skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because you're implementing a system that on paper has a lot more resolution than what you're really getting. Imagine buying a 1080p HDTV and then showing solid colors on it only - not only a waste of engineering effort

The difference is that the HDTV costs extra, while the rating resolution does not.

but also building subsequent systems around the validity of your 5-star ratings will also be fundamentally broken.

It depends on how you interpret and use the data.

Also, based on their data there's a very concrete reason why the 1-5 star rating is worse than the thumbs up/thumbs down. With the thumbs up/down system you have a single dimension of data ("likedness"), whereas with the 1-5 star rating system they're only getting data from people who like the video (and almost none from people who disliked it, look at the distribution). This makes the data practically useless for determining the quality and user preference for a video.

Again: With only people who like voting 5 stars and a few people who dislike voting 1 star you have the exact same information as with a "favoriting only" voting system, or as a thumbs up/down one with few people voting down (which is very likely). So how is it any more useless? The only real problem I see is that people probably interpret the ratings differently - to some, 1 star is "the worst possible vote", to others it is "one notch better than no vote".

Consequently ranking algorithms just won't work on the star system - the difference between video #1 and #100,000 can be an average rating of 4.8 and 4.92.

Which is not necessarily a problem, if you weigh the average by the number of votes. Sure, you don't want to rate a video with one 5-star rating higher than one with 5000 5-star ratings and one 1-star rating. But you don't have to.

So are movie ratings - but it's still a very useful metric to a lot of people. With a large enough sample size you get the lowest common denominator preference measure - which may be what YouTube wants.

Um, yeah. That's exactly what I said.

I object to the labeling of basic user behaviour as laziness or some type of stupidity.

You're reading something into my comment that I did not say. Actually yeah, it's lazy... and people have every right to be - they go to YouTube to be entertained, not because they're being paid for it.

People do something because there are rewards. With user-generated content, the rewards are generally immaterial: attention, status, self-expression. The only reward for thoughtful ratings is self-expression, but very limited because nobody can see your vote. Even a single-word comment is more rewarding than that. So if you want people to spend the time and effort that thoughtful fine-grained ratings require, you'd have to add artificial rewards - which is almost impossible because you can't measure how thoughtful a rating is.

The alternative it to make rating easier, so that more people will do it at the current reward level. And "easier" here means "requiring less thought".
I got to the end of the entry and felt inclined to click "Report abuse" at the bottom of the page. =D

Loved it. Looking back, I have sinned as well.
They don't. I've typo'd my destination URL and immediately got stopped because it didn't match the display URL. Definitely some trickery afoot.
Martin Jetpack test flights for sale on eBay
For every piece of cheap advice, there is an equal and opposite bit of cheap advice.

In this case, "if you're not doing it full time, if you're not fully committed, you always have an easy out. By quitting, and officially dedicating yourself to your new venture, you've given yourself a big incentive to give it your all. It's like the Greeks who burned their ships on the shore" (or something along those lines).
As anyone who has ever run Kconfig knows, linux is already very well modularized, and disabling unneeded logic at compile time is already easy

Yet in the interview, Linus says the kernel is getting bigger and slower because of new features, which presumably not everybody needs. "[W]e are definitely not the streamlined, small, hyper-efficient kernel that I envisioned 15 years ago...The kernel is huge and bloated, and our icache footprint is scary. I mean, there is no question about that. And whenever we add a new feature, it only gets worse." He isn't talking about code that can be compiled out or left unloaded if you don't need it. He's talking about code that ends up in your instruction cache whether you need the features or not.
Watch the video, tons more information.

As someone who launched balloons like these in college, it's interesting seeing so much coverage of these projects. At the time, it seemed like a run of the mill thing to do (we did about 3 launches a year, part of a NASA program) Now it seems to be hitting the news rather frequently.

Anyways, props to this guy. Where we were at least applying knowledge from our fields to write code and create experiments, this guy did some pretty complicated stuff for not having any related background.
Yes, grepping a folder is easy. Of course, you can always update it from the source control database. :-)
Become hacker
I think what you meant was 'if you quit, I'll take you still more seriously'. The way it's written, you suggest you were planning to take me more seriously anyway, and you'll still do if I quit :)
Actually, I think it might take some of those into account. It mentions a Lost Wages term, assuming 1/3 day per failure. It also has includes "Transaction costs" for buying a new(er) car. It's been 5 years since I bought my first, and so far only car (a '96 Camry, still going strong), but I'd disagree that the cost of time looking for a new car is much less, if at all.

I would also be inclined to disagree with their assertion that "your car is in no way a positive-dollar-value asset". While I'm sure there are usage patterns where this statement is true, in cities with poor public transit, employment may be effectively directly conditioned on owning a car, thus very quickly making it a positive-dollar-value. I suppose the counter argument is that no one is forcing you to live in that city, but that starts getting really hairy.

Either way, I would like to see the paper that this poster is connected to (if there is one). A lot of the terms and figures
"... Just out of curiosity, have you ever discovered something that you thought would offend enough of your audience that there was no point publishing it? ..."

read about "the conformist test" ~ http://paulgraham.com/say.html I've written a few things that on reflection after reading "can't say" I've thrown out.
weirdly the url mentioned http://firefox.mozilla-now.com/ now goes to FileHippo's AVG Download page
Nope, it's russian tastes that would make a huge trollfest of such a title.
A Startup's experience with the TechCrunch50 event
The downside of keeping your day job is that you are slow. Recently another start-up lunched my idea as a beta. This really hurts, because I know I've thinking and hacking this similar product for over a year. And they've got some great press, which hurts twice as much.
i think 37signals was implying that you no longer deserve to be applauded for quitting, because that's not difficult, according to them. i'm saying that i still find it to be the opposite: it's a big step, and it shows that you're determined to accomplish what you're going after.
Increasing Popularity of Off shore Banks
Off-shore means a location other than your place of residence. Off shore banking is not a criminal activity but just means that you are doing your business some place else. For example, if you have a business in Seychelles, you would open an off shore bank account with a Seychelles company. Off-shore bank accounts are beneficial for people who are doing business internationally or who travel around the world frequently. Off shore bank accounts are flexible and accessible and these two factors have made off shore banking popular among all.
Thanks for digging up this link.
Robotic Submarine launched Coolness redefined..
It would be interesting to crunch some numbers on that. My gut feeling is that the statement isn't true, esp for larger companies and companies that for whatever reason require some sort of significant restructuring. The unwillingness to kill your darling and all that.
A link direct to the auction was posted a few days ago and garnered some comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830868
I'm not really sure why Techcrunch dislike Bartz.

Yahoo have been struggling with their position in search for years, and they have been losing marketshare. They have an inferior product, and they haven't been able to compete technologically with their main competitor. Their advertising platform isn't big enough to maximise their returns, since Google has most of the mindshare.

A partnership with Microsoft for search engine technology seems like a decent approach, since Microsoft are willing to put the investment in to ensure Bing's search technology is as good as Google's, and their combined single ad platform is going to advantageous to both companies.

Yahoo aren't giving up on search. They're still going to have a search engine, afterall, and Yahoo is still going to have their own custom interface with Bing's results being the backend. Ultimately, they're just giving up trying to compete technologically with Google. They've long been unable to do that anyway - no-one uses Yahoo for their superior results.

So what's next for Yahoo? Slimlining. Strengthening their core businesses - refreshing their main services (portal, e-mail, messenger) combined with an advertising push is good, as is their plans to expand into the Arabic markets. Closing dated, unpopular, or unprofitable services (are people seriously mourning the loss of Geocities, Yahoo Brief Case and Yahoo 360?). Getting rid of properties or partnerships that differ from their core business as a content provider. I honestly don't see what's so bad about that.

Were people expecting miracles in 8 months?
I actually like Corona, though I consider it more to be brand of lemonade than a brand of beer. But yeah, real beer goes in brown bottles. There's no questioning that.

Disclosure: my national identity allows me to say anything I want about beer and be right on principle.
Be careful when using Uniform Type Identifiers
back when carol was first hired, i asked how she was going to turn the company around. it's not just about running a good business, its about having a product/technology that's better than the competition and being able to monetize it. i think MSFT and YHOO can do it if they work together, but their cultures don't really get along all that well and both are fighting for the same piece of the pie.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=497570
Point taken, but this story doesn't really indicate that the small arms trade is in decline, just that "knock-offs" have reached sufficient quality levels that they are considered a viable alternative to an authentic product. Same thing that's happened to the auto industry, the software industry (with open source), etc. Guns have become a commodity product.

This has happened to a lot of other guns. There are tons of clones of the AR-15, the Walther PPK, the Dragunov SVD, and the 1911. These are just off the top of my head, so I'm sure there are others. The only reason Colt / Armalite isn't in the same position is probably because our military is way more active than Russia's. That, and AK-47's are notorious for being sold to developing nations, who probably want to maximize their bang for the buck (no pun intended).
Windows Live Still Losing Money
USB Implementers Forum replies to Palm's complaint about Apple
Stockholm cash depot hit by helicopter heist
Look at the bright side. If you consider the history of computer software, the company that launches first is rarely the company that ends up dominating. Follow your competitor closely, learn from their mistakes, listen to their customer's gripes and try to find a point where they are weak and capitalize on that.
Doctor Vinnie Boombotz is Rodney Dangerfield's fictional doctor. (Rodney Dangerfield is a late American comedian.) Rodney had a famous joke that I will paraphrase below:

Patient: "Doctor, it hurts when I raise my arm over my head."

Vinnie Boombatz: "Then don't raise your arm over your head."

mattmaroon is thus saying: if scrolling down to read TechCrunch comments hurts, don't scroll down to read TechCrunch comments.
Somewhat true, but there's an important difference between an engineering challenge and a research challenge. I know next to nothing about nuclear science, but I guess that fusion will require breakthroughs. Moon landings - while not particularly easy - simply require a lot of quality engineering. Engineering like that is mostly a function of the bags of money you throw at it.
Maybe I'm mis-understanding you, but you are supporting his point. He is saying that people who keep their day job and build something on the side, and see it through, are just as deserving of applause if not more so.

In some senses it's the harder way of doing it. Less heroic, like getting code written to time, without bugs, without fuss, working 9 to 5, no drama.

He's saying that the room burst into applause because someone took the dramatic step of quitting their day job, and he feels that that isn't, of itself, deserving of applause.

Aren't you agreeing with him?
A car costs about $10-12k per year on average (including gas, insurance, payments, repairs).

If you live in a city with great public transportation, an annual pass will cost about $1200. Taking taxis and renting cars to fulfil those other trips won't add up to much. You can save even more money this way and go green at the same time :)
Red dust over Sydney
Third, launch then get feedback, interate quickly. I was scared when I launched my startup, but you will realize it takes time to get users to try your service out. We were lucky to get techcrunched before launch which led to a bunch of signups for our beta. So we had about 2000 users on our list prior to launching.
Launch early and iterate often! Websites fit this model perfectly. Launching can be scary -- but what do you have to lose? Feedback from a partially working site is better than nothing!
2 out of 5 working-age Californians jobless
HitWicket : Watch Live Cricket Score In Your Firefox Browser Status Bar
> one of my friends to handle getting funding

Why do you need funding?
Damn Flu Season
To me it sounds a little bit like:

Why get a divorce? Just keep your new girl on the side as an affair and see if it works out.
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So why doesn't Microsoft just announce that they will no longer be supporting IE6?

They have, it's the same as XP's (8 April 2014). You answer your own question: products as widespread as IE6 cannot just be withdrawn overnight. It's quite a sensible move have the end-of-life the same as XP, when the corporate desktop moves from XP there IE6 will effectively be dead. Microsoft would like this to happen earlier I understand: it has to cost them money to maintain so much code.
This doesn't help either:

http://www.blogpi.net/wp-content/uploads/arrington-cigar.jpg
Thanks, I am doing monitoring for that company and someone might mistake me as their media person: blogs, twitter, using backtype, google alerts and HN search. Lot's of feedback coming from there for sure - it's almost like I've launched on my own.
Agreed, it's extending the usefulness of the platform. Saying nothing of IE7 or IE8: which are IE too.
I hate to be cynical, but most people are going to flake out. Many people overcommit themselves, or just say "yes" because they thought it was a good idea at the time. I've experienced this sort of flakiness - and done it myself more times than I can remember.

You sound like the kind of person who prefers the social bonding that co-founders provide, as I do too. However, sometimes you need to go it alone, because most people won't be able to connect the dots the way you do. In most of these situations, my motivation would peter out because there was no-one with which I could share the success. Eventually, I sucked it up and rode on without a co-founder, and now I'm having the time of my life.

Startups are difficult, especially by yourself. But the short-term pain is worth it.
Not that anecdotal evidence is anything to go by, but I know nobody who uses Google docs. Absolutely nobody. In fact the only place I see this mentioned as a real competitor to anything is on reddit and HN.

Whoever I know who needs a Office-suite and doesn't want or have access to Microsoft Office just installs OpenOffice.org instead.

There is simply no way to claim that Google Docs has hit the mainstream, not even among so called power-users. I very much respect Google Docs on the technical merits of actually making it work, but I just prefer a local desktop application for this kinda work.
It depends on how you approach things, I would rate someone that works 14hours a day/ 7 days a week in the same regard as a full time job and working 6hours every night.

Devoting all you free time to something, be it with a full time job or not, would get you taken equally as seriously.

On the other hand if someone quits their job and settles down into a 6 hour a day routine they may not get taken as seriously.
Less - it's gone for me already.
My first exposure to this was at the UIST conference in 2007, I've seen it pop up at a couple of other HCI conferences since then and I've always been skeptical of this interaction paradigm ever since I first encountered it.

Every time I meet someone working on this project, I ask them several hard questions which I've never managed to get satisfactory answers to:

* How is cross screen, pen interaction handled in a graceful & generalizable manner? How do you distinguish dragging to the edge of the first screen vs dragging onto the second
* What is the persistence model between the two screens in independant mode? Do they share state or not?
* Is this designed for specific, highly targeted applications or as a platform? If it's a platform, how do you intend to replicate the interaction paradigms of desktop apps such that they can either be trivially ported or completely rewritten?

My ultimate conclusion about this project has always been that it's been optimized to get papers into HCI conferences and not towards practical use.
Ellison's Impatience Over Sun
There are certainly some experiences in life that are unique to each gender. I don't know how much this would affect development though...
Reminds me of the ending of Mad Max 3 - it must suck for the locals, but it's still pretty cool.
Yeah, "journalistic standards" is rather like "legal ethics" and politicians' honesty, good for bashing the opposition, but not much in view otherwise. Does anyone actually trust anything they see in the NYT or WaPo? Really?
Or how some armies burned bridges behind them.

I believe in this case armies were showing that they were fully committed to your enemies. It was a demoralizing act to defenders.

The same might be said of startups. Quitting can signal to others (investors/potential employees/customers) that you are serious. However, I feel like this thread has taken an introspective slant. I'd caution anyone quitting who is trying to signal to themselves.
after thinking about it a bit more, and from my experience in yc this summer, i cannot imagine how anyone could do a start up successfully part time. there may be a few examples, but i don't know of many. i did it in school with my cofounder, and i could feel the gpa's drop. surely your employer will notice you slacking if you're trying to work too hard on a start up. even the ones who do it full time seem to struggle.

if i had to guess, it probably feels a bit like raising money and programming at the same time. maybe less painful because you can program for about 14 hours out of your day. but i really am a skeptic, and i'd say that having the laser focus is one of the best things in a start up. our competition moves pretty fast, we would probably not be standing where we are now if we did this as a side project.
Neat. I wonder if it would be possible to do something like this...

Create a website where anyone can upload their algorithm. The website takes it and runs it on the data set. Depending on its accuracy and the accuracy of everything else it has, it will give it a weight.

I wonder how well this would do.
Discovery like creation is the act of a single mind; the discovery or creation often needs to be fleshed out to be really useful, which is often done collaboratively. But without that initial lonely insight collaboration is worthless.
Tip for Choosing Your Social Network
Social networking sites are becoming one of the popular hangout places for all age groups. Many people have started replacing their other pastime activities with online social networks. This helps them relax and unwind after a tiring week or a frustrating day. At the same time, they do not have to spend any money unlike going to a bar or a movie.This has become an ideal way of spending one’s free time especially.
Looking for exceptional engineer
We are a startup in online advertising reaching millions of people online .We are currently looking for talented individuals to join our team
and help us take the company to the next level.

Qualifications:

* Thorough knowledge of EC2,CloudFront,S3,SimpleDB,PHP and MySQL.

* Understands how to write scalable code.

* Can quickly learn new languages when required.

* Understands and interacts with social media.

* Can work well in a team environment.

* Above all, an all around excellent engineer.

--

Advantages:

* Has previously worked as an engineer responsible for scaling.

* Can act as the system admin when needed.

What will you get ?

* You will get company stock.

* You will get money to pay of your bills

* You will get monthly salary once its our venture profitable.

Who can join ?

* You must be located in San Fransisco or Sacramento.

If you are interested you can send me your resume my email is hidden in the picture given below:

http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/6816/encoded.png

Thank You
The big question is, "What will increase the startup's chance of success?" It makes no sense for me to quit my job and code when there are great coders out there who I can outsource to(/partner with) and keep the strain off the company finances. If the costs are inline with your budget, you're already 'Ramen profitable' without actually having to eat Ramen.
See the Flag of Mozambique, for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Mozambique
While we have a $5/month option, Wikispaces has offered a free service (no ads, same features as paid service, no strings) for K-12 teachers since early 2006. We've given away around 225K wikis under this plan. http://www.wikispaces.com/site/for/teachers
Damn, I was in Sydney 2 days ago so I just missed it. They're pretty spooked about climate change and water shortages down there. This isn't going to help matters any. It still would have been cool to witness. They say this is the worst dust storm in 70 years.