never done it. But these guys are trying to effectively predict what markets are going to do AND how they team is going to work together in 5+ years. AND they have to hope that nothing catastrophic happens to the business in 5-7 years (key founder falls ill, has a bad divorce, etc) -- startups are fragile.

You don't sound like a jerk. You sound like the guy on the couch yelling at the football coach on TV: "How hard can it be to call the right plays?"
Site looks pretty good, however:
"Our team are on call to moderation your content 24/7."

Should be:
"Our team is on call to moderate your content 24/7."
Hmm. I don't tweet, blog, FaceBook, MySpace, or anything else like that. I contribute to various fora. Will that count, I wonder.

Perhaps people will become invisible if they don't participate in any of these "social media" activities. The world will belong to the ego-centric, narcissistic, I-can-shout-louder-than-you generation.

In the news and broadcast media insight is being lost in the tsunami of attention-grabbing, 10-seconds-at-a-time sensationalism.

Is this good? Does it matter? Is it inevitable?

Should I get a blog and moan about it?
Soon to be followed by Flopsy (a facebook property) and Mopsy (a myspace skunkworks project).
I don't think this is really specific to VCs -- it's just usual social stuff. You don't tend to tell people you think they suck to their faces. I wouldn't call that dishonestly so much as, well, just normal human interaction. You wouldn't tell a job applicant, "Sorry, but we just don't think you're very good at what you do."

This is compounded by the relative oddity of the venture capital business. You're basically asking people you don't know to trust you to a pretty amazing extent and to drop more money on you than most people make in a decade or two. Imagine how jittery you'd be screening job applicants if you had to pay 20 years salary in advance. And imagine that there was also a steady stream of application coming for that same job -- so many in fact that you couldn't even really look at all of them. That's kind of the mental image I use for the VC evaluation process.

Edit: One amusing postscript to that -- the second job I interviewed for after college they didn't think I was good enough for. I didn't let it put me off too much and eventually became good friends with the guy that didn't hire me. I could easily have gotten that job later if I'd wanted it. I suspect it's not too different with VCs. A rejection isn't a rejection until the end of time; it's their snap assessment and they'll miss sometimes.
That's vaguely what I meant when I said that C isn't a great applications language but C++ is a passable one. Different languages are well suited for different tasks, and if you use the wrong language for the task you'll always end up with a mess. So sometimes C++ is more suitable than C. And sometimes some other language entirely is more suitable. But the language design of C--compared to C++--is a masterpiece of clean and simple design.
Clear business model, great website design.

While I don't have a problem getting the idea at first sight, I believe an introduction video/animation would help a lot.

The plans are a bit pricey to me -- (how) did you do your pricing analysis/survey?
I love it when Zed Shaw gets pissed. It's fun!!
AWESOME! In the meantime I'm still waiting to get invited to the beta...

(please invite me on your own time, not because I posted this to HN)
It's quite normal to have people not believing in you or your idea. Jeff Bezos wasn't able to pitch the online book store, google was turned down by yahoo and for me more tangible, my professor Goetz Werner, was turned down by his former boss and consequently started his dm drugstore chain. It's now a multibillion dollar business for him. He has since then passed on daily operations and is now teaching entrepreneurship at our uni (Universitaet Karlsruhe, Germany).

Just like ideas, people evolve. The trick is to not feel too depressed about rejection. Practising helps :)
Building a Hackintosh Apple Can't Sue You For
Yeah, that's more or less what happens. What you'd, admittedly naively, want, though, is a way of saying "a new empty dictionary, please", so you don't wind up having to write this kind of thing:

def f(a, d=None):
if d is None:
d = {}

which, okay, it's a minor deal, and I know why it happens, but it's the kind of thing I forget you need to do!
Yeah - how will you know when Ashton and Demi go to Arby's?
I think that is an oversimplification. Everyone has biases, some people may actually feel more comfortable with a gruff no nonsense doctor.

It is a VC's job to assess whether they want to work with a team. In the end the VC has to work with you and that one in ten hit is supposed to bring in a high return to make up for the the nine loses. If the VC is getting the return and enjoying working with everyone, even the people who fail in the end, then it's still a favourable situation.
Does your disaster recovery work?
Instead of thinly veiled insults, say what you mean to my face. Do you believe that despising the nonsensical constraints of today's programming languages marks one as stupid? Pray tell how.
How to make your place in the world
What TweenBots Can Teach About Federating Tasks
lol.. I'll see what I can do :)
Geeks Invade Government With Audacious Goals
Navigation at relativistic speeds should be quite doable with a simple transform in your visualization system.

This navigation system can be used around multiple stars, hence it's technically interstellar, like a local hick-town airport that gets one commuter flight from Canada is technically international.
I was thinking the same thing. I also wonder why more Linux distros do not include qmail. Other than having a few anachronisms, which can quickly be brought up to modern times, it's a fast, secure, time-tested, and completely respectable mail system.
Five places featured in The Geek Atlas that you've never heard of
Wow. If anyone here has seen Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex, they'll immediately recognize the 3rd robot shown. It moves very much like the Tachikoma.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qqz8B-Z6ijM
You're missing the point.

I know it's hard, almost impossible to find good teams.

My question is: how much stock are you going to put into a general feeling you have about character based on a few short interactions? Is "gut feel" that reliable? Or should you use some other criteria.

Lord knows it's tough. That's why your general feeling about the team probably isn't such a good thing to go on, right?
I think this whole "things I hate in $language" misses a very important point.

There is an immensely rich universe of languages you can chose from today. If you want Lisp-ish lambdas and macros, you should, by all means, go with Lisp. If you want to build your own DSL, you may as well chose Ruby. If you want pythonic indentation-as-structure, you should go with Python and, if you love the "do this if that" thing, you should consider Perl.

Having said that, I would love if Python threads had better support for multi-processors. It's not like changing syntax and turning Python into something it isn't, it's just properly implementing something that should be there from day 1.
I think the issue is that the people you should really pay attention to, aren't out there self promoting. They're busy. You have to go seek them out. So I'm not sure how well this will really work.
Honestly, as a geek through and through, the best way to learn about the world is to figure out how other disciplines think.

Failing to do this is what a lot of CS people do that really annoys physicists, chemists, and other scientists. (Especially when we post comments!) We think that we can instantly grok anything that has good documentation. But not everything is an API. Other fields are full of very smart people, and they had to devote years to fully understand. It's like people who learn your native language, but speak it with a heavy accent and clumsy use of idioms.
Who better to make a secure os than a cranky, nearly paranoid Canadian? I can't think of anyone.

I will not use anything else for my internet-facing boxes.
Sounds plausible, and I've done a lot of it myself, but I'm curious if there's any hard evidence as to its effectiveness vs. other study methods?
Good guide, but I don't care if it's legal or not, because I feel it is my duty to break unjust laws.
Ask Pg / HN Community: Problem with HN submission/comments ... OR is it me?
I dont know whether this is a known problem (bug)? OR is it me doing something wrong? --- but this has happened quite a few times and every time i end up signing up for the new user account so that i can again participate on HN.

Problem: After couple of months of opening an account i suddenly realize that my news submission/comments is not going thru - i can see my submission/comments when i'm logged-in but in reality it doesn't appear for the rest of the community, it comes to my notice when i logout and see that my stuff doesn't appear at all and that's the reason my karma doesn't move (up or down) .. and then i have to sign up for the new account ... I love HN but this is bugging me a lot - pls tell me its not me :)
The American Experiment
You're not talking about the continuum hypothesis. The continuum hypothesis just states that there isn't any set with cardinality larger than the natural numbers (aleph_0) but smaller than the reals (2^aleph_0). Interestingly this can't be proven or disproven within set theory if you assume the axiom of choice.

Comparing the cardinality of the natural and real numbers doesn't have much to do with the continuum hypothesis. It's simply true that there are many many many more reals than rationals. It's not a hypothesis.

But I do agree that the Cantor set is pretty awesome.
Nope. It was some slick illustration for the assertion discussed in the beginning of the book; that we are closer to being destroyed by Huxley's vision than Orwell's.
Millionaires Go Missing: Maryland's Fleeced Taxpayers Fight Back
Only in America does it seem like good grades are bad thing

And the UK.
What else would "Chinese" mean!?
I noticed that the site has very good graphics. Did you do that yourself? Did you work with an expert?
What account names were you submitting under?
A quick google search indicates that he ran a feed mill and took a threshing crew to ND every year, and the tractor was developed to address problems he encountered doing that work.

One of a few rough sources: http://iagenweb.org/boards/clayton/biographies/index.cgi?rea...

So, yeah, it's actually a perfect example of someone taking his technical skills and using them to come up with an innovative solution to something close to home.
XI Festival Internacional DerhumALC
I prefer most of the "then" comics.

After a few years, the members of REM all changed instruments. This was because they thought they sounded too "polished", and wanted to get back to the sound they had when they were still struggling to master their instruments.
Maybe it's because you're using a contrived example, but I don't quite agree. These sort of studies are usually undertaken at a higher, more abstract level. eg. How do various cognitive abilities differ between sexes? With the resulting data, we might be able to explain certain phenomena, or dispel certain stereotypes. But I don't think we're anywhere close to being in a position we can say x out y men/women would make excellent engineers. That kind of information is usually extracted from trend analyses (eg. studying the proportion of males/female engineers who are highly successful at their career vs those who aren't), and they're inherently skewed because of the nature of the society we live in.
How to name a website by Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose
Excellent video of Ferriss and Rose discussing naming strategies and market testing.
I have tried removing it, but it comes back again. The best way to deal with hackers, that most people are suggesting is to move on to linux based servers rather than windows based. So we are probably going to try that.
Couldn't you at least try writing your congressman first? Civil disobedience is fine when necessary, but otherwise you just come across as a scofflaw.
"If a tree falls in a forest, and there's no one around to hear it, does it make a sound"?

I think this is definitely a big problem that topsy or any other reputation based system will have to work around but if you're busy building amazing stuff, at some point you will be recognized, by getting lots of users talking about you, or people writing about you, etc.

What makes topsy different is that the people behind it have been thinking about it for a while. From one of their previous projects:

CODD is a tool for creating and analyzing statistical measures of "developer involvement" in free software projects. By assimilating authorship attribution information included in source files of a package, CODD approximates the the amount of individual contributions from developers who constructed the codebase. CODD also provides many tools for analysis of the attribution data. CODD was used in the First Orbiten Free Software Survey. It has since been extended for International Institute of Infonomics that uses CODD in open source research.

via: http://vipul.net/code.html
I've been here almost 2 years, never seen the case that you're describing.

Are you sure it's not an odd browser/caching issue?

Are you submitting insanely stupid topics, or making wholly pointless comments regularly?
I don't get it...didn't you need to file before that point? Wouldn't you have found out this info the first year you paid taxes? At which point you would have just been starting out, and the "buyout" would have been for pennies since the company wasn't showing profit
do you mean the design (logos, layout, images, etc.)? yep, all me. i noticed that while i do enjoy working on the server side stuff, i have more fun tinkering with the design.
If 4 out of 1,000 women would make excellent engineers, and 1 out of 1,000 men would make excellent engineers, and yet we see that the distribution of actual engineers is something other than 4:1, we should investigate.

We might want to investigate, but "should" is a strong word. There are all kinds of reasons why this could happen, and some of them might not need fixing.

It could be that the total number of people who would make excellent engineers is too low for the number needed, and that men (in your example) are more likely to make adequate or good engineers than women, even though women are more likely to make excellent ones.

It could be that women in general, in spite of being four times as likely to make excellent engineers, tend not to enjoy engineering for cultural or other reasons.

It could be that the women who would be excellent engineers are in the group that would be pretty good CEOs, and they all become CEOs because there's more money in it.

But you get my point: the failure of actual people to conform to the occupations that they would be best at is not, in and of itself, evidence of a problem.
Ask HN: How does twitter allow multi-byte messages
I posted a test message on twitter to check if it accept multi-bye chars and posted "信" 140 times, which it accepted.

How does this work? Looking up wikipedia, I realized that GSM accepts 7-bit characters, and for multi-byte it uses USC2 (UTF16)

Wouldn't this message be double the size in this case(70 16-bit characters)?