skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would certainly take more to get to the front page with downvoting. I think the trouble with downvoting is if you have a polarizing story that is interesting the vocal minority could in practice downvote stories that don't align with their worldview. Thus censoring an otherwise merit based story economy.

I was toying with different downvoting schemes but all of them seemed flawed in a fundamental way:

You could have downvotes after a certain threshold.

You could have downvoting carry a different weight based on how much karma you have.

You could have downvotes only after a certain time has passed thus making stories with polarizing opinions not get squashed immediately but still allow for the opposition to have their voice heard.

You could have downvotes only enabled on submissions from members under a certain karma threshold.

I am sure there are many more ways to do the downvoting but I think there is a more fundamental problem with downvotes in that it creates a kind of hostile community. It might be worth having the occasional dumb story come to the front page to keep this place a civil place. Downvotes in the comment section should be reserved for a person that does not further the discussion or is overly rude to another member here.
Doctors eager to try ‘mystical mumbo jumbo’
it's not actually mine, just stumbled upon it - but I uploaded it to try out...: http://zee.me/cv.html
And I can't believe I missed this earlier, but: he cites the IQ difference between the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim (two groups with a common culture and very different genetic characteristics) as proof that culture, not genetics, determines success.

Was this a parody?
Maybe look at it this way:

There is no X for which "X / 0" is defined.

There are many, many, many X (in fact, potentially all X such that X is a set) for which "X is a member of itself" is defined.

In other words, division by zero universally leads to contradiction no matter what you put in for X. But self-membership is perfectly well-behaved for lots and lots of values, and only starts to get troublesome on certain particular cases. This is curious: why should something which works well in many, many cases end up at a contradiction based not on the logical form of the statement, but rather on the particular values we substitute in place of its variables?
Here is another one, made by the creator of that template: http://thingsthatarebrown.com/resume/
This makes me want to go play nethack.
I agree.

Angel investment is a very long term game and you'll be dealing with many issues that are separate from the startup you're investing in.

I'd advise joining a reputable angel group or at least finding a few active angels that you can "follow".
That's a wrong summary. He says:

1) "I can't read most academic po-mo papers (with exception of Foucault)"

2) "I also can't read some academic mathematics and physics paper"

3) "Physicists and mathematicians can readily explain their papers in terms that are understandable to me, no one seems to be able to do so for po-mo papers."

He then gives specific criticism of Foucault (whom he understood), and then makes a logical statement about po-mo:

1) Either po-mo is so incredibly advanced, it can't readily be explained by one academic to another academic (and while Chomsky is known in public for his political writings, his real contribution manifests itself every time you are using a parser, interpreter or compiler).

2) or.. po-mo is incomprehensible and can't be treated in a logically rigid manner, which means it would be pointless for Chomsky to speak more on the matter.

Both 1) and 2) are logically valid conclusions, but facts seem to align themselves closer to 2)
The MP3 Experiment
The Real Story: First Wave at Omaha Beach (1960)
You probably can't invest in startups even if you want to. SEC Rule 501 limits sales of securities to "Accredited Investors"; to qualify, individuals must have over $1MM in net worth, or $200k in income for each of the preceding two years and a reasonable expectation of the same level of income this year.
Interesting reaction from Tom Watson MP, until last week the UK government minister for e-democracy and (more or less) the Internet:

"That Sir, is a seismic result, and a big warning to a very large number of vested interests."

http://twitter.com/tom_watson/status/2068168426

The Pirate Party and friends are, in many ways, the new face of the libertarian left in Europe.
ooh, the brown does look nice :)
Do you usually search for information on subjects you know well or subjects you don't know well?

One needs to use any of these search engines over a period of time before making a switch, mostly because the improvements are incremental in Bing.
Are verified accounts another attempt at making Twitter profitable?
When I tried the comparison, all three tended to have wikipedia pretty high in the rankings.
So people voted on a party which wants to deal with copyright issues of the distributed music/video content (as its main goal)... A party that will now be able to have its say about national and European issues. It's a bit interesting that such an issue can be so high on people's priority list. Not that I'm opposed to what they want to do, but I'm not sure what to think of Sweden right now:

Is it the best country to live in? One where people don't come across bigger problems in their daily life?

Or is it that all standard political parties in Sweden crossed the line which many parties in any country are very close to - not doing anything, having every possible populist claim in their programme, getting old...
Knowledge of Linux is what greatly helped my software engineering career: I've been told at interviews how rare it is to find a software engineer who understands the OS as well as operations/systems administration concerns.

If the author is seeing only .NET/Windows jobs, he should either modify his job search query (or look on different sites) -- to look for employers where software development is the core competency (versus "IT" programming jobs), or look elsewhere (either on another job site or in another geographic area). In addition, if he knows Java learning .NET will be trivial.
The best way I can think of would be to have a long term test where a number of users did all of their searching through a site that would randomly show the results of one search engine, and then have the users rate their satisfaction with the results. It wouldn't be quite as good at cross comparing, but it would have a much more realistic selection of searches to draw from, and it would reduce the sort of biases that the gp post was talking about.
Is your product good enough to blog/tweet/tell friends about? If so, you're probably ready to launch. If you think it'd get bad reviews, keep working.
Here's a thought.. build a list of questions. Give them a search box to find the answer, using their own queries, and let them choose which result set was most helpful.

"What is" "Who is" "How was" type of questions.

Would be much more work, but could be worth it if you're trying to answer this question accurately.

Tho personally, I've begun using Bing in addition to Google. I think this is what most people will do. The idea that we only have room in our lives for one search engine seems silly. Doesn't anyone remember what life was like before Google? I'd often use multiple engines for a given query -- and each engine had links to 'Try this search on ____' at the bottom of each result page.

Google has been so far better than the competition that such behavior has died off. But I think it's going to make a comeback now. I guess we'll see.
I'm an accredited investor. The amount I listed was the amount of my liquid cash I was looking to invest; entirely separate from my long term investments which are invested in places where I've already signed the paperwork assuring them I'm accredited etc.
Agreed on all counts pj, I'd sign up for your peer motivated/enthusiastic mentor program instead of a 100k education any day.
I can't imagine what I would have done had I not finished school, but my gut feeling is that there's room for improvement, certainly in regards to entrepreneurs.
The demo video had a spam folder, just like gmail, so there's something baked in.

People will be able to write robots that will flag spam.
I read the whole thing, and I thought it had Chomsky's voice. I've read a few of his books, and listened to him speak (not in person).
I agree; I don't think YC would be impressed with my 'strategic value'.

I don't want a coffee shop either - I couldn't think of anything worse.
"Per capita, Americans rely on their cars more than Europeans. But adjusting for the size of the country, automobile usage is lower only in Finland, Sweden and Greece."

It sounds like some interesting mental hoops were jumped through here. I wonder what exactly this is supposed to mean? cars/(person * m^2), perhaps? If so, I'm not sure how meaningful that number really is.
++1;

>It's much easier to find and get the attention of good professors when you are a big fish in a little pond. They will find you.

I spent what was ostensibly my senior year of high school attending a mediocre 20K student state university near my hometown. Then, after high school graduation, I went to a slightly better private university.

At the state school, it wasn't hard to be noticed by professors in even large lecture classes. I was known as one of the people who showed up to class regularly. And, with little study, I was able to regularly get one of the highest grades in my classes. This is not a testament to my abilities in any sense -- it is evidence of the abysmal level of intellect and interest displayed by the student body as a whole.

Professors in several departments asked me if I would consider their field for a major because _I was obviously so interested and talented_. What made them think this? I showed up to class, filled out multiple-choice tests well, and occasionally stopped by for office hours with a interesting question. My level of competence would make me average at a better school, and this was indeed proven out when I went to engineering school.

What I did find was that the honors program at this school was actually quite good. The best professors taught honors classes, and much attention was paid to those students. So, there are niches of goodness, even in places like this school. Furthermore, some of the faculty were indeed quite good in their fields, so there was opportunity to learn from competent folk.
A tangential: after seeing this and almost.at, I conclude that aesthetically pleasing websites really matter.

This was apparent when I was in high school, even: the kid that did best in our CS class had the best eye candy (and he went to Stanford and now works at Facebook I think).

So I'm going to bookmark all of these eye-catching websites on HN and study them. Not only should my startup be something that people want, but also something that makes them enjoy simply looking at it. Good-looking websites draw attention. Useful websites retain and help build a user base.
Not sure if you're in the US, but reading your comment, I can't help but linking to an explanation of how legislative seats are dealt out in Sweden (and many other countries). It's not a thing like we have in the US:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Sweden#Seat_alloca...

In such a system, it's not uncommon to see a few seats go to minor parties. In the US, we'd surely see some Libertarian and Greens in congress if we had such a system. However, the US system is more conducive to 2-party politics because of the way the rules are defined, which is why we see it here and not so much elsewhere.

So, its a surprising result if you're used to 2 parties, but not so unexpected when multiparty politics is the norm.
The only one of those factors that can't be controlled for very easily is appearance at the moment of adoption.

def random_twin_like_pair(children):
x = random(children)
y = random([c for c in children if (c.race, c.age, c.gender) == (x.race, x.age, x.gender)])
return (x,y)
What do you consider as an adequate level of intelligence? And what kind of intelligence? I suppose that being a manager requires a lot of social intelligence...

The problem I see: to balance out a deficit, one has to work more or to delegate that work.

The advantage I see: everyone is different, so that everyone contributes different things in his field. Yes, the basic level of understanding needs to be, but everything else is open.
Great find and share pj, thank you.
I had a related conversation with a co-worker (retired consultant with great vision). We need to produce as a nation to compete, not just intellectual products but real physical items. Without pushing the simple capability to manufacture, we are forever in debt to nations who choose to.
Read the motivation behind it more carefully. It got accepted to a scam conference. These are conferences that accept all papers, and exist to generate a profit for the conference organizers. Nobody takes the scholarship of those conferences seriously.

The entire point of the exercise was similar to the stunt Sokal pulled: to demonstrate the quality of the venue by submitting a paper that anyone competent in the field would recognize as garbage.
They're campaigning on a much broader digital rights/anti-surveillance techno-libertarian platform. That's going to appeal to a certain class of (probably urban, young, middle-class) voter.
Reality Checks for Cloud Computing
There's only one way to find out. After all, you're not asking them for money; it would be more like an internship. Best of luck whichever way you jump, it's nice that you want to reinvest in your community.
The only reason number of arms is not heritable is because the variance is close to zero.

Once you include a sample with non-trivial variance (a sample including humans, snakes and spiders), you discover that number of arms is almost 100% heritable.
I just reread what I wrote and realize that I was rather ambiguous about my thoughts. I was completely agreeing with Chomsky et al. that post-modernism is complete bullshit.

To your point, if you read the linked article, you will note that Chomsky has indeed attempted to read the works of several post-modernists and found them to be totally devoid of meaning, wrong, imcomprehensible, and/or trite.

He shows absolutely no elitism or "smug posturing" or "implied superiority" in his critique -- on the contrary, he repeatedly stresses that he is perhaps not smart enough to understand these works, that he is perhaps missing the point. But if people as intelligent as Dawkins & Chomsky fail to understand these works, then it's highly unlikely they are capable of being understood by anyone.
The author makes a several interesting points, but then many of his conclusions come out of nowhere. It is certainly of note that lower class children are admonished more than encouraged, it is certainly of note that America and Britain do not have intelligent political discourse.

But where does he justify the anti consumer sentiment thrown in at the end?

And what is the consequence of high SES children being overscheduled? Don't they end up in a higher economic class in the end?

What do the last two sentences even mean?
Wow, I haven't seen a <blink> tag in the wild since last century.

I stopped reading right about there.
I will take a stab and assume you mean that as landlord you charge full market price, but take payment in the form of a convertible. This arrangement is fair only if the housing is comparable to what the entrepreneur would otherwise be paying cash for. Otherwise the landlord is getting screwed, or the entrepreneur is too loose with the equity.

As an investor I hate convertible notes- there's no way I would ever agree to this sort of arrangement unless the conversion price was capped.
Get the condo. Save aside 25-50 max. Find a company that interests you, that you would want to be active with as well. Invest the money there, and assume you'll lose it. You'll learn the ropes the right way. From there, assess if you want to do more of it. Angel investing sounds all dreamy and great, but it may not be everything you expect.

Also watch angelconf videos.
I'd argue that search results trump many of these. The UIs (including mobile UIs) of most search engines these days are virtually identical, although maybe slightly flashier in some cases. No Cuil here. If a search engine offers better results but is a little slower, then that's an advantage over having to flip through pages in a faster search engine.
FWIW, it's now:

>Google: 39%, Bing: 31%, Yahoo: 30% | 26,307 votes

Which still shows Google in the lead, but they are clearly converging to something a little closer than at 9.5k votes.
Buy rental property. Here's a crash course.

I bought a house in Salinas last year and have been earning positive cash flow since last August, and the price has come down quite a bit since then. 10% ROI is quite easy. You can get up to 20% ROI on the best deals.

The fact that you have a few hundred K in cold hard cash is a huge advantage. Learn how to do title research and bid at government foreclosure sales at the courthouse.

Check out http://www.fidelityasap.com for the sales in the past 7 days. (For example, choose the city of San Jose, and search for the word "sold". Ignore the ones that whose sales status is Sale Status:	Back to Beneficiary, nobody wanted these. We want to see what experienced investors bought). And we see, as an example:

1317 Soto Ct San Jose, a 3/2 1200 sq ft house built in 1969(zillow.com) selling for $220K. Notice that no one bid against this lucky buyer. Spend, I dunno, $20K fixing it up, worst case. Get a mortgage for 25% down, 7%, 30 year fixed. That's $55k down, $1100 a month or so in PITI. You rent the house out for $2000 a month(check craigslist for real numbers).

So you're getting $900*12 / $75K = 14.4 % ROI AND they are paying off your mortgage for you AND you're saving on your taxes. And the house will appreciate in value, you hope.

The general rules is, the ROI is higher for more ghetto neighborhoods. Modesto, Stockton, and Salinas has higher ROI than the Bay Area, but they are 1.5, 1.5 and 1 hour away from Santa Clara, respectively.

It's not rocket science. It's important to be patient, learn the rules, and compare lots of numbers, but the hardest part is having the MONEY, and you've got that already. I'm an young engineer with a day job, the above I picked up over about a year and a half on the side.

The reason I'm posting this is to meet other people interested in this stuff. Drop me a message at istarist @gmail.com, if you are.
I can definitely imagine the savings in IT support of a larger cluster, much like internet host providers parse out domains/hosting profitably. The effect of adding a control dial on spending versus bandwidth/processing power/storage for unknowns will allow for greater market experimentation with lower long term costs. Once past the acceptance/trust boundaries, I can’t help but imagine cloud computing as an efficiency boosting service.

Are there similar cloud concepts for software development? What about in other industries like power control or manufacturing/fulfillment?
The point of credibility meltdown:

"The modern American creationist, interestingly enough, no longer takes scripture as sufficient reason to believe the Biblical account of the origins of the world. The debate is, instead, conducted on the turf of science, with creationists attempting to argue the fine points of the age of the fossil record, suggesting that orthodox evolution has gaps as a seamless explanation, and otherwise indicating their acceptance that the modern world speaks the language of science."
I admit to liking to hear viewpoints that echo my own beliefs.
Thanks for reminding me to listen to far polar voices and do my best to extend my perspective to listen rationally and with minimal bias.
Evolution, religion, schizophrenia and the schizotypal personality
A particularly amusing example ripped from today's headlines...your tax dollars at work:

"Pres Obama you got nerve while u sightseeing in Paris to tell us 'time to deliver' on health care. We still on skedul/even workinWKEND."

More at: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/06/07/irked_grassle... /background: http://www.politico.com/blogs/anneschroeder/0309/Grassley_th...
I did 10 searches about subjects I was passionate about. Results

Google: 5
Bing: 5
Yahoo: 0

Having read what other people were writing in this thread I thought I would also try and rank the results in order, which would be my first choice, which would be my second choice - so for second choice results, here they are.

Google: 3
Bing: 5
Yahoo: 2

So while the Google/Bing split for first place results were interesting, the second place results were more interesting (to me at least).

I'm going to keep throwing in results later today as I think up more topics to increase the sample size a bit to see which is a bit better, as I think it will trend towards a more even split or even a Google lead, but definitely promising results for Bing.

EDIT - Update, I just checked the results again, seems like it was just hacked in Yahoo's favour.

Around an hour ago (when I first published this comment) I noticed it was about 26.5k votes cast with the split being Google 39%, Bing 31%, Yahoo 30%.

Now having a look the split is Google 31%, Bing 25% and Yahoo 44% with 40k votes cast... I suspect shenanigans.

EDIT #2 - 2 minutes later, split is Google 30%, Bing 24%, Yahoo 46% with 41.5k votes cast, so looks like the fixing is in process. Wonder which Yahoo engineer is doing this...

EDIT #3 - 6 minutes after edit 2, Total is 45k, splits are Google 29%, Bing 23%, Yahoo 49%... Any insight that could be gleamed from this rough poll is now officially tainted, nothing more to see here.
The form of payment is independent of the price you charge. The advantage of using convertible debt is you do not have to decide on valuation. Many people on both sides (investors and founders) would find this preferable, precisely because putting a valuation on a very early stage startup in a fair way is nearly impossible.

FWIW, pg suggested using convertible debt in such a scenario although someone else on the same thread links to a counter-opinion. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=565493
Ambassador Hot Dog
Have you read the Dawkins and Chomsky articles? They clearly have read the texts, and spent a lot of time trying to understand them, before concluding that they are nonsense. Both also request that someone translate the allegedly profound concepts into comprehensible English, so that us commoners can appreciate the concepts in question - are you offering?
I wonder what we can learn from "dark" cloud computing. Since their development is unrestricted/without ownership I wonder how quickly their frameworks adapt and evolve.
An interesting example of this is my enjoyment of programming versus my lack of enjoyment for physical experiments. Physical experiments take (in my opinion) too much effort in controlling the variables for the reward of good observations.
What’s Your Backup Plan?
This is excellent, I've been waiting for batch actions like delete in the admin for a while now. Now when will 1.1 be a release candidate...
I'd love to see a blog post that focuses on the 'barriers exist' point. Maybe some case studies.

I guess there are a range of levels of barriers to entry, and any example of high barrier to entry I can think of implies you've already done a lot of work yourself. Very often, this might be because of a previous job / study gave you some specific valuable domain knowledge, and / or contacts (eg google).

Other times not. For example, the sydney harbour bridge climb - there high barriers to entry here, they have a monpoly! but to get that monopoly they had to put in a lot of hard work convincing the relevant authorities to let them do it.
I share the feeling of optimism, but must point out that the European Parliament is where a lot of good ideas go to die, and it has little in the way of real power. Members include representatives of parties who wan to leave Europe and other relatively fringe thinkers. So it's significant, but not momentously so.