skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are no particular ethical or legal issues involved in turning down an offer after accepting it, although you have burned your bridges with that company. (IANAL) It goes both ways. Companies occasionally rescind offers and usually there is nothing you can do about it. From the employer's point of view it is annoying to have someone not show up. It has happened to me. You just live with it.
There is seldom much interesting for ML person in this paper. (disclaimer: I haven't made much sense of its goal either. This reminds me of a saying “Write for lay audience, so maybe specialists will understand; Write for specialists, then noone will”)

It's just Bern Strumfels running his research program, which is somewhat obscure even for algebraic geometrers. He is an expert on algorithms of algebraic geometry and their applications e.g. to optimization, and whatnot. There was a thematic school on that, videos should be buried somewhere here, http://www.ima.umn.edu/2006-2007/. This may be interesting line of research—for a mathematician—or ML person willing to learn stacks of pure mathematics leading to fluency with at least the book by Cox, Little and O'Shea just to make sense of labels on buttons.
I'm a CS student, a hobby programmer/very-amateur quasi-hacker, and a musician. I'm the lead singer and guitarist of a band called Martyr Your Muses. We are really just getting started, and our myspace page is still pretty ugly, but you can listen to some of the music at http://www.myspace.com/martyryourmuses
Facebook: The Most Searched for Term on the Web?
I use LMMS a little bit. Not much.
I'm a n00b at it. I'm classically trained, most of what I listen to is Renaissance or Baroque, but I try to write in relatively modern style, mostly for a solo tenor vocalist with piano accompaniment. However, I've yet to compose anything that I like enough to publish. I use Rosegarden and a Yamaha PSR-S500.
Let me tell you something about Perl ... have you tried the Dancer module ? http://dancer.sukria.net/ I like it very very very much. It seems to be straigh-to-the-point web programming. Use it :)
"If you get someone’s business card, never call them. That mobile phone number isn’t for you, the person who just met them. A random call to their cell phone is never welcome. Send an email."

I disagree with this. For someone being approached a lot, like Arrington, it's obviously easier to give an e-mail a quick glance and then discard it instead of all the time and bother that comes with an almost cold call. But if you want to get through you should call, it's much harder to say no on the phone than it is to discard an e-mail from someone you don't know. You'll also have a much better chance of making an actionable next step. "so you like it? Well why don't I send you a mail with login information so you can give it a try? I'll call you next wednesday to hear how it went"

That's also why response rates on direct mail is much much lower than coldcalling potential customers.
Last thing I put out though haven't tested on the dance floor yet: http://soundcloud.com/nickolay/nickolay-funky-zippa-ruby-sky...

I use Reason 4 exclusively. Never had the time to figure out any other piece of sotware. Now that ReCord works flawlessly with Reason, I won't need to.
13th Wheel of Time book named: "Towers of Midnight"
Graham Joyce wins British Fantasy Award
Getting Closer to Real Time With Hadoop
http://www.thesixtyone.com/patrickryan/
http://www.ilike.com/artist/Patrick+Ryan+Music

Hardware - Presonus Firepod, Sterling Audio ST55 condenser mic, MXL 604 small condenser mic, ART MPA Gold Preamp

Software - Logic Express (for larger projects), Garageband (Simple and Easy)
I'm very pleased to read that :) Indeed, I'm part of those who beleive that Perl can be modern and can be a very good language for web development. Dancer is one example, but not the only one. See Plack and Catalyst.
Infographics about the Web
I'm tinkering with a melody myself, but it's not much yet. You can see what I have so far with this lilypond source:

\header {
title="Untitled"
meter="Slow and dreamfully"
}
\relative c'' {
\clef treble
\time 4/4
\key f \major
bes,8. f'16 r8 c'8-> ~ c2
d,8. a'16 r8 e'8->( ~ e4 c4)
bes,8. f'16 r8 c'8-> ~ c2
g,8. d'16 r8 a'8->( ~ a4 f4)
}
Trafficlight, this is some really good stuff you got going. Keep it up! Especially Topography of the Sun
Right-o. That requires, first, for you to plant a tree first, to remove carbon from the atmosphere and put it into a short term storage.

Now, IANAE, but from what I know the threat of global warming is that it comes with a cascade effect, that as it becomes more of a problem, the natural systems in place start giving way, making it become more of a problem faster (For example, as glaciers and ice fields melt, they release carbon and other gasses that had been locked in the ice, causing more warming). Doing something, anything to put that on hold sounds like a good idea to me.

Planting trees may not be the end-all solution to global warming, but it is the best Phase-1 of a long term reduction of carbon in the atmosphere that we have right now. You agree there isn't a current way to go from carbon in atmosphere-> carbon in long term storage (except for the "fake tree" thing, which simply shoves it into depleted oil deposits, which I think is a terrible idea).
Ah yes, because Apple is crying out for advice - they're really not sure what to do next.
The Secrets Inside Your Dog's Mind
I mess around on the piano, started using Logic Express a bit which is awesome.

Here's a song with no lyrics (I haven't quite mastered the writing lyrics bit yet)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8kEoN0tJZ0
I'm actually a composer who got interested in coding as a way to realize my music. Using Pure Data and Max/MSP, along with a bit of SuperCollider.

http://www.gregsurges.com
This has been a healthy debate. I only harp on the HC issue because I think its symptomatic of the community not thinking outside the box enough. I don't think its the only issue or possibly the largest one. Usually, the weekend posts on HN are a bit anemic, but not so this weekend. Here are two other articles and threads discussing troubles in startup-land: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833234 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=832672

Taken as a whole, there is much room to discuss how to create a more effective environ for innovation, job, and wealth creation.
It goes beyond that you can't get rich in China without being a CCP loyalist, it's that you can't function as a Chinese citizen in China without being a CCP loyalist. The idea of an outspoken political antagonist of the CCP even making it through college is laughable. An absolute rule of life under the CCP is that you do not question the ultimate authority of the CCP to rule China.

As for as economic intrusion goes, China is really a unique case. They've invented a new form of capitalism that works very well -- the state government owns some companies, the state government owns shares in other publicly traded companies, local governments own some companies or shares in companies, and some companies have no government ownership. They all compete against each other in the marketplace. There are 3 or 4 different Chinese state construction companies and they competitively bid against each other for projects.

There is indeed a meme in academic literature on China saying that their lack of freedoms and institutions will hold back innovation. This meme never seems to be very well sourced. Tsinghua University graduates engineers as capable as anywhere else in Asia. So far, Chinese engineers have lacked innovation, but if any country can prove that totalitarian rule does not stifle innovation it will be China.
Haven't written anything meaningful in a while, but you can find some of my material on Soundcloud

http://soundcloud.com/dnm/sets/all-music-1

Recently switched to Ableton Live after many years of Cubase. Make extensive use of Reaktor, Kontakt, and the Kore2 software these days.
For what it's worth, my understanding is that the target these days (especially thanks to the costs of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance) is closer to $100 MM in revenue to even think about an IPO.
That's actually a pretty good idea but I was thinking something along the lines of a subscription type of service that works very closely with publishers.
Check the mailing list - it's been made to build with MSVC2008 and the ATI Stream SDK beta that includes a CPU-only implementation of OpenCL.
I'm a hack musician...played all instruments except the drums.
Garageband...

Sorry about the weak lyrics...placeholder.

http://www.moorefilms.com/heyman.htm
On the web, "5. Data Grids" becomes "uses tables excessively".

These tables may extend off the screen horizontally; have unnecessary grid lines or alternating shading; waste massive amounts of whitespace for varied-length cell values; and include form controls that only take effect with some submit button several scroll-pages away.
You and your fucking snark. Hacker News is a place with lots of smart people saying smart things. Snark is for when people say something that is obviously stupid and not worth a debate. If you want to disagree with me, do it earnestly, because perhaps this is worth a discussion.

Twitter is the #13 site globally according to Alexa. Does that mean that a Blogger app would be more of a killer app than a Twitter app? What about a MySpace app? MSN? Windows Live? Google? If I told you that the iPhone's killer app was a Google search, wouldn't that sound stupid?

But Wired isn't just saying that. They're saying that Tweetie, one of a hundred Twitter applications, is a killer app and that the other applications aren't. Furthermore, Tweetie is a killer app if you use Twitter with multiple accounts. That is an incredible weird rare fringe thing. I'd bet most Twitter users have a single account.

Now do you want to attempt sarcasm again? Because I'll warn you: Not only do I know more about what I'm arguing than you do, I'm a better snarker than you, and I will tear you to little fucking pieces.

I remember when I joined HN and routinely felt dwarfed by the intellectual discourse here. Now I say something and the response is likely as not bullshit like yours. I feel so goddamn old.
When I was a kid, my father (an EE guy) used to tell me the importance of writing while reading. I mostly ignored that in my career and now a very smart person(Manuel Blum) has validated it. I hope there aren't many things (as told by my father) that I would want other smart people to validate ;(
Gee, what a valuable post. Except that it isn't.
I know this is supposed to be beautiful and poetic, and I do see a bit of that. But then I also remember two things:

1) The thinking behind this is essentially religious in nature.

2) While growing up, many of us were bombarded with similar messages in school starting from a very young age. Very little, if any, attention was given to the idea that humans on Earth might be more than a corrupting influence on nature.

Who knows, maybe they could even be right. But the manner in which the message is disseminated makes me very suspicious.
That is why I like Opera. You can actually save sessions, and return to them. So you can have more than one session going on at a time. I usually save a session once a month. It's quite interesting seeing what I was into 5-6 years ago.
From Nothing To Something. How To Get There.
I go back and forth between writing electronic music and performing intensely improvisational rock music. I've got a lot of my personal music on my main site at http://www.philchristensenmusic.com -- for this kind of stuff, I use ProTools as my main interface, running Ableton Live and Reason as ReWire slaves, as well as using a large number of Native Instruments plugins, particularly Guitar Rig and Absynth.

With my band seaflux, we've been spending a lot more time on social network promotion, and so although we've got a lot of linked content on our main site at http://seaflux.com , much of our material is available on our profiles on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/seaflux/27070655285), ReverbNation (http://www.reverbnation.com/seaflux), and of course of tons of videos on YouTube (http://youtube.com/seafluxmusic). Due to the improvisational nature of this band, our best recordings so far are live shows, which end up getting recorded just with a stereo mic setup.
I made a little bit while I was in high school (last year) We had a music tech lab. I used garage band to start but quickly changed to Logic Pro. It's mostly loops and some of my own guitar playing.
http://www.reverbnation.com/charliemccowan
The song "Serious Injuries May Occur" was made using loops in combination with the sound files of the popular game Portal. I made lyrics by editing and combining lines from the game. A warning, it is a little on the dark side following the nature of the game.
One of the better posts at TC
Get yourself tested for allergies. You might have them and not know it. If you've been tested years ago, they might have changed since then (it's normal).

It might start out as a small cold / runny nose, that cascades into sinus infection, chest cold and goes from there. And it can be caused by almost anything - e.g. you might have mold in your house and not know it. It can affect your sleeping and everything else about your life.

Also they're completely treatable by many means (from cheap/less effective to expensive/most effective): 1. avoiding whatever causes the allergy, 2. OTC medicine 3. perscription 4. shots 5. sublingual immunotherapy (slit) http://allergies.about.com/od/allergyshots/a/slit.htm

My wife got on the slit therapy and went from having 6 mystery sinus infections a year to now being healthy all the time. It's changed her life.
Although this is probably not what PG meant, all central governments are excessively powerful and excessively intrusive. While you and I might agree that the Chinese government is relatively better than many others when it comes to avoiding wealth destruction, I think we'd also agree that they are still destroying wealth.
Fuck that. How about others participate in this rat race and I relax and enjoy the shortass life I've been lucky to get, ay?
I grew up in the demoscene, but got too old to keep hanging in it. I'm part of a bunch of semi-retired demo sceners and put out tunes and releases every once in a grand while.

http://fulcrum.antisoc.net/

I did the music for this demo
http://fulcrum.antisoc.net/filemanager/active?fid=102

And a few other songs...they run a gamut of styles
http://fulcrum.antisoc.net/filemanager/active?fid=97
http://fulcrum.antisoc.net/filemanager/active?fid=93
http://fulcrum.antisoc.net/filemanager/active?fid=84
http://fulcrum.antisoc.net/filemanager/active?fid=76
http://fulcrum.antisoc.net/filemanager/active?fid=61
http://fulcrum.antisoc.net/filemanager/active?fid=72
http://fulcrum.antisoc.net/filemanager/active?fid=69
Just saw this - you might appreciate:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/20/from-nothing-to-somethi...

"This is the first post in what’s going to be a series of blogs on how to go from nothing - no connections, no team, no money and no knowledge of how the startup industry really works - to operating a growing business."

I've barely read it but I had just left your post and had you in mind. Good luck
I don't think cursive takes all that much time to pick up. Here in Taiwan, I often see 9-13 year old kids write things in cursive English for fun. It's legible, too. Cursive isn't required anywhere in their curriculum, at least in the one I designed, and it's their 3rd language.

Writing in script is much faster than printing, and the time investment is minimal. Until technology reaches the point at which most people really don't use a pen or paper and offices stop buying them, I'm inclined to call bullshit on all of these arguments that the skill is no longer practical.

When is the last time you, yourself, used a pen or paper? I'll bet you used one yesterday, didn't you? Odds are also overwhelmingly high that you haven't gone a single week in the past three years without using a pen or paper.

I've made this same argument with people who think that being able to write in Chinese has no practical use: http://toshuo.com/2007/the-pen-matters/
because almost everyone enters "facebook" into either their address bar or google search box to get to facebook.
I call this the "degrees of separation" rule. How far is your job from the point where the company makes money. Sales and accounts receivable (as much as we like to make fun of them) are pretty high on the totem pole. After you get past the politics, they tend to enjoy some form of stability. And it's not uncommon to hear of a salesman/woman work 10 years in the same company.

On the other hand if your job is writing software for a widget company than it better be vital part of every widget. You don't want to be the guy that is made redundant because what they assumed was good work contributed nothing to the overall business.
Entrepreneurial skill is a rare human trait. But they lift the rest of us beyond starting from scratch with flint and bearskins, so it shouldn't be dismissed just because it isn't universal. Have those same studies looked at accumulation of capital and infrastructural reinvestment in regions saturated with microcredit? I suspect a left wing bias that views the rising few with suspicion.
I remember when I joined HN and routinely felt dwarfed by the intellectual discourse here. Now I say something and the response is likely as not bullshit like yours. I feel so goddamn old.

The funny thing is that ubernostrum joined HN just a few weeks after you did.
A good read, but the article makes it sound like Seth was some kid who hadn't the slightest idea of anything business, kept trying, and finally hit jackpot with Meebo, when in fact, his CrunchBase profile says he "worked in IBM’s mergers and acquisitions department, while also working on corporate strategy and venture capital initiatives prior to starting Meebo." That's not to invalidate his advice, but that seems like a hell of a lot of advantage to have, on top of a great founding team, when heading into a startup.
If I were the OSS I would have written up this section of the booklet and then leaked it directly to the enemy at all possible levels. What better way to cause chaos among the German bureaucracy than to spread paranoia that anyone engaged in normal bureaucratic dithering, patriotic speechifying or bad handwriting might actually be a saboteur?
It's false. I worked for a company that owned one and was not named RedHat.
I had switched to water only from diet soda because I thought it would help clear up my acne. It didn't do anything for the acne but I did notice that I was eating a lot less or rather less hungry. So I was kind of wondering if there wasn't some kind of connection. Interesting to know.
its easier to preach than actually do, you ALWAYS start thinking, "man I need more content" or "this one extra feature will REALLY make us take off."

same thing goes for the servers, everyone starts out thinking that they need some server farm, just in case they hit some success. Here is a dirty little secret, don't expect overnight success, you'll have plenty of time to grow into needing that big server, but there is no point in wasting money on something you don't need.
The January 1980 thread was amazingly prescient...
Signs of a programmer created UI:

- hjkl are navigation keys

- Significant amounts of configuration via plain text files.

- Plugins. In multiple languages.

- A scrolling log viewer screen.

- Reports obscure metrics in the status bar.
Sort of electro-pop rock, and my love for 80s synth pop mixed together:

http://tindeck.com/listen/cqcc
http://tindeck.com/listen/vqjv

I'm looking for a vocalist to collaborate with, if anyone out there is interested.
http://soundcloud.com/chunky-g/tracks

Most of the stuff is from over a decade ago.

Interestingly(?) I wrote all the software I made the music with:

http://www.sonicspot.com/aliendiskosystems/aliendiskosystems...

http://www.sonicspot.com/xrazor/xrazor.html
A thought experiment: serial vs parallel
>They created their controlled experiment by altering the algorithm the bank used to evaluate creditworthiness so that some borderline applicants were randomly denied loans while other otherwise identical applicants had loans approved.

So maybe the banks need to set a higher threshold on who they loan to. This doesn't say much about the effectiveness of microcredit for well-qualified applicants.
great thread and some great music!
Ive just had my first digital release on british leftfield drum and bass label Scientific Wax under the name Social Engineer :)
http://soundcloud.com/social-engineer
http://www.scientificwax.com/
Chronic Low-Level Radiation Good for Us? Taiwan Housing Accident Suggests So.
He was quite self depreciating about his pre-launch role (button goes over here!) which is in my experience a universally good indicator of someone I would want to work with.

(Plus 'button goes over here' type input is actually really valuable - when working on UI stuff you tend to get tunnel vision and/or implement what works with the underlying design rather than what makes sense to a user who has no idea about the structure of the data.)
I know. I don't think it's just a matter of new users. It's a shift in what Hacker News is focusing on. The level of discourse has dropped.
I find it somewhat amusing that anyone would be interested in writing or reading this sort of advice. Getting fired is not something you should avoid. Any relationship that isn't working is better off coming to an end, for both sides. If you're stuck doing work you don't like and for some reason didn't find yet the motivation to move on, be glad that your manager did you the favour.
trading is zero sum if you don't count taxes and comission to brokers
At the risk of being downvoted, I disagree. Maybe this is just a good introduction to the series of posts, but for now he simply regurgitated what we already know, ie "Build something, put it out there, then iterate". What it fails to tell you is how to get that initial traction.

For every 50 consumer startups that email Techcrunch/Venturebeat/Gigaom etc... one will be covered. If this does not happen, then getting that first set of beta users will be extremely time consuming (unless you resolve to less-than-ethical methods aka SPAM).

Products like Meebo took off from the start. I am sure most issues they had were around hiring, scaling, and monetizing. Most startups' problem is not what to do with the traffic or how to afford more servers, larger teams. The biggest problem we have is not even building a prototype or convincing someone to partner with us. The issue is how to get users.

Maybe in his next posts he will touch this subject.
This some good analysis. I had no idea of the bigger vision of the XMPP protocol.

In the near term I've been working through how we could use Wave within some of our (relatively) simple content-creation processes at work, particularly around those items that require review by a number of stakeholders before being made public.

The key thing for me around Google's implementation is how one Wave, full of modifications and history, can spawn a new Wave in the form of a published version. We continually struggle with content management, and the balance between easy-to-use and "actually-managed." Version history, content re-use, blah.

If Wave can deliver that alone, it'll be worth our effort to use it. If it can deliver all of what Jason talks about this article, it'll be one of the most leveraged chunks of technology in the whole business . . . and insulate us from the whims of Big Software Companies.

This is exciting.
I got so fed up with the entire composition/synthesis/recording software genre -- for reasons I'll soon document elsewhere -- that I've written a new music authoring platform specifically for hackers. And it's Different. I've mentioned it here before, but I'll be releasing the alpha Real Soon Now (like, in days you could count on your fingers). Stay tuned.