skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Intuitively, we believe that health and ed contribute to productivity, wealth, etc. But the evidence that health and education (beyond the basics) contribute much is actually pretty weak.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/03/human-capital-p.html#m...

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/medicine_as_sca.html

By basics, I mean vaccines/trauma care/birthing in medicine, and literacy/arithmetic in education.

Disclaimer: I also work in the Ed/NonGov sector, as well as in the Sci/Gov sector.
Unacceptable Browser HTTP Accept Headers (Yes, You Safari and Internet Explorer)
Demo is a good idea. Check out http://www.stormweight.com/lists/hn-demo -- a public list I just made (open access).
This is a good point not mentioned yet. The number of viruses targeted to an OS is directly proportional to the market share it has. As long as it stays in single digits any "economically rational" virus maker will write yet another windows virus instead of working on an unfamiliar platform.

Whether it will be technically more difficult to write a virus on linux, max of chrome os, we will only know for sure when/if they become a target tempting enough.
In my opinion this is a good thing. I'd much rather have the things that my younger imagination thought up, because they are almost certainly cooler.

Making the things that people want who have no idea of the things they aren't supposed to want.
My coworker gave me admin access to his ideas list, and I promptly deleted one of his ideas, just to see if I could. I was surprised that it just "went away", but I'm glad notification of the event (along with the idea itself) was emailed off to him. It would be nice if my ideas, that get junked by someone else, (or all junked ideas) went into some sort of trash bin associated with the list (and maybe only the person who creates the idea gets to purge it forever).

Edit: excellent work overall!
I have seen this across many sites. For some reason, people view Taibbi as some kind of saint. You can't say anything good about Goldman, or any other Wall Street company, without being severely criticized. When you ask for credible evidence of illegal actions, no one can point to anything. I understand that a lot of people are going through tough times, but this massive movement against the Street is getting ridiculous.
Good point but I disagree. Ed is more like an investment, and Health Care is an important industry. Demand for it is huge. Everyone has health problems, while fixing them is important and often nontrivial.

Also, a remora is typically considered a symbiote, not a parasite.
I don't understand your question. You can sell/assign membership interest in an LLC (although a member of an LLC can't take W2 wages from it). You can even call it stock.

The problem with this arrangement isn't going to be legal formalities. The problem's going to be that your tiny minority investment in a private LLC is going to have no protections against dilution or unfavorable buyout. It's possible that the only recourse you'll have if something goes wrong is to be such a pain in the ass that they'll buy you out.

Note well that you will not be able to sell or transfer your equity interest in the LLC to anybody else.
There's still privacy in Britain? It's one of the most "under surveillance" societies on the globe. So how can you have views on a topic you don't actually view at all for utter lack of it?

This article also misses the point. It's not the same thing to post your pics or job resume online (with birth date and current occupation as well as email) and being watched by horny CCTV operators.

You can't blame people for using the Web for personal branding, social networking etc. The problem is the misuse of the information by government agencies and business.
I understand that. My sarcasm was apparently a failed attempt at being somewhat humorous after a long week.
A Virtual Reality
Friend of mine went to one that's around #25. His offer coming out was $35K more than the job he left to attend the program full time. And he moved fields from one he didn't like (healthcare) to one he did (marketing). No rich parents involved. Sample size of 1 FTW!
Don't get me wrong, I'm fond of Pandora's service, but isn't it strange that our society loves to throw money at sinking ships.

Pandora has now been funded over $55MM and cannot possibly be profitable if it boasts 70% of it's revenue goes to royalties.

Personally I'd also argue that these guys are hardly revolutionary. They have not developed any different business model from radio, but still gripe about lowering royalties. I'm not saying there's an obvious new way to distribute music, but historically a company should succeed because of innovative technology or an innovative business model, and their song attributes rated by-hand by "music professionals" should not be considered innovative technology.

But like I said, I'm fond of the service. They're pervasive and I'm personally a daily user.
Yes I plan to.

Hopefully some part of our system will be open sourced :)
Yes - definite weirdness - BTW - I have to click on "View Source" to copy text off your pages, which throws me off, but, "You now can invite people to lists by email address, even if they're not members of Stormweight. When they sign up for an account with the email address you invited, they will be privy to the lists from which you sent the invitation."

But, I'm unable to do this _any more_ (could for a few) no matter how many times I try. Bug?
Bernstein disagrees with you, in his analyis of 10 years of qmail security. Worth reading.

The problem with sandboxing is the misalignment of effort between attacker and defender. Sandboxing and capabilities are a huge pain in the ass for the defender, who have to construct and deploy applications with perfectly configured security controls. They're just an obstacle course for attackers.
Girl falls down uncovered manhole - while texting
GM hopes to sell its cars through eBay
We're actually just marking them as deleted (acts_as_paranoid rails plugin) so we can later add an "archive" that lets you pull things out of the trash bin. We haven't figured out the UI for that yet, so it's in just an unranked idea in our product development stormweight list for now.
David Langford's Three Laws:

1. A robot will not harm authorized Government personnel but will terminate intruders with extreme prejudice.

2. A robot will obey the orders of authorized personnel except where such orders conflict with the Third Law.

3. A robot will guard its own existence with lethal antipersonnel weaponry, because a robot is bloody expensive.

(Langford is an SF writer. You might know him from his "basilisk" stories--if not, go read them sometime.)
Not if it's a false positive!
The Entity-Attribute-Value idiom (tuplestores, RDF, BigTable, etc.) is by far my favorite data model. The App Engine 'Datastore' sugar on top of BigTable is pretty goddamn awesome.

RDF would have been great if the W3C wasn't full of idiot blowhards.

There are some application domains that have not lived up to their potential because of RDBMS abuse where EAV would fit perfectly -- Desktop Search for example. All of [Spotlight, Google Desktop, Beagle, Gnome Tracker] use RDBMSs with a pre-determined set of 'attributes' baked in, crippling any creative use. Spotlight at least has the decency to let you add your own non-indexed properties, but it's not very useful. The contents of people's filesystems and metadata about them will never fit into some spec-writer's schema.

Compared to RDBMSs I think sugared EAV is lot more amenable to being abused in the "when all you have is a hammer" way -- they start a bit slow but scale linearly with more resources without getting any slower.
With Hadoop, HBase, and Hive, you can do BI just like with a data warehouse without all the big iron and expensive proprietary software. SQL to boot. It's a nice overview.
I wish I could ignore him and deal with someone else but there's a whole culture of exclusivity that seems to exist around these things. Not to mention it's hard to find anyone better in the first place, since they all seem to be the same give or take very little. I'm willing to deal with him for the property in question though, it's just that good.

Redfin for commercial real estate would be complicated pricing and service-wise because of what you mention and more issues unique to commercial deals, but I think it could have as big of an impact as Redfin itself has had for residential homes.

And oh, loopnet+something like redfin? That would be amazing...
Seems to be inspired by the latest Terminator movie. Why do we need more killer machines, are the people in charge afraid that some day humans will refuse to fight for the "just causes" they are presented?
Before it was made illegal, music companies used to pay Radio Stations in order to get their music on the air!

When Pandora/etc argue that it adds popularity to music, they aren't lying- You can see this effect in the national music sales numbers-

Music used to be primarily local- A DJ in a regional market would start playing songs, and they'd catch on in that area. You can track songs such as Louie Louie, which started on the west coast and moved east.
Reprocessing also offsets some of its costs, by producing things like highly sought-after medical isotopes.
And I think the simplest solution requiring the least amount of code and effort should be the default. It's not just about performance, it's about implementation effort. The safe conservative option is quite often a lot of extra work.

Most people aren't building banks, for most apps data corruption is not the big concern RDBMS fans make it out to be.
I also think it's time for them to cash in. It could be that FB is a fad that will phase out in a year or two, just like a popular night club has a half-life of about 6 years. However, it may be one of those things that will be around until it's displaced by something disruptive.

Concerning the revenue stream. Half a billion sounds significant, but maybe not even enough to break even.
This proposal is not too dissimilar to the ideas behind P-BOS (http://lmframework.com/page.php?id=pbos)

P-BOS works best when the modules are small, and hence breaking down individual contributions within a given module does not get too messy.

As to the 'morality' of charging for FOSS, the issue can easily be sidestepped by giving developers complete control of the licensing and payment terms for their modules.

For example, a given module (component) could be free for everyone, or just non-commercial users. Developers should also be similarly free to route a certain percentage (0-100) to charity. The key point is to leave all the key decisions to individual developers.

If anybody wants to know more about P-BOS, feel free to drop me a line: david-lmframework-com
Ahhh, up until now I hadn't made the pig / flu connection.
Right, but what we really want is options, not proper stock. They don't want to make me a proper LLC member, and I don't really want to be one anyway.

Part of the idea is the equity-holding stuff won't become a tax event for me unless they do sell or buy me out, which is roughly how I understand options to work.
Google Maps' "My Location" feature is sometimes off by thousands of miles
More on the Dark Side of Entrepreneurship
How does Scala compare with Clojure? (I'd like to learn a lispy/fp language and these two are currently at the top of my list.)
70% was under the old deal and they admit they weren't profitable under that. The new deal is 25% of revenue or a song fee that increases each year (as you'd have seen if you'd read the article's 4th paragraph)

As for revolutionary, I don't care. It's a good service. I show it to normal, non-tech people and they almost universally start using it themselves. That says it all for me.
So they deserve what they got for wanting to see pictures posted by their friends?
If thorium reactors are developed, it will not be nearly as expensive to reprocess.

Thorium reactor article:
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/348/
Impressive demo. Very cool to see real-time updates coming to Google Reader.
Personally, I find it silly to get paid in beverages if I could get paid in cash. Then again, when I was at Amazon I was in downtown Seattle with some of the greatest lunch bars in the world (read: Tats) and not on top of a suburban hill.
Maybe instead of making the whole idea area draggable, make just the idea's titlebar draggable so we could gain the ability to select and copy text.
Lost suitcases, or how to DoS an airport
Well, how do you foster an environment where the market would arrive at fair rate?

Without any control, it seems like the rates will get quite high.
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3103 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=492853
Having to click view source is so drag and drop doesn't accidentally highlight text. I'll make it so that only applies on the pages with drag and drop.

I've gotten a number of replies about the email invitation. I am looking into that currently (one monitor is that code, the other is HN). It's absolutely a bug if it doesn't do what you, the user, expect -- even if it's what we intended. However, this seems like a true bug, probably an overstrict email validation regex.
I'm just not sure this is the case, and I'm frustrated by it. Many people, maybe even most people, won't start companies. These very same people, incomprehensibly, will study hard and develop amazing talent in engineering or science. They will diligently apply for jobs, but if they can't get one this way, they'll either leave the field or end up in the unemployment stats. But they won't start companies. I don't know why.
Both of our posts would be funnier if the project was anything other than vaporware.
Two ideas, sort of corporate-customer oriented:

- Output to email.

- Host-it-yourself package.

Established mid/large-sized companies are very leery of sensitive data outside the intranet, and used to e-mail for discussions. They know e-mail sucks badly for that, but it's like keyboards - you're not going to switch layout for each task.

Frankly, I have the perception that internal web apps are for the peons to fill in the little fiddly input form fields (looking at you, HN comment box) - at the top you have emails with thousands of (mostly unread) lines quoted, plus attached presentations and spreadsheets.

Make a web app where everybody can reap results via email, even if only a few bother fiddling with the controls in the browser, and it might be a winner. Might.
Like their plans for a new super sensitive detector that could pick up a single molecule of explosive in the entire building - not quite though through.

Happens here all the time, airport gets shutdown for an hour every time a cleaner leaves a door open. We have a perimeter fence 20miles long surrounded by trees but they search the airport if somebody leaves a door unlocked.
THEY ask a lawyer, because they are probably the ones violating securities law. IANAL. A possible framework is for them to grant you x,000 options that you accrue on some basis. You reduce your rate, because you are part of the team. I am not sure you can buy stock or options at your leisure because you probably are not a qualified investor.
Nowadays you can list listings by price + shipping. Amazon sufferers from USAitis really bad compaired to eBay, where shipping anything out of the usa (like canada) adds ridiculous shipping fees like $50 extra from a $5 to USA shipping fee. And most of it is not even available to ship to canada.
is there any non-military research left in the US?
Not sure why I didn't see that it explicitly said email address. Awesome.

I can also see value in a mobile version of this app.
Actually I use craigslist & another local classifieds website. Shipping is "instant", you usually can get lower prices than online, and you can inspect the item, and you have the persons address if they screw you over. It's only really speciality stuff that doesn't sell/can't buy. Also when I sell locally, I usually get a higher price than I would online.
Yeah, I would like to see what would happen if these files were in S3 instead.
I still don't get scribd: http://blog.bradgessler.com/i-dont-get-scribd
The bug was that you ran into our free account limit and we didn't give you the proper messaging. Our pricing model only gives free accounts five members per list. I've upgraded your account to an unlimited beta account in thanks for finding this bug.
It doesn't help when the whole society is pushing against you. From birth we're the members of institutions, but never the founders of them. And some aren't interested in taking the risk.

But enough do it that we carry on.
Facebook has their marketplace, but to be honest, craigslist is better traffic wise than that.
You keep saying it's no big deal, but it is.

I am the danthewelder server. Me personally, or my hosting service. You cannot resolve on my turf.

http://itsmyturfand.youwouldbreaktheinterenet.danthewelder.c...
When I was writing some of our internal HTTP apis, I came up with a reasonable compromise -- honor the Accept header, but treat any file extension as a limitation of it. .../foo could return any supported type, but .../foo.html is, by definition, the HTML version of the resource (and will return a 406 Not Acceptable if the Accept header doesn't include text/html, text/(star), or (star)/(star) ).

EDIT: the asterisks in my MIME type notations were interpreted as markup.
InCall Advertising - A Startup Idea
ITIL is pretty standard for managing IT Infrastructure. So standard in fact that http://www.google.com.au/search?q=itil
maybe returns 1 result that isn't about ITIL in the top 50.

If you can't google for something as basic as that - then maybe the bus. guy was right about you being lazy.
I completely disagree with you about them being revolutionary, but that's besides the point. If we assume that their business model is no different than any other radio station, then why should they be charged 10 times as much (70% vs. 7% of revenue being paid in royalties, as cited in a comment above)? Given that information, they are a radio station with millions and millions of listeners. Musicians and labels ought to be fighting to get on Pandora. The likelihood of you becoming interested in an artist and purchasing a record, merchandise, or concert tickets is magnitudes higher than traditional radio, and much more accessible, since you are already on your computer.

The fact that Pandora is struggling to "survive" is fucked and is a sad consequence of obsolete legislation that is inevitably subject to change. It doesn't take a genius to see that the old style of radio is dying and that newer, more relevant services are on their way in. Pandora is currently the leader in this market. Would I invest in them? Hell yes.

Read "Remix" by Larry Lessig for more insight into the legislation behind modern media: http://remix.lessig.org/
Being completely serious here: who cares? The Accept: header has never been useful. It's an overdesigned disaster of complexity, trying to handle in the client something that is trivially doable at the server level.

Ignoring for the moment that there are "good" and "bad" ways to specify it. Has there ever been worthwhile application for this thing? In what way would a browser that simply left it off have trouble?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=698365
If I ran Github, I'd put a link to this and a summary on the front page. I haven't heard a better argument for distributed source control.

The guy who uploaded the stolen code is a moron, but the other people using the site don't deserve this.
SkyNet, here we come.
...or pirate bay?
Meg Whitman bailed out on a ship she caused to start sinking.
Agree'd. The percentage of books available in digital form is still frustratingly low. Being reminded of that every time you go out to buy one (and have to settle for the 4th or 5th choice as usual) is bad enough.
I don't think it rises to that level, but tedunangst and gojomo are both right in that imprudent user behavior was a necessary condition of this happening.
Awib is an optimizing compiler:

o) Sequences of '-','<','>' and '+' are contracted into single
instructions. E.g. "----" is replaced with a single ADD(4).

SUB(4)?
Just as long as they make sure to note never to rely on GitHub (I know everyone will have the full repo backed up, but for working together, deployment, etc). This kind of thing makes it clear GH could be toast because some yahoo decided to upload illegal code.
Last year, I bought a DVD of Terry Gilliam's 1985 movie Brazil, prompted by amusing memories of its original theater screening.

The satirical dystopia has aged badly - now it looks like a documentary. Halfway through the movie, lacking the stomach for more, I rewound the DVD and put it back in the box.
and it again rises the question where one stands in this path.
I'm pulling the "this is the worst idea I've heard" card here
Is that really a win though? Your friend is out two years worth of income + considerable debt to make an extra 35K after two years.
Borland tried something similar, awhile back. It was called ObjectVision, and was before its time. It was not game oriented, more generic. You placed a graphical object in the window and then programmed its behaviors...

I got 2 months into a point of sale system until I ran into too many rough edges.
in fact, there is work on a gcc-backend which outputs brainfuck (name's gcc-bf)
Why do they need the dealers again? It seems to me that the dealerships are an even worse ripoff than real-estate agents.
Perhaps you are thinking of the case where HTTP is used as a simple file-transfer protocol - where there is a 1-1 mapping between URLs and files on the server. However if you think of things at a higher level, where URLs map to generic "resources", it is plausible that a single resource could have multiple representations. Think of the Twitter API - a tweet can be represented in XML or JSON. This is the principal behind REST (granted, Twitter does not actually follow the HTTP standard, but you get the idea).

That said, for the overwhelming use-case of HTTP (web browsing), REST and the Accept header are probably overkill.
It is not a violation of securities law to include equity as part of an employee's compensation. You're right to point out that his 1099 status might muddy this up, but the spirit of the arrangement they are trying to come to is certainly achievable under an LLC.
We've looked at doing a host-it-yourself version a la github FI (http://fi.github.com/) or the google search appliance. Although the pricing that tier allows is quite cushy, (http://fi.github.com/pricing.html), the company they used to wrap up the installer is dauntingly priced for our bootstrapped budget (http://bitrock.com/). So that'll probably happen after we get the SaaS version off the ground.
Pet peeve: authors who cannot tell the difference between the noun 'phosphorus' and the adjective 'phosphorous'.

(And even use both indifferently. The 'paper' goes downhill from there, but today I only want to shave off a few points.)
best of luck to you, its a great idea. I hope your learn to live harmoniously with Google.
We do have output to email; you can email new ideas and attachments in to your lists and receive customizable updates by email.
The "new deal" meaning that historically it's been 70%. Base projections on past data. "They are going to be profitable" sounds great, but isn't great until it happens. (And spare everyone the attitude please.)

The reason I bring up "revolutionary", is because without something that sticks, the investments are going towards a fad.
Maybe there's some utility in the Accept header as a signal of the capabilities of the browser/client. There's a nice discussion [1] on using the Accept header to suss out whether to send the 'correct' but generally less-usable 'application/json' mime type or just send the blatantly wrong but working 'text/javascript' instead. Given a client with the capability, you should go ahead and send it the way the client prefers, right?

[1] http://simonwillison.net/2009/Feb/6/json/