skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is pure hype, abusing the term "nanotechnology" to mean something like "any technology depending on nanometer-scale features". I recently made a list of such technologies:

Obsidian knives (Aztec empire): sharpness comes from ≈3nm edge thickness.

Soap bubbles (Roman empire): low average density is due to surface film of 50–1000nm thickness, as evidenced by iridescence.

Iron (Iron Age): stable in air because it forms a magnetite film about 5nm thick, or thicker if heated.

Jell-O (commercialized around WWII, but of course present in roasting pans for many centuries): its consistency is a result of a liquid-filled foam with pore sizes in the single-nanometer to hundreds-of-nanometer range.

Montmorillonite clay (discovered 1847): its effectiveness in expanding when it absorbs water is a result of plate-size crystal particles that may be hundreds of nanometers wide, but are only a nanometer or so thick. Currently used in my cat litter box, as a reinforcer in many plastics, for sealing landfills against leakage, and for splitting rocks, among other things.

Homogenized milk (1900): the milkfat doesn't separate because it's in particles that are small enough for Brownian motion to keep them from floating to the top, which means 200–2000 nanometers. Milk also naturally contains casein micelles of 10–300nm in size, but that's not "technology".

Gold leaf (ancient Egypt?): 30–100 nm in thickness.

Pottery (prehistoric): made of clay, which is often defined as dirt with particle size of under 2000 nm. (Some people use a stricter definition that additionally requires certain minerals.) Larger particle sizes don't form plastic colloids when mixed with water. As mentioned above under "montmorillonite", some clays have much smaller particle sizes.

Asbestos crystals will fracture into fibers down to the nanometer range; this is the problem with them.

(Talcum powder is much larger: 10 000 nm or so.)

(And of course there's all the stuff we make with X-ray lithography, and there's data on hard disks, but they don't support my point that the kind of "nanotechnology" being touted here is nothing fundamentally new.)
Yep, it's a Ning thing. I'll see if I can cut out some of the signup options, thanks for the feedback.

EDIT: Just removed b-day, gender, and location. Thanks again, sorry for the poor 1st impression.
Whoa, that was annoying.

the retweet thing is daft. the music annoying. the text flying in actually hurts your eyes. you didn't explain any new features. "a revamped comment system"? seriously?

Just give a screenshot with a few annotated labels. And next week isn't long enough for me to care.

I should add that I really really love Disqus, one of my favourite startups. Just a lame video. sorry. :/
but for any particular program the number of people who care deeply about preserving that program is always greater than the number of people who care deeply about removing it.

This strikes me as the most significant factor at work in the constant inflation of the government, and it's a really tricky problem.
My own, java + apache velocity. In the process of switching to compojure.

Why my own? It's simple, does what I want and does it well, and when it brakes it's my fault. No learning curve :p
how does this article make sense? comparing a pirate operation with legitimate businesses?

I can be a hitman, and make millions of dollars a year, with low overhead. Does that mean I am a better business man than other legitimate businessmen out there?
My own personal opinion, from direct experience, is that a co-founder is ideally someone that you met non-randomly. You have known or worked with them previously, or have a contact in common that can vouch highly for them.

Of course, you could meet a future co-founder on a 'dating' site, but I would still want to get to know that person over a period of time.

How a person deals with the stresses of making business decisions, handling money and investments, and general product management are not something you get an optimal feel for in a short period of time.

I am sure that there are several people who have met and co-founded a business in a short time window and been happy with the outcome. Just like I know people from arranged marriages or who were married a week after they met, and they are quite happy. But not many people would recommend that approach as having a high probability for success.
It reminds me of the famous Drake equation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Equation

The most famous 'guesstimation' based on the Drake equation says there should be something around 10 civilizations in our galaxy. But there are other factors that influence here, like the tendency a civilization has to destroy itself before it reaches the space exploration era (and also the tendency it has to destroy other civilizations) [2]

Also, the fact that we have found none yet comes the famous Fermi paradox [2]. Alternative explanations for the seemly inexistence of extraterrestrian civilizations exist, such as impossibility of communication between long distanced civilizations.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
If entrepreneurs::VCs was like government::taxpayers, then entrepreneurs would throw VCs in jail whenever the VCs decided to withhold funding for a failing project.
Having Macs doesn't mean you get to use the platform of your choice. Is everyone using Macs, or just the people who want them?

What about the people whose platform preferences aren't so trite as "Mac or PC"?
gdp's objection to calling this compilation, which I share, is that there is only one form.
If I'm reading the high-level description correctly, the plan here is for this thing to be one giant centralized instance. Can anyone verify that I'm reading that right? Not that I have any pro or con feelings towards this architecture, just not sure if I'm fully grokking it.
Great comment. Instantly reminded me of Lewis CK's “Everything’s Amazing, Nobody’s Happy” video (http://www.hulu.com/watch/60634/late-night-with-conan-obrien...).
Hmmm, it's still asking for birthday and gender when I try to re-register.
And Now a Service to Roll Your Own iPhone Apps
The only good metric in my opinion is time spent.
#1 is FanFeedr: http://www.fanfeedr.com

The guys who did it are friends of mine and I think they did an amazing job.
I'm suggesting that ranking high school students by any metric, drive and talent included, is stupid. In my senior year in high school I published a novel, so I'm aware of how drive and talent varies. At the same time, even driven people like myself and your sister suffer when a school system focuses on regimenting and ranking their students. We'd thrive on freedom as much as any other kid.
All you have to do is create a network under these guidelines. One system to do whatever you can in that awesome system that does a batch of particular things. Then you invite your friends and say, look, you can do all these awesome things just by being in my awesome system/network! They, understanding its awesomeness, will have to join. You offer them even more things that are progressively more awesome. And more people join. And more people surf under one unique sign-in.

One night you get home and feel happy, satisfied, knowing that your network of users has finally experienced the greatest possible, most efficient, most awesome system ever invented. And before you go to sleep, you pick up a phone and call your mom to tell her how happy you are.
I usually find my apps are CPU bound rather than memory intensive, so it pays to test this out. Easy way to find out is to run apache bench locally and watch the server performance (Use perfmon on windows, not sure what the linux/unix alternative is). Its a crude performance metric but will point you in the right direction as to what you want to upgrade first, you can validate your findings with a more complex tool like Webload/JMeter/Wcat if you want to make sure.
@astartupaday - This is definitely an interesting idea.

A company that I have been working with is doing some similar - they have created a private, invite only community for connecting with talent, resources, capital, promotion of ventures on a global scale. It is geared toward early stage ventures of all types and the collection of people within the community is great. They are currently partnering with government incubators across the world and various private agencies focused on helping startups.

For more information - take a look at http://www.incunation.com/

Because it is private - if anyone is interested in joining contact Incunation using the "Contact Incunation" link at the bottom of the home page and we can make sure that you are added.

Startups are all about passion! I love to see people do well with their efforts and hopefully this can help someone's venture or ability to support a venture.
you're right - being developed in GWT the site is completely javascript dependent. The problem seems to be that with javascript disabled you're still getting the content in somewhat of a mangled form --> you shouldn't be getting any content (just a message), this is obviously not working.

On performance - it's laoding up pretty good on all the browser we've tested, then again we didn't test on any of the environment you refer to, which makes your feedback much appreciated. Thanks!
http://incanter.org/

Incanter is a "Clojure-based, R-like statistical computing and graphics environment for the JVM". Ready to replace R? I don't know, R has a lot of libraries. Worth a look? Definitely.
That depends a lot on local laws an mores; reaction to Google Street View photos has been been far more negative in some jurisdictions than the US.

Also, to the extent focused surveillance reveals anything of interest -- times of comings and goings; activity behind windows; children's play activities -- I suspect most US jurisdictions would have a problem with 24-hour video surveillance of property you don't own.
Learn You Some Erlang For Great Good
Strange, I just tried to register as as new user and the only options were for username, password, and birthday. I think b-day is mandatory for legal reasons around online child protection laws.
Okay, he is saying that the time required for an arithmetic operation is proportional to the number of bits operated on.

This is true, and it is applicable to other concepts besides hash tables. Can you sort n numbers in O(n log n)? Well a comparison is not really constant-time, in the wall-clock sense of time. If the n numbers are distinct, then each is going to need at least O(log n) bits. So a comparison is O(log n) by the clock, and our sort becomes O(n log n log n).

Part of the solution is to be more precise. For example, when we say that Merge Sort is O(n log n), we usually do not mean that it takes that long to run; we mean that it can require that many comparisons. Counting primitive operations can be useful, even if those operations are not constant-time from a wall-clock point of view. And as long as we are clear on what the primitive operations are, everything is fine.

By the way, there is another problem with the statement that hash-table insertion is amortized constant-time: what if all the keys end up being in the same bucket? The true statement is that HT insertion is amortized constant-time for average data. (So it's constant-time on average on average. :-)
ahah - I believe you're right
This is fantastic, he starts with the claim pure theory is wasteful, experiments must be run to validate models.

He asserts hashtables are not amortized O(1). Ok, interesting, maybe something with caching? latency of disk access in huge data stores? No. He concludes hashtables are not O(1), because integer multiplication is not O(1). No mention of putting an upper bound on the hash key size, like the size addressable memory, or electrons in the universe, just that it's not O(1)

Lucky for us, he's backed it up with a clever and insightful lack of experiments.

edit spelling and grammar.
How To Create A Habit In 15 Days
Really? Do you really think that every business that uses a bunch of Macs is letting employees choose? From what I've seen, most of them assign Macs, and that's what you get to use, period.

I think the point of the article was that Macs indicate the company's willing to spend money on employees' working environments, not that the company's willing to let employees choose working environments. If you like Macs, it's a great metric; if not, it sucks.
Awesome, checking it out right now. The primary reason for putting this together is to scratch my own itch, so this sounds very interesting to me.
How to Network With Busy People
This article is really just a poor summary of the one by Wired, here http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-07/ff_som...
that new logo is a no-go. i would not want that on my site.
I think there's a big difference between killing people indiscriminately and putting a camera in front of their house.
Palm WebOS App Catalog Now Open to Submissions
It asked for gender and location on the second page of the registration. Now that I look at it again, it's not mandatory; but that's not very obvious.

Anyways, cool idea, it's just a shame that Ning's signup process is so convoluted.
While I don't necessarily condone it, I don't see how parking in a public place taking camera pictures of things in plain public view would actually be harassment.

Google street view mapping of public roads and views accessible from same is perfectly legal, right? (and perfectly reasonable, right?) Why would this not be legal?
From my perspective, that list (and the fact people choose Win7) means:

1. Red Hat / CentOS is better than Ubuntu, but if that's my only free/open source Unix-like option, it sucks.

2. MacOS X is good for the "tell me how my working environment should look" crowd, I guess.

3. Windows XP and Windows 7, but not Vista? Good! Too bad XP and 7 only look good by comparison.

4. Solaris for workstations. Damn, this company is interested in giving people options! Too bad I'm not terribly sold on any of the options they offer.

5. I wonder if people are choosing Win7 because it's better, or because it's "new" and still "Microsoft" (and thus "better", but not necessarily better).

I'm a bit of a cynic when it comes to technology options and how people make decisions, I guess.
My main issue with this is that drugs are illegal.
"Why can't the US military increase the pay for the soldiers, hire more soldiers and reduce the number of contractors?"

Soldiers aren't paid very much directly, but the indirect costs are huge, including at least room and board, training, and future benefits including medical care (via the VA system, currently almost $113 billion/year).

Quickly Googling for estimates of the cost gives answers between $350,000 and $400,000 per soldier per year.

So, to answer your question, we don't because it'd cost more.
Apple investigating malfunctioning iPhone reports
Company says the incidents are isolated and denies a general problem
A common claim I hear from software engineering researchers is that the number of errors in X lines of code from a person is constant. "Lines of code" is supposedly independet of programming language.

If this is true, then the implication is that when you can implement the same functionality in less code, it will also probably have less bugs. So, if we look at opportunities for bugs, I think lines of code is relevant.
Sounds like Olin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_W._Olin_College_of_Eng...
That picture of Gary Kildall looks like a baseball card. Oooh, maybe a startup idea...entrepreneur & programmer cards for aspiring hackers.
Sure there must be some interesting thesis to read. But I think thesis are like patents, there are many and most of them are useless.
Despite lawsuits, AT&T says MMS still coming soon to iPhone
Defendants say sales reps for Apple, AT&T deceived them on MMS availability
I agree, regarding deception. As for something being there -- that's kinda the point with a startup: there's quite possibly nothing there yet, but you get to help build it. Someone has to start the process. Just don't hire on with someone that expects you to do that and lies about it.
Slideshow is better than video, and out of 20-30 logos I might like just one. Comparing to logoworks quite low rate. I wouldn't submit information if I'd saw this portfolio. Keeping in mind that you need iterations and several logos to choose from, I don't expect something valuable for me as a result. Of course we will see, but still ... I wouldn't use this service if found it not on HN.

Have some idea for you. You have two types of services:

1. Draw it by yourself - which works, for some people
2. Services where you find designer, who will do it for you. But first you need to find a right designer. This is done or by looking thru portfolio of designers or by contest, where designers might or might not participate.

So the problem is to find a right designer. This could be done by asking me to choose several logos to identify what I am looking for a match to the designer that works in that style. It will save my time to find a right person (since I can't even formulate how the logo should look like) and save designer's time.
Commanding Military Drones - Now iPhone Has an App for That
The same is happening in scientific research, although, it is not as obvious: a standing army of PhD's are making progress very difficult by making research expensive.
Basically he is talking about the trench war one has in scientific writing. Call one side side A, and the others side B, and imagine there is a student who tried to read a thesis and did not get it. Side A will say: "Well, he is too stupid to unterstand my thesis", while Side B will say: "well, he might not know enough basics to understand your thesis, but I rather think that you just wrote incomprehensible gibberish".

I second his part about the informal parts very, very much, even though I would call this 'informal part' examples and motivations. Tell us in simple examples what your definition means, what your algorithm does, how your consideration works in this simple example, even if the example might be borderline with wrongness and oversimplification. It helps a lot, even though it is hard to find good examples :)
I agree the most important thing is great rank worthy content.

However, if you build that content all in flash, setup your robots.txt incorrectly, or any of a number of other technical snafus then you can screw up your rankings. Hence why it is important to be setup in the right way for the search engines to find you. Otherwise you will miss out on on most of the traffic.

I've done full SEO campaigns with larger budgets and currently manage millions of paid media on search engines and other places.
"The used a wrong offset, as the parent poster indicated. They assumed a simple offset could adjust for the differences."

The parent poster didn't have any evidence for that statement; he just assumed it, because of the way that the data was graphed. Point out the place in the article where they say that they used a single offset.

From the section I quoted, they seem to be aware of the problem. They could have easily adjusted each data set individually for time zone, then taken the average of the sets to make the graphs shown. They do say that they're graphing average European and American traffic.
A Lunar Nuclear Reactor
What treatment? It's a scarecrow, not a killer scarecrow.

Yes it's my view in that I am not a drug dealer, it is preferable for me to have this in front of my house (granted there is a drug dealing/violent illegal activity in my neighborhood) to warrant it.
What about a startup that only has room (and money) for cubes or a bunch of desks shoved together in the main room of the rented space, but provides free Starbucks and donuts and lets you work from home whenever you want?

> The problem with these authoritative lists is that they're anything but.

I think an "authoritative" list (by which I take it you mean "comprehensive", too) is pretty much a pipe dream. If you come away from such a list with two things to think about during the interview process you weren't already thinking about, though, it's pure win -- and if you come away with just one, it at least wasn't a waste of your time.
I'm not sure what song that is that made it in, but the last draft I saw had Danger Zone from Top Gun. Easily my first choice. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1a_ikfUico
As they all use OpenID, the accounts can be the same if desired -- but they've managed to keep the reputation scores separate. To the extent the same person might be motivated to repeat their 'achievements' at each site, this might accelerate the creation of answer content.

Also, this might better yield three distinct communities, each with slightly different norms and leaders, than trying to make one mega-community. The mental styles of programmers, sysadmins, and power-users are different; there's no reason to think the three communities will evolve better if merged. (Scale is not always a benefit in online communities.)
Is Taleb a crank?
Nah, it's worth having the discussion. Companies spend billions of dollars on software. I would argue that they waste most of that money because of software defects and inefficiency. There are language-based solutions that go a long way towards saving a lot of money.

That's just one argument. Similarly, if someone was going out into the fields with a shovel, it would be a bit tragic if he ended up digging it all by hand when there was a perfectly good tractor nearby.

So go ahead and write hobbyist software in whatever you like, but if it's going to cost other people time and money, then it is a worthwhile discussion.
That's a really disingenuous comparison, given that device doesn't even do a fraction of what the iPhone does, and you know it.
And how will CouchDB solve your scalability problems? I am really asking, because there website contains nothing exact about scalability problems.

I also tried to read about in the first chapter of the upcoming CouchDB book, but it only contains vague generalizations like "Erlang makes you scalable automatically" or "it is built on the same technology (HTTP) as the web which is proved to be scalable".

I am still not convinced.
Maybe your 'Mom' doesn't like it, but that doesn't mean everyone, just your 'Mom'!
I think the point was to be pretentious to the point of irony, which the namedropping achieved.
I'm both excited and pissed that this came out.

Excited because it's awesome, pissed because my book didn't come out before this.

Edit: my book is still more children-based. :-)
Some of us are interested in comparing programming languages because we find the expression of computation inherently interesting.
_Why did you do this?

You need to make it more poignant. Perhaps you should pack up your shoes, some hpricots, and go camping. Lay it all out on a RedCloth, drink some potion, and get unHoly. Then, only then... may you reach optimum poignancy.

Some may or may not find that punny. Great work! I like the "guide" approach, and it's great to see one being written for Erlang. Keep it up!
I think anything directly related to the syntax of a language is a very, very dull metric. I say 'dull', because the LOCs certainly can tell you something about the size of the project (if 3 guys crafted 3 million lines of code for a project, and 3 other guys did the whole thing in 12k lines of code in the same language, something is eery), but it is very hard to make fine statements with them.

I much rather would like to see metrics which actually involve the complexity of the code involved, that is, a measure for 'what the user has to keep in his head'. The cyclomatic complexity (~#of paths through a method) is a good example of a step in the right direction in my opinion. I just don't know how one would formalize the complexity of a framework, for example, where one has to remember 'ok, I need to implement this, this and that method in my class and these contracts have to hold' and such :)
so this is just an annoying advert? How on earth did it make it so high up HN? Ugh.