skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Certainly do. What I do lately is I tend to stay logged out when I read YC.

I find the activation energy to log in is high enough to be useful -- so I generally only log in and comment / post when I really have something to say.
this is a superb point, excellently articulated.
The number of people answering "yes" to this post might be underrepresented by selection bias :)
# withholding long-winded reply
Well put!

I adopted a black labrador puppy last thursday. She's 3 months old and she's pulling me outside 6 times a day! We spent 2 hours at the park today because she kept laying down on the grass during the walk home. Quite a difference from those "err i havent been outside in 3 days" scenarios.

pics here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pauls
I'm American. I spent a year and a half traveling through Asia, Australia and NZ. Then another 6 months in South America. There are tons of people, Americans included, doing the same. In general it's extremely safe.
This reminds me of the Transnationals described in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red-Green-Blue Mars trilogy (which won an award for its realistic portrayal of economics). Basically, the multinationals found small countries with a GDP much smaller than their own profits and bought the whole country: land, infrastructure, and government. Then they refashioned the laws of that country through corruption and bribery to fit themselves and began operating at a level parallel to the governments of other countries, rather than being subject to their laws.

In this case, the governments of Saudi Arabia, China, etc., worried that the countries that supply them with raw materials will pass laws restricting exports, are buying massive portions of the production capacity of these exporting countries to essentially make it impossible for these countries to sell goods to anybody else. It's simultaneously a clever and sinister form of neo-colonialism.
Poll: How often do you write comments, and then not submit them?
I'm stealing this question from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=629572 and adding a poll.

Please only select one option closest to what you think is how often you write a comment and then not submit it.
80% of the time or more
60% of the time
40% of the time
20% of the time
10% of the time
5% of the time or less
Search engines do indeed link you to the real content.
Good idea, I created a poll with a similar question (it asks for how often instead of a boolean response).
Would you give me $1000 for this zip-lock freezer bag I have here?

(It is waterproof, doesn't block the screen, and lets you operate the buttons through it. Elegant it's not... but it will protect your Kindle from water and sand.)
With respect to your second paragraph, the economics profession has far from sufficient data for anyone to really hold a scientifically derived opinion on the matter.

The purpose of currency in an economy is (increasingly) seeming to include imposing a tax on using money as a store of value. See Mankiw's recent remarks on negative interest rates, which are all consistent with the mainstream monetarist theories that underly our use of fiat currency, etc.

A trend that I am noticing is the idea of credit as a "right" just as people consider healthcare a right and perhaps home ownership. We have already seen a bit of politicization of the Fed. I sincerely hope that this is all nonsense, but the danger is that the most powerful interests would actually stand to gain from such a regime. At present, banks (who are the biggest contributors to both parties) would gain as would various other industries who (by virtue of various other government imposed incentives) are popular ways that people attempt to purchase stored value (houses, 401Ks, etc.).
America Guide
A complete guide to the best places to visit in the US
TinyChat, throw away video chat and screensharing.
I've done this before, but the usual pattern for me is to delete the first two paragraphs after realizing that the third paragraph is really all I wanted to say :)
And 8x belongs in 28x's class, since 8x and 28x share a tail.

I think the author meant for you to interpret "equal after a finite number of entries" in the more normal fashion (e.g., 123x = 456x but 1x != 111x, the prefixes have to have equal length.) But your way seems to work fine too.
First they sue you, then they partner with you, then you win.
comcast has pretty good deals -- the quality of the service depends mostly on how good the coax is in your residence. I only get 4MB even though I pay for 6. I tried increasing it to the 12MB service and still only got 4.

But latency is pretty low, DNS is pretty fast, and the service is up hte vast majority of the time.

I should add that I get > 1MB upload speed which helps when I need to send a file.
You don't need to get clever here. Any SMTP server will deliver locally if you just give it a username.

So, any mail server will do. Just configure it to only accept mail from/for localhost. I know that Perl and Python both have good small SMTP servers available, and I imagine most dynamic languages would also (if it even matters what language it is in). So, you could use one of those, fire it up on a high port as part of your test process and send a message to the user running the test (which would then deliver to the users Maildir or whatever, based on configuration).

But I would just use Postfix. It's small, really easy to configure, and can be installed on most modern Linux distros with one command. It can easily be configured as I've suggested (set it to listen only on loopback, and set the destination to only localhost, and then send mail to "joe" rather than "joe@domain.tld").
I do this on other sites more often, but occasionally on HN as well. It's usually when I'm not satisfied with the way I worded the comment.

More often what I do is write a several paragraph reply, and then cut it down to a few sentences.
We are a powerful force of hackery indeed.

Hopefully a few can make it out for beers this Sunday.
I am amazed by the number of people. I attended a NY (I'm from NY) meet up since I was convinced no one was around here.

It'll be great to have local meet-ups!
Yeah, but it also doesn't work very well.
Hammock Chair Stand
Our cool hammock shop has hammock chairs, hammocks, rope hammocks, hammock swings, and many hammock stands for at home or the on the go. We also offer the #1 tailgating product, the trailer hitch stand.
Oddly, what I was looking for in college (but never ended up finding) was a woman a few years older who could serve both as mentor and sex partner.

I ended up meeting some hot grad students and getting a bit of stimulation (intellectual and otherwise), but never quite found the right combination -- I wanted someone to whom I could utterly submit intellectually; someone who would teach me patiently and willingly everything she knew, and then, with our hearts and minds open, share a vigorous and uninhibited sexual romp.
Upvoted for the town I once called home during college! Good luck!
Ask HN math nerds: How to rollup lots of data points into a 0-100 score?
So we're building this new social media dashboard called MightyReach.com that tracks stats from Twitter, Facebook, Feedburner, Digg, Youtube, Google Analytics, etc. We thought an interesting feature would be to do something akin to PageRank, but for your social media presence, rolling all these data points up into a score from 0 - 100. But how best to accomplish this? I don't think we necessarily want to penalize someone for not using a particular service and therefore not have added it to their MightyReach account. On the other hand, if they've added it and their stats are really low, then their score would be lower.

Other than manually coming up with some kind of curve equation for each service, which seems dreadful, the only thing I've come up with so far is maybe a percentile score?

Let me know if this makes any sense and if I'm missing something obvious.
I have to disagree, from experience. CD Baby was a Nevada corporation, though I was set up in New York when I started and Oregon when I left. I never had to file anything in Nevada, and there were no "needless" hassles or expenses.

Someone has to be the "resident agent" for the corporation. It's no harder to incorporate in Wyoming or Delaware than it is in Ohio or Arizona. The expense really is only $100-$300 a year to have a resident agent, and I've found it very worth it.

I'd rather have the LLC/corporation domiciled in a state like Wyoming, Delaware, or Nevada so that I'm free to be location-agnostic with where I choose to live or work. If you incorporate in California or New York you're going to really regret it when you move to Texas or London in a couple years.
What's a real-time CRM, exactly? Our startup has some synergies with CRM, so perhaps there's some opportunity for us to work together. Email me at ryan at mightybrand dot com.
But domestic cats kill far more than necessary for food. I've had cats that were very aggressive hunters, but never ate their prey, and another cat that preferred her kills to what we fed her, but nonetheless killed far more than she ate.

If this wasn't for "sport", then what was it? Did I just happen to have extra sociopathic pets? It seems more likely to me that they just liked killing little things, and this behavior is not unusual in felix domesticus.

Note that domestic cats are rare among felines in this, and they kill for fun even when they go feral. It seems likely that it's a trait that humans helped to encourage, by feeding the cats than brought home the most mice.

The question of whether or not it's "moral" for a cat to kill a mouse he isn't going to eat is bigger than this conversation, and clearly not self evident.
Not all LLC's are created equal. If you're going to incorporate in your home state, make sure your state has a "strong" LLC.
Profit margins would be slim, and good design would be over the budget often, I think.
Nice work guys, congrats!
I dunno, I kind of like the energy that he gives off, and stack-based languages are a nice complement to high-level languages such as lisp.

I would certainly find myself using factor in very small footprint systems rather than C or asm.

Seems like this is useful innovation, and there is not much innovation happening in the C language world, relatively speaking.
Tweetbucks Brings Affiliate Fees To Twitter Users. Is That A Good Thing?
figure out a metric for each service:

Twitter:

a: tweets per day

b: # of followers

Facebook:

c: # of friends

d: # of tagged photos

Then figure out a quantity that you would consider the 100 score for each attribute.

and just create a weighted average.

Aa + Bb +Cc +Dd where the capital letters are the coefficients weight the average and the lowercase letter are the 1 to 100 score for each attribute.

Then divide by the sum of the coefficients.

Later, you can tweak the coefficients (or the 100th percentiles) to make the score seem sensible based on whatever business criteria you have.
Yea - so, I have a family which eats up a lot of my time, but beyond that, not long ago I would spend all my living free minutes reading tech books and writing code on projects I never finished...really just to keep myself sharp. I've done this for 10 or so years. It was a passion/obsession, whatever. In some strange twist of events, I've been listening to a lot of dubstep lately, and I just decided I wanted to create my own for fun. So, instead of reading textbook X all day, I bought some music software and now I'm trying to learn how to create my own musical compositions on the 'puter. It is the most fun I have had since I can't remember when.
Joinning. Awsome.
Highly addictive. Previously I only used graphs to skew work data in my favor. Now I can finally correlate Duke's ugly cheerleaders with Coach K's wins. Fascinating site.
Next year I plan to spend much of my time in the libraries at Emory University. Hopefully I will do both. ;) heh
WhereToGetEngaged.com - Engagement And Wedding Social Network
A quick and easy Pomodoro timer
That doesn't mean they're the most popular. It might be people all sharing stuff to say "look how retarded this code is."

(just saying)
I work with small nonprofits and I can tell you that while they are embracing open source tools like drupal and wordpress, many are still not quite savvy enough to run the show themselves. And even the small orgs have annual budgets of around $100k - more than enough to dump $5k or so into a custom design and some integration with their fundraising software.
I say work backwards. Instead of thinking how you want to compute the score, think about how you want the distribution of scores to be. Anything you come up with will be fairly arbitrary, so you might as well "game the system" by creating incentives that will cause people to get addicted to increasing their score on your service.

For example, you may want very few people in the 90-100 range (reward the few who reach this high level), very few people in the 0-10 range (don't make people feel bad), and most people below 50. Then come up with a scoring system that fits this distribution. If you find a metric that doesn't quite fit the distribution, tweak it by using a log transform, or by adding to/multiplying everyone's score.

Also, make it simple to understand. If it's some magic formula that people can't understand, they may not engage as much. Make it clear what they need to do to increase their score.
Sure, all the time.

Sometimes it just doesn't add anything interesting. Sometimes it's just too big of an idea to explain in a couple paragraphs. Sometimes I'm just not not sure my opinion is well informed enough to commit to the Internet forever.
I thought about starting a puppy rental business for college campuses. I imagine you could charge over $100 per hour b/c of all the girls who would flock to pet the puppy and then happen to think "wow what a nice guy".
Is this a competitor in the eReader market or is it an attempt to sell their technology to companies already making eReaders? The two year thing makes it seem like the latter IMO.

Either way I'm very interested. I hope Apple does something like this. </fanboy>
Yeah, it's the step of picking the quantity that corresponds to a 100 score that concerns me. How many RSS subscribers is considered the top? 50,000? 1 million?

Also, I wonder if some kind of curve makes more sense so that it's easier to move your score up in the lower levels. Let's say you pick 50,000 Twitter followers as being the 100 score for that service. You have to get 500 followers to go from score 0 to score 1.
MySQL-PostgreSQL comparison
The Princeton Companion to Mathematics has a good description of this starting on page 572.

Basically the proof goes like this: Define a random variable that can only take on integer values. Show that the expected value is less than one. The random variable must therefore sometimes take on the value of zero.

If your random variable was defined to mean something interesting at zero, then the above is an existence proof. What they mean by "non-constructive" is that you still don't actually have an example of the thing existing -- you just know it does. Very cool.
I'd include non-scientific journals like business, politics, and humanities

I once wrote an essay for a Lit class that cited this paper:

http://openlibrary.org/b/OL21651541M/Tybalt%27s-Spanish-fenc....

It's all right there in the title: a 20-page argument that Tybalt, Romeo's dangerous antagonist, fences in a Spanish style.
Browser Javascript performance vs. adoption
I'm nearer Baltimore, but the drive will be worth it.
Made a poll of this question for that reason:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=629642
Even more than that, sometimes while writing a comment I'll realize my position is flawed. I generally try and make sure my argument is sound before I submit, because I know you can't get by on hand-waving here. Often in my search for data to support my case, or even when I just try to articulate it properly, I find that I'm actually arguing the wrong side of something.

Being forced to re-examine my own positions is one of the things I enjoy most about a discussion, whether it's caused by something someone else says or something I almost said, then thought better of.

(Also, most things I've submitted within the last 10 minutes are being furiously edited. Not sure why, but I don't notice a lot of things until I read my own post in the context of the others.)
Scale it by your user base-- that is, if your top user has 50k RSS subscribers, then make that the top of the scale. This makes it basically a percentile system.

However, I suggest not updating the coefficients in real-time. Otherwise you could have a new user join that instantly changes the scale. So calculate which user has the most Foo once a week or once a month to keep things a little more static.

With respect to giving newbies an easier time, you could try using a log transform. This will give a quick rise in the beginning but saturate in the high levels. Try something like:

log(X)/log(N)

where X are the number of quanta that the user has achieved with a service e.g. number of Twitter followers and N is the maximum achieved by any user with that service. Then you could combine the services as grandalf describes above.
Google: Expect 18 Android Phones By Year’s End
It isn't waterproof so much as splash-resistant.
Hmmm... You like the teachers, eh? Bow chikka wow wow.

But seriously I can relate to this in a way. Intellectual passion with a bit of animalistic release. We can't think /all the time/, right?

I dated a beautiful grad student in philosophy and I used to try and get her to help me with symbolic logic and talk about philosophy over a bottle of wine. She would entertain the idea for a little while, but when she wasn't studying she didn't want to talk shop. I can't say I blame her. The grass is always greener, as they say...
I do the same. Also, I only join forums using my real name these days.
I am, alas, below legal drinking age: do you know if the establishment would tolerate me ordering a Coke?
What happened to the EFF's website??
Google probably has SOME connectivity they pay for, but by now they are effectively their own Tier 1 network, considering how much Internet traffic flows to their servers. They have a 2-byte ASN, which basically means they're a major backbone network. ISPs drool at the chance to peer with Google and get tariff-free YouTube/Google traffic, which probably constitutes a significant chunk of their overall volume.

Considering that Google has all of these little mini-datacenters spread throughout major colo facilities, a ton of the edge-to-edge traffic probably flows over in-building GigE or 10GigE. It probably costs them a penny per TB delivered to a peered ISP rather than $.05/GB us peons pay at the colo. The ~8mbit multi-T1 connection at my office amounts to about 38 cents per gigabyte in or out if we use it at 100% capacity 24/7/365. That's still more expensive than the 250GB capped Comcast user, who's effectively paying about 20 cents per gigabyte.
Hey T, yes, you should be fine for this Sunday. They card when you order, not at the door.
Something related...

I will write an email with a question or concern and in writing the email I will argue the point and discover I already know the answer.
Poll: Do you upvote stories on the new submissions page?
Do you look at the new submissions page to upvote new stories? I'm trying to see if the stories make it to the front page due to people upvoting, or due to people voting automatically when they submit the same link.
Yep, I check new submissions page for worthy posts to upvote.
Nope, I only focus on the front page.
Unless this is drastically cheaper than the Kindle, I don't see it doing well. For me, the biggest draw of the Kindle vs. the competition is the anywhere wireless access to a huge library of books. Unless someone else can offer that, I don't see how they'll compete.
Browsers are the new OS, says Google
On Hacker News, definite yes. Other sites, not so often. But I am not moved to comment on other sites as often as I am here.
The advice to use LegalZoom is well intended but those services are a huge ripoff. If you're not smart enough to be able to set up an LLC ($80.00 in AZ) yourself, you might be better off staying employed. LegalZoom: $300+ | DIY: Way cheaper and you understand it much more clearly.
Ironically, I'm virtually certain that I wrote this exact question and then decided not to submit it :)
AT&T: wireless data twice as fast by 2011
I'm the reverse. I stopped commenting online a long time ago, but Hacker News is the only place that I bother. Conversations here tend to go places.
Ask HN: Would you pay for these services I'm thinking of building?
Hey guys,

I have two ideas for startups I'm thinking of building.

Idea One: The problem: firms often struggle with which copy to put on their websites. (Better copy significantly improves conversion rates.) If a firm has the infrastructure to run A/B tests, then that's great, but I thought of an independent solution.

This is my product: The customer/firm enters in two different phrases. They are loaded into my product's database. Workers from Amazon's Mechanical Turk service are then recruited and paid one or two cents in order to view a webpage and click on either of the two phrases, which are displayed on the webpage in a random way.

Customers are instructed to click, following a gut
reaction as to their preferred phrase. Measuring reaction time and click proportions would give some measure of users' preference and willingness to click/act on given text.

Customers would pay approximately $5/month + $1/campaign (or so). This could especially increase CTR on anything, like a craigslist job ad. If you pay $75 to post an ad, wouldn't an extra $3 be worth it to attract a few more applicants? Any ebay ad, sign, headline, etc? As the product matured we could collect even more detailed demographics, for better targeting and making the sample more representative of specific populations.

Idea Two: It's hard to come up with ideas for company names/domain names. A good company name/domain name will be better for a young business, because the product/etc will be more memorable - people will be more easily able to recall it. So, you give us a few different possible names, and we take a significant # of people in for a study and pitch them your company with the possible name combinations. A week later, we test them, and figure out which ones performed best with either cued/uncued recall. Rates per name test undetermined presently.

What do you think?
Yeah, fairly often.

I think the most common reason for me to cancel a comment is just knowing how internet people are. People on the internet, especially software people, are really really critical. I think there's a certain group of people that browse forums with the sole intention of pointing out how other people are wrong.

So sometimes if I have a slightly controversial opinion, I will just not bother commenting, because I don't feel like dealing with the nitpickers.
Yes, but then I do this for every site I participate in, because Goddess forbid I am wrong on the internet.
watch out for the drop bears in Australia though. Those guys are vicious!
I don't know about it being the worst possible industry -- government procurement or public education give it a run for its money some of the time. (I will refrain from playing the "find the common thread here" game.)

Seriously, though, I hope that this startup escapes the regulatory issues and goes Big. It solves a clear problem for both patients and hospitals, will greatly increase societal welfare, and it should attract Big Bucks (TM) because of the amount of money wrapped up in the problem it solves.

This page is one of the best brief sales pitches I've ever seen, by the way:

http://inquicker.com/page/inquicker_benefits

Everything about it is great. It scans great. It directly addresses the customers' needs and makes it explicit what tangible benefits buying in will get them. I have bookmarked it so that when software vendors ask how to improve their website I'll say "Your benefits section should look like this".

Best of luck.
Heh our uni library sucks for CS resources.