skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>they used their private knowledge of 10 people in the network who were gay but did not declare it on their Facebook page as a simple check. They found all 10 people were predicted to be gay by the program.

Does the author care to give a false positive error rate? how many were predicted gay and were not. without that statistic this argument is bogus.
I usually let who ever is "driving" just write the damn code. He might write poorer code than I, but we're just trying to solve story cards quickly and if the tests pass, I don't complain. I usually only perk up when I notice logical errors, or other places in the code that we'll have to change when my pair refactors something.
I think without real collateral, banks should not get into this. It is very easy to file papers, slap up a web site and put some whiteboards up in cheap office, and have a "startup"; if you can get 200k a pop, vacuous startups will be manufactured at a great rate, very similar to how we manufactured $300k MacMansions for $100k a pop until that game blew up. The deposited money of ordinary citizens should not involved in something like you describe, and espeically not in collateralized startup obligations or insurance on the same or whatever else the dark-suited sociopaths will dream up.

However, a VC or hedge fund might get into it, as long the investors are millionaires who can afford the losses and presumably have or can buy the educated understanding of the risks.

On the other hand, if there were some sort of club or co-op I could join, that I could pay a small monthly fee, and that would then invest the aggregated fees in a new startup every couple of months, I might do that. Especially if I got to attend a monthly meeting, hear pitches from various people, network with other members and people in startups, and hopefully have an "in" should I ever apply for a job at one of the startups.
The "read", "post", and "history" tabs are far to large in my opinion. The fonts could also use some work..
If you have questions or comments, please use feedback at iter8r dot com

Thanks.
The best thing that comes out from it is the peer pressure to stay focused. Even if your pair doesn't know anything about programming, just having him sit there and watch you will make you at least twice as productive so that you don't end up reading Hacker News while your unit tests are running!

Sometimes we'll be so engrossed in the engineering, that neither of us will remember that restaurants close at 9pm and we have to stop to eat.
Tips for Designing a Contemporary Website
I am reading this these days. I think you are right about this not being here.
Sorry. Will keep in mind.
How about some combination of Revenue + Profitability?

Revenue alone doesn't help, I think Facebook crossed $300 MM but was not profitable at that point in time.

Current IPO's target revenue in the range of $50 MM (I think), pre-bubble IPO's required 4 straight quarters of revenue growth (something like that), this is a moving dynamic.
I'm unsure of how you'd execute on it, but have you thought about rolling up many startups into 1? From there you could IPO, cross-own, etc.

I think the founders, especially the ones closest to an exit would need a good reason to change their path forward.

There'd be no shortage of talent, although acting as an organization mightn't be so attractive.

Check out Web Conglomerate if interested to learn more:
http://tr.im/wgxn
"The Post-Gazette, known locally simply as the PG..."

My family owns a small convenience store in the Pittsburgh area. Over 10 years of selling that paper I've heard Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh Post, Post-Gazette, and "the Post," but I can't point to a single time someone called it the PG.
Don't feel bad. Even super angel Ron Conway didn't "get" or invest in Facebook early on. It took Facebook a long time to reach profitability, but they still made it!
New Media Demands a New Kind of Media Company
I don't like fancy image viewers. The over-animation makes it unnaturally slow to move from image to image, and the "window-like" appearance plays tricks on my muscle memory (e.g. sometimes making me use the close-window key to "close" the viewer, only to kill my whole browser window).

It's hard to go wrong with a simple list of thumbnail links. They work everywhere, they give the user flexibility (e.g. I can "open in new window" several of them if I want to, or resize), and they take almost no time to implement.
As if I have a shortage of things to read. My RSS feeds are neglected, and all are worthy of reading. Get me an app that buys me the time to catch up on my reading-- now that'd be a killer app.
How about a Seadragon interface? http://seadragon.com/view/avv
The thing is that newspapers back-in-their-day, didn't make the bulk of their money from selling their content but from advertising.

A small town (or even small-city) Newspaper, twenty years ago was:
1) An assortment of major stories culled from the New York Times, AP and what other newswire they subscribed to.
2) A couple custom national articles and/or editorials.
3) Some local news pulled from the police blotter
4) Classified adds plus banner ads declaring the usefulness of hypnosis for weight loss and such.

The money came from ads. Aside from the small number of major newspapers in the country, the product was completely derivative, completely ad-driven and generally strongly tied with local political interests. I can't see the death of this phenomena as a great loss. Moreover, I can't see websites with newsfeeds as what killed it. Rather, Craigslist killed it with free classified ads and it killed itself by not improving anything, not reducing prices and increasing volume, not innovating and so-forth. It's an industry which previously consisted of a lot of local monopolies and the problem with any monopoly is that it's profits are so good that it will hold to it's position till it dies rather than competing, since competition would result in a profit drop of an order of magnitude - if you have an investment opportunity that makes a solid 10% profit each year, you'd probably keep putting money into it, even if the money that you could invest dropped each year. Why innovate to make 3%?

Someone pointed-out the craigslist might make $100 million/year but has wiped-out an industry that made multi-billions. Now the billions previously spent on classifieds are available to buy entirely different kind of products but its still more logical for newspapers to gnaw on the bones of their previous business model.
Got a source for Stephen King's royalty rates being significantly above the standard rates for other authors? Everything I've found says royalties range from 10-15% for hardcover, like http://www.writersservices.com/res/ri_adv_royalties.htm: "hardback royalties on the published price of trade books usually range from 10% to 12.5%, with 15% for more important authors"

You talk about simple market economics, but the publishing industry seems to be a cartel, and authors are on the whole largely shafted. The music industry is the same way...
The founders persuaded the users
To read web sites, and pick winners from losers.
As the users increased,
Founder ownership ceased
Handing the reigns to a board of directors.
Both principals' original and rebutting words are at once smart and sloppy. This speaks to the complexity of discussing the economics of knowledge and taste.

For example, neither writer seems to have tackled the role of advertising revenue and other intangibles in assessing the value of content.

There are comparatively few ads in an edition of The Economist, which might explain why a subscription is so much greater than that of Time. And that should be factored into any newsstand-price-per-page analysis.

And some weekly trade publications, delivered by mail at no small cost, are monetarily free to the readers because subscribers pay with other currency -- information about themselves, their companies, and their spending plans.

I would also point out that the popularity of a fabric pattern or the life story of Sarah Palin are related more to taste and fad than to the value of any elusive wisdom, such as that derived from The New York Times or The Economist.

Mr. Graham is correct in noting a demarcation between conveyance and content, but as Mr. Weaver points out, it's not all that simple to proceed from there.

In any event, I've really enjoyed reading both sides of this, and I am impressed by the overall quality of the comments.
Y SIN EMBARGO magazine » todo listo: mañana se publica YSE #21, ink or link?
Because its more work than getting a master's and also much higher risk.
I really am enjoying the thread here on my post. Interesting to see some of the comments thinking that I'm anti-development with my quote about product mktg and validation is the scarce resource. Of course great architects and developer are the scare resource but I've seen many code a great solution right now a cul de sac of no market.

to me the biggest issue driving this counterculture that I'm seeing is "trust" of the capital markets. Especially since most of the productive actors in this marketplace have lived in a successful open source movement culture for 25 years. The capital markets (VCs) are at odds with this culture.

There are many other points in the post that I would be happy to discuss if there is interest.
whats the advantage of this over instapaper? FYI: Instapaper came first
if you're looking for someone who's "starting out" and is "the dream coder" at the same time, you're most likely looking in the wrong places indeed...
I can attest that it is very easy to identify who is gay on Facebook, even if their profile does not say so. If you have a lot of gay friends, then Facebook tells you how many mutual friends you have with new people. If you know the mutual friends are gay, then it is likely that the unknown person is also gay. Very easy, so I'm not surprised.
Please read: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=832987 to get a clue.

Further, publishers have no real advantage over each other. Once you print 100,000 copies the cost per page does not change. Book publishers and Music companies have the exact same business model. They all rely on constant prices, and a few wild successes to make their money. They don't really know how to pick winners so they front a little money as a gamble just like VC's and hope the got a winner to two. The big name authors can get the publishers to fight each other so you end up with a fairly stable equilibrium across the industry.

PS: There are lot's of special cases, and even if profit is zero, keeping the presses rolling has value etc. But, that's less important than you might think.
For one, I think this is beneath you. Two, you have to expect stuff like this. When you use simplified models of painting or other activities to make your points, very few people are articulate enough to rebut you. But when you go after journos they have knives they've used on much tougher opponents. One of the ways they needle you is to quote you exactly and throw it into your face again and again. A related one is to deliberately misunderstand a point an rebut it with a more-memorable image (eg Laura Bush, who does not make more per-unit, but by that time you've lost the audience) and to repeat it (the dig about Lisp books, which makes even less sense).

Referee says you both have points, were both a bit sloppy in supporting evidence. 10-minute timeout.
yes I agree and I am one of them. As entrepreneur/hacker I like to see and enjoy hacking old business models. I'm personally sick of the Cable TV and cellular phone service business models as they are restrictive. I don't want to sign a two year contract and I don't want to pay for channels I find no value in. Thus for me I see the Internet a way to break down these biz models(opportunity) and allow consumers more freedom and choice in how they enjoy content and how they purchase/use their communication devices.

For me a iPod Touch with 3G/4G or a device similar to it would become my phone, text, twitter, email, facebook, etc communication device without having to sign a contract. I would just sign up for the service as I do now with my wire-line broadband connection and have the same Internet experience I have on laptop and desktop!
I do the same thing, but I use Safari which can only restore tabs from the single most previous session. At some point my browser will crash, and then will crash again before I’ve restored the previous session. And then my reading black log will be cleared. I can’t decide if this is a bug or a feature.

I use instapaper for articles I really want to read. The tilt to scroll is amazing. It might be my favorite way to read.
Man, you are being difficult. Ruby is well known to be a very slow language (if you want numbers check http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...). Optimizing compilers are computationally demanding tasks, and the proof (albeit extreme one) is Stalin Scheme compiler, that can take minutes to compile code, but the result is sometimes faster than C/C++ code, or at least on par. Now, this compiler is written either in Scheme itself or in C i do not remember, but definetelt not in ruby. If it take to compile your code a minute for a compiler written in [C/Stalin Scheme] it will take at least ten minutes for one written in ruby.
Tom Wolfe has a good intro to it here, using Robert Noyce of Intel as a prototypical Midwestern American: http://www.forbes.com/asap/1997/0825/102.html
I am a new grad student after spending a few years in industry. My advice for people who don't know what they want to do is to go straight to work. Don't go to grad school. It is much nicer to figure out what you want to do while earning $60k+ than $18k.
I work on the team that handles packaging feedback at Amazon, we do care about these issues and need your feedback on how both Amazon and the product manufacturers do on packaging.

http://www.amazon.com/packaging

You can always submit feedback on past orders here, it's easy and quick, and helps us fine-tune things a lot. Like parent said, you can take pictures of how we packed your stuff and submit it, we do go through the feedback religiously :)
The Ultimate Display - Ivan Sutherland (1965) [pdf]
Do you have data to prove these claims? My original comment was trying to point out that many "hot application" get hot because they enable theft or copyright circumvention in some way. Publishers continue to grumble about putting their stuff behind paywalls because offering it up for free offers very little protection.
BBC weekly podcasts | More or Less
300k for 25M sounds too little, almost like having a muffin for a wedding cake.

But your question is very valid. Also valid are mine:

1) How many of those pigs are of edible age/weight? vs how many are still little piglets.

2) How many of those Egyptians are of chewing age (i.e. how many are not toddlers or toothless senior citizens unable to chew bacon.)

See, anybody can practice sophistry with little effort. We can debate this forever, but let's do each other a favor, shall we? Here is a quest:

Find ONE Egyptian coptic recipe with pork. Just one dish. Google for the rest of your life, call the Egyptian embassy in your country and summon the expat Coptic community. Why stop at copts? Go for all Arab Christian groups. Fact: pork is something the urban poor just resorted to recently, never part of their heritage or long-term diet.
I agree this that article is of very limited interest. A lot of people in my lab study RBMs and I'm not sure I would even forward this article to them.
I think he may have been thinking of the ZX-80, precursor to the spectrum. I recall reading a review of it many years ago - it came in kit form, and was a really primitive machine.
Ok, the discussion is becoming pointless: you like ruby for compiler construction. Well I'd rather use a language with proper tail recursion, algebraic data types, with pattern matching as a part of it, fast, strongly typed [I beleive algebraic types with pat. matching gives roughly same possibilities as does dyn. typing, for this task], with standard or at least big industrial backing behind - such as F# or Haskell. And at the end of the day get warm feeling that my code is "green" - does not waste joules, by working fast.

I appreciate your choice, but I'd myself do differently.
Could you help clarify this? In my experience the only things that seem to matter are the offering bank and the financials.
Ask HN: Why haven't universities moved to textbook subscriptions
Does anyone here know of a service that allows students to rent e-versions of classroom textbooks for the duration of a semester?
The C64 also improved the fitness of its owners - you could play outside with your friends while a game loaded :)
> A community operated social news site

Aren't all social news site community operated ?

> Because transparency is not a just a plastic film

Reveals nothing about your business.

> We are "Open for business"

Reveals nothing about your business.

I personally think it's important to both emphasize that you're a social news site and that you pay the users for their contributions. Something like "Social news shared both ways", not sure -- I find it easier to criticize bad slogans than to come up with good alternatives.
That script almost crashed my browser.
And I do not know where you saw me saying C is the ultimate language for making compilers. I never said that, I do not think so, I just said python/ruby are bad for the task.
There's also a rather large amount of anti-nuclear hysteria in there.

All plants would have 'burned or melted down'? Sure, apart from the 100% of plants that weren't in the middle of a dangerous test with all the safety systems turned off at the exact moment that the operators disappeared.

The rest would just go cold and sit there (pretty safely, baring an earthquake) until erosion broke down the concrete containment building.
Having the "stamp of approval" is a bare minimum requirement to go public; you can't find enough buyers of the securities without it. The pricing, as you say, is affected by the financials and (I dispute this, but hey, it's not germane) the underwriters.
This is begging to be gamed -- people game for "karma" at most sites, and if karma is cash on yours, people will get ruthless.
Even if they do not need a lot of optimizations, they still have to be fast. You would not like the performance would they be written in ruby.

And do not forget by the way that Ruby is a memory hog.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...
It's not at all clear that human evolution is slowing down. In a recent study, it was found that it's actually speeding up. Evolution is a tricky area because often its too easy to thought-experiment out a very wrong answer.

"Modern life's pressures may be hastening evolution"
http://www.physorg.com/news158839250.html
Um, I don't need your permission to not download something ("advertising, promotional links, social networking buttons, etc.") from your site.
Remember, though, that if you enjoy life as a graduate student, there's nothing forcing you to become a tenure track professor and deal with all the management/politics.

And if you enjoy being a grad student, then there's little disincentive (other than opportunity cost) not to do that, learn a lot, and come out with a PhD that will make it easier and better paid to find similar work out there.

(n.b. I am assuming that one is getting a PhD in the sciences, or any field where there is reasonable amounts of funding available and one need not take loans to continue being a student.)
Why did the c64 version of the same games often had (significantly) better graphics? Did it just get more attention from developers?
http://www.amazon.de/

is still there. In fact my team just launched a new feature on it a week ago. Amazon is far from dead in Germany.
I too visited about 10 years ago. I found the trash, poverty, chaos, and general attitudes on the street to be fairly repulsive. I referred to it as the armpit of the universe. I don't recall heavy air pollution though.

Giza was definitely overcommercialized to a nauseating degree, but I don't recall such a stench.

I felt that, as a westerner, I was walking around with a blinking dollar sign over my head.

We got out of Cairo as soon as we could, taking a 12 hour bus ride to Dahab. This place was a little paradise on the Sinai Peninsula, and the hospitable attitude by the locals was quite refreshing. We stayed a week and only returned to Cairo to fly back to Greece.
Think about Instapaper's use case: Offline or slow connection. On iPhones or iPod touches.

There's no point in having a social network button when you can't reach Digg or Reddit to submit or to vote. There's no point in having a blank space for an ad, if the user doesn't have a persistent internet connection that can be used to retrieve the ad to show on your page.

And because this is an iPhone or an iPod touch, the screen space is still limited. This means: Only having the text of the site - the essential content - is the goal for the end user. For the end user, this is very much preferred to displaying the entire webpage and zooming back and forth (while ignoring ugly empty spaces for ads that didn't load). Or maybe your ads are in flash and just won't load at all, because they can't be displayed.

I can't disagree with your right to make money from ads. I can only point out my right to not want to waste bandwidth (which can be expensive if going over the limits with the iPhone, on AT&T at least) in order to display useless content that does't contribute anything to the item I wish to read. And I can ask you to revisit your stance on Instapaper. Because as a consumer of content, presumably someone who you may potentially target, your stance seems irrational.
Please take the limerick off there, or write a new one perhaps. Rhyme only counts for so much - meter is rather important.
You should probably limit the number of iterations that this executes :)
I don't blame you at all for submitting it. I'm just confused about who upvoted it and why.
Thanks for the correction!

Since you're actually interested in fruitful discussion, let me leave you with this tidbit. Since the recent religious tension, the government tried to out-radicalize the Islamists, and their minion-clerics issued a fatwa by proxy calling for the boycott of all Christian businesses. The Muslim Brotherhood, the main Islamist opposition party in Egypt capitalized on this and issued a competing fatwa urging Muslims not to harm their fellow countrymen and to keep patronizing Christian businesses!

It completely exploded in the face of the government, they lost farther public support, and now the Islamists and the Christian community (i.e. the working classes) are chummy again. So now the government is leaning heavily on both groups; the Mubarak regime is going as far as talking up an imaginary Shi'ite invasion of Egypt and it's pickings diplomatic fights with Iran, even though the two have no border and the Egyptian Shi'ites are not even the same kind of Shi'ites as the Iranians (they're Ismaelis, adherents of a once ruling sect that once built the city of Cairo and the Azhar Mosque; the Fatimid dynasty.)
I see a lot of good advice here, but what sticks out and hasn't been addressed is that the OP is essentially asking, "Can I steal this client's idea?"

If you chose to do this OP, I hope it is the best idea ever -- because if it's not, you've probably sunk your career as a contract programmer, so I hope you have a plan B in the wings.
By encouraging use of InstaPaper (or its ilk) with longer articles on your site you may just find that it improves your readership.

Yes, and by allowing users to share MP3's of your songs you may find that over the long run your listenership is improved.

Nonetheless, under current (US?) copyright code, reformatting documents by stripping out 'extraneous' advertising and saving them in a different format for later use is flat-out illegal. This may not make it 'wrong', and certainly does not make the app any less useful, but I think the OP's point stands.
OSS (pre-CIA) Simple Sabotage Field Manual