skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The danger here is that you can only talk conclusively about what you can measure, and imagination, which seems to me the most important component of genius, is intrinsically hard to measure. If g is in practice dominated by another quality i that no one can measure, then whatever we say about g is beside the point.
The Fed is buying treasuries. Where's the outrage?
yeah I think developers would prefer Kongregate's model better since they give 100% of revenue to the game developer.
...eventually. From the linked forum page:

The initial goal is to support JNI shared libraries written in C or C++ that link with the Android versions of libc and libm. In a future release we hope to support linking with OpenGL ES and audio libraries, which should enable high-performance games.

I'm eagerly awaiting that release. :)
what good is that? I don't want a virtual HP-11C. I want real buttons (hint, hint).
You miss my point completely. You are thinking that mathematical proofs are like airtight and completely unassailable and locked in for all time. In reality (practice) they are pretty sloppy, and are really just a form of persuasion.

Now, persuading a group of mathematicians to believe a claim is a high bar, and they are very good at finding logical holes, gaps, and mistakes. As Nietzsche points out in Beyond Good and Evil, it is quite possible that humans as a species have all sorts of blind spots in our reasoning abilities, and that such blind spots are essential for life itself.

In fact, we know of many of these blind spots, or failures of human reason. One great example is the Monty Hall problem. Others are the lottery, gambling, stock market events, advertising (the effects of), and all sorts of experiments that economists do these days.

So before you get concerned about the Pentium IV's accuracy, and 'mathematically proving' it is correct, consider that your brain is a very imperfect reason engine, and there is no reason to suspect that our intuition is accurate except in (and still imperfectly in) those situations where those intuitions improved the reproductive chances of our ancestors.
Only those cheap imports don't have whip holders.

Otherwise, your contention in-domain feature copying somehow translates to cross-domain feature transfer is something that I fail to understand. Can you explain it better?
Can't you just use a subscription model? Give the customer a certain time (say, three months or one year) and start charging after that. This way, they won't feel as if you are taking something away from them when you pull the plug, and the service may actually be able to go on with this extra revenue alone.
For me the best combo is consulting and side project as opposed to day job. With contracts I can keep them to 20-30 hrs per week and then have substantial time and focus to work on my baby. And if I need 2 weeks or pure focus, I usually can get that too. All the while, keeping some decent income coming in. It works ideally for me - but f course it depends on many factors.
I've been in a similar job before, as the lone tech guy, and one small step that really helped me was to require that all work requests be sent by email. I put a sign on the door to my office/server room that said "Verbal requests will be cheerfully forgotten. Mail to tech@company.com".

That won't get rid of everything that comes in your door, and you may find yourself reduced to sending the email yourself, for something your boss walked in and wanted you to do. And it won't stop the "OMG the network is down" freak-outs, either.

On the other hand, it will hopefully reduce your walk-in interruptions, and it will give you more of a record of the work you're doing. Bosses who don't understand anything beyond rebooting can see how many work requests you're handling in a day, to tell how busy you are. Ideally, you can have the 'tech@' alias CC your boss and other crucial managers, at least at the start, so they can see how much you're doing.
What about in cases of disbarment? The judge is surely a member of the same bar association that the defendant is getting kicked out of.
Don't try to censor me.
And dynamic publishing is what drives wordpress powered blogs into the ground when hit by the Digg effect.

I hope the Melody project will better enable the use of CGI::Application or others for dynamic publishing instead of PHP There are already extensions for that, e.g. http://oss.iteman.jp/wiki/2/A_Perl_based_dynamic_publishing_...
Pretty interesting. I never heard of db4o before. I'm skimming the tutorial (http://www.db4o.com/about/productinformation/resources/db4o-...), and it looks fairly nice.

It seems that db4o supports some pretty flexible query mechanisms. That leads me to worry about performance. One of my recurring nightmares of relational databases and SQL is optimizing queries on non-trivial constantly-evolving schemas, and I can't help wondering if db4o has the same horrors in store.
And there are other ways to 'get around' the ugly rebuilding process which do not include making your site as digg allergic as wordpress.
Kongregate only offer up to 50% rev share on the advertising and if they offer 100% on the virtual goods part then its not a business model for them.
MySQL was a relational database that was missing some very important RDBMS features. CouchDB is not a relational database, and the developers know it's not.

What it is Not

A relational database.
A replacement for relational databases.

(http://couchdb.apache.org/docs/intro.html)

Obviously, CouchDB is a cool thing for the cool crowd, and doubtlessly many of the cool crowd are going to shoot themselves in the foot by using CouchDB when they should be using a lame boring RDBMS, which they can't bring themselves to do because that would be like wearing a polo shirt with their company's logo on it. That doesn't mean CouchDB is a bad idea. It's just a very sexy idea that will break a lot of hearts.
Pastor Urges His Flock to Bring Guns to Church
He fails to draw the real crucial issue out -- by pretending that all children have equal abilities, we try to force them all onto a track that only a third of them will do well on.

A high school student is in a much better situation with a realistic assessment of his abilities. If you struggle with math, you aren't much of a conversationalist, and you have trouble remembering things, you would do well to find a career that you can succeed at through nothing but persistence and hard work. Also, you shouldn't borrow $50k to go to college.
At some point someone's going to set-up a succesful virtual currency exchange and the government is going to step in for creating an illegal currency.
You want real buttons, you can get a real HP 12c on ebay for $10.
I did and came up with nothing. What do you see as interesting about his article?
Pointing out that a person lacks credentials is not an ad hominem attack. It is extremely pertinent.

Think about it...

"Dr. Bob says x about my corpus callosum separation..." "Dr. Bob is a neck surgeon!" "Stop relying on ad hominem attacks!"

Please, please read a book on rhetoric and logical fallacies.
And supposedly the Id guys had zero confidence that the Valve guys were going to come up with anything cool.
that's for ads, the tips go 100% to the developer

edit: it may not be a business model for them, but that's kinda the point. It makes Kongregate look more developer friendly.
Putting aside arguments as to the morality of copyright infringement, I'm surprised you think that the pro-copyright lobby will win. The odds are hugely stacked against them.

The content industry has a large amount of financial and legal backing, but the pirates are backed by technological progress. As bandwidth increases, it becomes faster to download material, and easier to hide your activities from prying eyes.

The content industry has enough problems with piracy now; how do you think it'll fare in the next decade when there's enough bandwidth to run anonymous P2P networks at decent speeds?
When do I get an iPhone TI-85 app, so that I can play tetris like back in calculus class?
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/06/lazy-hurt-less-than-st...
That's gut at work again (he makes this point later on) you have the risks explained and still gut refuses to apply it right. Given the choice between fly and drive now both are worrisome.
Is the putative student "bad at math" or "bad at math the way it's taught in high school, perhaps even by a certain teacher"?

I thought I was bad at math and lived under that shadow for a very long time. Then I grew up and realized I'm actually very good at math, I just had terrible teachers/source materials.

All of these generalized statements are questionable by dent of gross simplification.

PS - where is a university education only $50K?
If you were going to try to do this, I'd recommend not mentioning that part of it. Say you've got a big project you're working on, or whatever. Of course, it all kind of depends on what your relationship is with the people you work for. Maybe they already know you have the entrepreneur bug.
RIP Michael Jackson
Because the vast majority of the population doesn't know what that means.

And most of those who do know, are not too worried, because even if they are worried about inflation down the road, right now V is still near zero so the sky isn't falling.

But a few like you are just going bonkers! And also flagged because it's politics.
Does this sound bitter to anyone? One of the other commentors is right - it doesn't cite any proof for its argument, much less anything that detracts from the opposition.

And who doesn't know people who don't seem traditionally intelligent in the academic things that, as the author suggest, give "success" -- but who are extraordinarily graceful, skilled athletes, great with their hands, can fix anything, or always know the perfect gift and the way to make anyone smile and feel good?

Those people are a good case for "multiple intelligences" and granting them that acknowledgement isn't just High IQ Guilt. Not paying attention to those different, seemingly natural abilities is to be blind.

It just seems that certain academics are extremely uncomfortable because it's not as easily measured. (Why is IQ measurable? Why, because there's a test for it!)
I think the bigger danger is perpetuating the typical American cultural belief that people are with smart or stupid. Contrast actual American achievement with eastern cultures where they consider intelligence to be more of a skill that can be refined through practice.

The author is rebutting feel-good pop psychology, which I suppose needs to be done for balance, but you can't argue with the achievement gap, and there are solid studies showing that praising kids for "working hard" leads to better achievement than praising them for "being smart."
You can't. It can run third-party program code, and so violates the AppStore ToS.
While pointing out someone's credentials is not an ad hominem attack, it isn't a refutation of their position either.

In fact, it's rather lame. (It is perfectly appropriate to point out "he's arguing from authority and has none", but the second part is, strictly speaking, unnecessary.)

Either he's got a good argument or he doesn't, and that's true even if he's Hitler. (I like to skip to the end.)
"blessed are the peacemakers".
CNN says that he is in the hospital:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/06/25/michael.jackson/...
you know what would rock?

A hypervisor for server providers that does these tasks in background (without the root server owner seeing it) and alarms the provider if a hd breaks down, temperature is too high, etc! Which can then automatically react.

I think there is a need for your service, but I think it's too expensive. I wouldn't use it. A server starts at 50€ per month, why spend 1/4 of it just for monitoring?
The culture isn't (completely) homogeneous here. The people saying it's bad to rip off web sites aren't necessarily the same people saying it's ok copy mp3s.

I would imagine that many people believe that the morality of stealing depends on who you're stealing from. Additionally, many probably don't consider it theft if there isn't an immediately apparent victim.
I was hoping for the backstory on Magneto
Micheal Jackson Dies of Heart Attack
I was listening to an audiobook by Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, and I think it has the answer to your question: people can't be outraged at an issue they don't understand. How many people in your family will have an opinion on whether the Fed should buy treasuries?

The book is "Words that Work:It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear," in case you are interested. Democrats may be too distracted by his right-wing bias to enjoy the book, but it includes great case studies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colt_Peacemaker ?

Anyway, what's the bit about Geometry? That got glossed over in the article.

Personally, I don't understand why dudes on the left are content with the right wing being the violent nutjobs. Don't they have any idea how much more effective they could be if they ALSO had a reputation for being violent nutjobs?

edit: Oh, also, I really liked the part about not searching for concealed, loaded weapons. Fundamental logical reasoning failure.
New iPod Touch to be released in September 
Apple have been dominating the handheld devices market with recent releases of the new iPhone 3GS and iPhone OS 3.0. Thus, Apple have decided to deliver the new and improved iTouch in less than three months. Do not feel left out iTouch lovers!
Thanks Paul.

I added the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). Vote here: http://moderator.appspot.com/#15/e=90c6a&t=90c6b
Evaluating charities can be very tough and many people tend to be blinded by nice pictures or compelling but simplifying stories (eg Kivas effect on the poor is far less straight forward than it sounds after spending 5 minutes on their website).

After working in development aid for a couple of years I'm very reluctant when it comes to having a vote on what is the best charity. Sounds to me a little like voting on the most efficient code by the general public...
That's a pretty depressing story, but very powerful, too, and a very effective counterbalance.
How is this even remotely hacker news?
<em>The remaining intelligences have nothing to do with intelligence or cognitive skills per se, but rather represent personal interests (for example, musical represents an affinity for music...)</em>

This is total nonsense. The author has apparently never watched the early episodes of any reality TV show of the "looking for a star" variety -- there are plenty of examples where the interest is enormous, but affinity is nonexistent. Nor has he ever met someone with great talent for music but who couldn't bother learning the basics (and this comes from personal experience).
Vyoom: A Social Network Built For Real-Time
When I see articles like this 'round here, I always head for the "new" page and spend a few minutes up voting worthy content.

Edit-Responding to child:
Yeah flagging works, too, but it's not the same. Stories like these are usually just the reminder I need to spend more time on the new page making this place a better community, not just flagging and hoping to stop the degradation.
"If you struggle with math, you aren't much of a conversationalist, and you have trouble remembering things"

Since when have any of these things been a requirement for an academic career?
Need to fix the name on this. Its Michael, not Micheal
Startup Law 101 - Why not to incorporate your startup in Delaware
submitted earlier from the original source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=674438
If you don't like it, flag it.
Got any stats on that procrastination claim? I thought the conventional wisdom was that projecting profits too early and running out of startup capital kills most new businesses.
Beyond the tool, Sonar is a platform to manage code quality
Tasty little cupcakes - Making every iteration count.
bbc as well http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8119951.stm
SocialGo and the Importance of Specialization for Internet Startups
Sounds like really "fun" technology, but I wonder: is peeking-over-the-shoulder really enough of a pain point to justify the cost of this software? I suppose it would be ideal for surfing porn at work, provided that it blurs effectively enough.
So far nobody's invented a device that's capable of shape-shifting, so replicating the interface via touch is as good as you can get without actually buying the calculator.
Surely if it's modded up it is?
That's why I'm looking for commentary from knowledgeable people, not just simple vote counts (which reflect enthusiasm, but not effectiveness).
The truism in this article seems to be something like pg's hypothetical:

Imagine if aliens came to Earth, and told us that they'd destroy our planet unless all the Physics PhDs got became experts in French Literature, and all the French Literature PhDs because experts in Physics, and they gave us a year to do it. The physicists would not be happy, but the French literature experts would really be scared.

[citation needed]
Complaining about submissions is against the guidelines, I've been told.
Twitter states otherwise:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=michael+jackson

The last tweet about it is 14 minutes ago. The search page was refreshing with 1000 new tweets/5 seconds when I first heard the news. This is such a hot topic that Twitter can't keep up!
It's not a complaint, it's a genuine question. How is this even remotely hacker news?
Like I said, I'm just restating what I read in Dement's book, which hasn't talked about this technique at all except to say that people who wake up frequently (like people with sleep apnea) are much more tired than they should be, because the awakenings actually don't change the total amount of sleep that much. So there seems to be evidence indicating that many short chunks of sleep are less effective at reducing sleep debt than one chunk of the same total length. It's as if there's a "startup cost" to falling asleep, and it doesn't start to benefit you until after some time has passed.

So I should have formulated myself more carefully by saying: Studies indicate that short periods of sleep is less effective than long ones, and that each individual requires a certain amount of sleep per night (but which varies with individual and then as you age).

He did go so far as to say something about how he thought methods advocating that you can train yourself to sleep less are "dangerous", given how much sleep deprivation affects your health and ability to do things like drive or operate other machinery safely.
Yeah, my manager reads my dev blog and knows about all my side projects.
IBM's Lotus Domino is one absolute, proven reference for document databases with multi-master replication. It's been around for 20 years now and used to build a huge number of valuable applications.
Should read "8 basic tips" rather than "open letter."
It never seizes to amaze me how people are able to dress-up bad business.
Some people obviously feel that Michael Jackson was a musical hacker.
Postgress has certain features because it is competing, both technically and in marketing check-boxes, with other SQL databases. CouchDB is not an SQL DB (and not even an RDMS) and so doesn't automatically have to have the same rich set of features.
It'd be hard to ignore it. He was a giant in the music world, and influenced a ton of stuff.

He was so far ahead of his competition it was silly.

I remember the music video to 'smooth criminal' as a kid and was simply blown away by it.
Michael Jackson announced Dead
There is a Google Group http://groups.google.com/group/lean-startup-circle that is devoted to discussing customer development and lean startup techniques. It's open to anyone to join.
Michael Jackson Dead
Don't identify more than a few people from the same IP. It's easy to do QA and spot someone who's putting in fake names if you get carried away.
> I also hear that the canonical folks will be bundling it in an upcoming Ubuntu release so it will be easier than ever to check it out

I think you're talking about "Ubuntu One"[1] a file syncing tool (kinda like Dropbox), and Ubuntu One use CouchDB for their storage.

[1]: https://ubuntuone.com/
Sure, but it's also on the top of every single news site in the English speaking world right now. One of the things that's always been nice about HN is that we've historically let news organizations be news organizations and we could stay on topic here. Clearly, I'm in the minority here, and I'll have to either accept the redditization of HN or find somewhere else to go.
CouchDB doesn't scale, but not for any of the reasons the author of this article lists. I especially like meaningless sentences like, "just like PHP programmers don't get namespaces." While true, it's not "just like" that.
Why did you stop?

It sounds so great! I can't wait to take 2 weeks of to try it! :-)
Pop music HACKER Michael Jackson dead. RIP
Well they are an OK idea... but the question to ask is whether they are likely to have a significant impact on safety. My guess is that the impact is slim, which is OK since they are cheap and easy to implement.

But note that it took way longer to implement the cockpit doors than it did to nationalize airport security and start making people wait on 3 hour lines.

Also note that the GAO was able to get bombs through security at most major airports without doing anything particularly sophisticated.
Yeah, I was thinking the latter.
Ask HN: Feedback on my project
Hi guys,

I'm currently an undergrad at UCSD working on a research project that I'm hoping you guys can give us some good feedback on.

"Herd It" is a, what I like to call, music discovery engine. You enter/select some tags in the search box, which could be anything from music genres (like punk, rock, hip/hop) to certain characteristics (like danceable, sad, romantic, etc) and our project comes up with a playlist that best fits those tags. Once you start playing the playlist it'll continually add more songs that match those tags (so really similar to Pandora in that aspect).

Any feedback is appreciated! And thanks for your time!

URL: http://herdit.org/music/index.html
LinkedIn v freemasons -- Joining the club
If you want to ensure better degradation, you could upgrade your app to be more usable without the server. Drawing on your stamp example, you might add client-side stamp storage and backup features. If the server goes offline, then you could even continue selling your app that way. I would not implement those features too early, though, since obviously you don't want to cannibalize the rest of your service.
Sharing an mp3 is dramatically different from designing a similar website.

When I give a song to my friend, its like I put a website in an iframe. The whole site is still there, attributed to the website's owner, the owner just doesn't get money for it.

When I make a design that looks eerily similar to someone else's, I am trying to pass it off as my own. That's plagiarism, and that is the line that is more morally reprehensible because of the implicit deceit.

That's not to say that infringing on someone else's property is not wrong, but infringing with deceit is IMO much worse than infringing without deceit.
&lt;--- Michael Jackson
Care to elaborate? Given how addicted the Gov is to printing cash, and the immorality of our Fed/Treasury/Gov cabal, I would love to see a big challenge go to the supreme court.
I get some inspiration from package design:
http://www.thedieline.com
Personally I wouldn't do either. But I think a lot of people feel a line is crossed when you make money by copying someone else's work, as opposed to making copies for free (and for personal use).
Feature Suggestion: YC Comment Forwarding
Is there a web service for blog owners to access hacker news comments about their own articles? If not, there should be.

More often than not there are few comments on the actual blog post and a very active thread on hacker news. I feel that if we find a blog author's content engaging enough to talk about- it should at least make its way to the author's site.