skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd really like to know this too. I could walk away with much less than you, apparently, but my needs are small.
Shirts with FCUK on them aren't supposed to be outrageous designs.

They're wearing clothes that advertise French Connection UK, a high-end clothier.
1.5G per core... not that much.
"That pink is not a masculine color seems peculiar to western culture."

Go to Italy, then. One of the good things in life is to wear a dark Italian suit with a pastel-colored shirt (light blue is the norm, light-pink is not unusual). Only utter morons would associate a color with a sexual orientation. But then, most Americans are utter morons. In fact, most people, Americans or non-Americans are complete morons. It's an epidemic.
The quest for dumping GameBoy Boot ROMs
And what are they going to do to get more diesel pumps around the good old US of A? And the perception of diesel as dirty in the good old US of A? And why does it seem like there's an unwritten law that any sufficiently fuel efficient car has to look like a robot turd?
http://mld.dreamhosters.com/Backup.avi

I actually applied to YC with this some time ago. After I took this screencast, I even re-worked the UI to make it look all slick and web2.0-y. I abandoned it because it was too ambitious for a part-time project.
Let's go with the current situation of corporations having similar rights to people.

I'd like to make this proposal: when a corporation dies (goes bankrupt), it should be treated as murder. If the CEO is responsible for killing that corporation, shouldn't he go to jail?

That would put an interesting twist on corporate responbilibity.
This makes me very happy! A lot corporate nastiness has remained unregulated due to arguments based on the tenet (ridiculous, in my view) that corporations should be afforded the same rights as human beings.
Or once all of mint's goodness is infused into Quicken, Mint gets killed.
I guess they didn't get Sarah Lacy's memo: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/17/memo-to-start-ups-you%E...

clarification edit: Just pointing it out. Don't agree with her oversimplified (and 37 signals s vs n link-bait style post) essay
It is not really apples to apples though: there are so few people flying their own planes that the loss of one private plane would be the same as the loss of several commercial ones.

The law of large numbers apply, but only to large numbers.
Actually, I'm not so sure your advice is very good.

The likelihood of a drive failing does not linearly increase with it's age. For relatively young drives, the opposite is true -- if the drive has survived a few weeks of heavy use, it is much LESS likely to fail in the future than a fresh drive off a shelf. Tires are changed routinely because they wear -- hard drives don't so much wear as spontaneously fail. Changing them "before failure" costs you money and increases the amount of drives that blow up in your face.
The article says "After busting your butt for two years on a startup salary -- and suddenly you have the chance to become a rich hotshot with a big job in a big company -- wouldn't you?"

I'm assuming that some/many entrepreneurs would rather work on their startups instead of working in "a big job in a big company".
I'm not necessarily suggesting that one is better than the other or commenting on Mint in particular, but I think that the reporter is mistaken in his assumption that people would always choose a big job in a big company.
The fact that there remains a controversy over even the possibility of at least some animals having some form of consciousness, indicates how the evolutionary world-view still has ground to gain over the Judeo-Christian religious world-view.

Put another way, I'd wager that most users of this site are familiar with Darwin's theory of evolution via natural selection. And if one accepted the basics of that theory, one would have to accept the possibility of animal consciousness, or take on the nearly untenable position that human consciousness sprang into existence from seemingly nowhere...
Google Copernicus Center is hiring
Google: We're Going into the Solar Mirror Business
Once upon a time, the foreman on the shack that made a cannon would _sit_ on it when it was first fired (I don't think that included the cannonball, but still).

The reason was that if the inside wasn't smooth, the cannon might go off.
Moving the same functionality from one layer to another won't help much. For example, rebuilding a full disk in ZFS takes just as long as in traditional RAID because the same work is being done. ZFS does help if your filesystem is not full since it doesn't bother rebuilding empty space, but this doesn't provide the order of magnitude improvement that we are looking for.
Another number that struck me as interesting is that the programming, art and design departments combined add up to fewer people (120) than the cinematics department (123).

There's probably some explanation for this, perhaps that directing "the creation of sword replicas, statues, and other physical objects" takes a lot more manpower than I imagine.
I find the non-free options no Heroku to be vastly more expensive than hosting options elsewhere such as Slicehost, Dreamhost and Amazon ECS.

They provide a valuable service in terms of taking administration issues out of the picture and letting you just focus on developing your app.

But my feeling is this is not targeted at hackers who are surviving on rice and beans but rather those who are more likely to either have well-paying day jobs that can subsidize their startup hobby on the side or have enough VC capital to not bother with the mundane details of hosting administration and its associated time and financial burdens.

Not that there's anything wrong with that - Heroku has come up with an ingenious business model because it really does satisfy a need in the vanity hosting market where cost is not an issue - but belonging to the rice and beans category myself at the moment, I just find that I'm sadly not their target demographic - as much fun as it is to use Heroku's free option for little toy apps.

Deploying to Heroku really is a delight and I think we will see more services like them start up over the next few years.
Since I know the FlightCaster guys read HN, I'd like to make a suggestion of something I'd love to see.

When I take a flight that's not on Southwest and more than an hour in length, I like to do the first-class / business class upgrades when I check in because they aren't that much more expensive (usually $50 to $100 per leg). It's one of my few guilty pleasures.

Anyways, it would be pretty cool if there was a way for me to predict which flights have a higher likelihood of having those types of flight upgrades available (which is to say flights that are statistically less likely to have a full first or business class).

I have no idea if you guys even have access to that kind of data, but whenever I book travel now I guess as to the likelihood of being able to upgrade on the day.
Yes. That is the trickiest part of getting started. However that step negates the user from needing to signup with another service. Normally, you would have to signup with a service, create your list, then invite your users, then send your message. This simplifies all of that with the cost of 1 initial email.

I've thought about this a lot and there just isn't any other option. One way to get around this is to build my own web/iphone/etc client which would know exactly how to handle the Cc's. But that is out of the current scope.

Putting the recipients in the body is not really an option since there is no auto-completion for email address in the body.

I'm left with trying to hammer that concept into anyone that uses the service with clear/concise/clever instructions.
Matt, sorry you had a bad experience with our support folks. If you had a problem I definitely want to hear about it. Please email me directly with all the details so I can look into it: jason@37signals...

Thanks.
123 people on cinematics? I've played WoW since beta, and until recently have seen all the content at all levels of the game raid-wise. This seems like a lot of people for how few cut-scenes there are, and for the few pre-rendered FMV scenes. Am I missing something, or wildly underestimating what it takes to produce 3 minutes of FMV?
That's what they all say. "We love you, you're perfect, now change." That's what we heard when the company I work for was purchased by a company with about five hundred times as many employees. The bigwigs came in and said, "We bought you because we could never do what you have done. We don't want to change your culture. You guys are great!" Since then it's been a steady drumbeat of being forced to use their systems and integrate with their processes. Every time we scrap one of our nice, customized, lightweight systems or processes and adopt their crappy, heavyweight, generic, unsuitable processes, our bosses get to take credit for insane amounts of "savings" -- they literally claim we save millions of dollars. So in general they love the fact that we're different, but when it comes to any of the hundreds of small differences between us, it is taken for granted that we must conform to their superior way of doing things.

Leaving us to ask, "Hey guys, what difference will we be allowed to retain? Can you name anything that we'll be allowed to do differently from you? If we have to do everything just like you, and you freely admitted that you could never do what we do, why don't you just get it over with and shut us down?"
Twitter Now Explains Trends
Competing with Visa and Paypal, by using digital certificates, public keys, etc to cut down on fraud.

In the right mood, sometimes I think my current project is crazy, but I'm sticking with it!
False dichotomy. You don't have to say "we're not friends if you don't pay me back" but you can still want to be repaid. Who here hasn't loaned a friend a small sum of money? My friends and I are constantly in debts of 20 or 30 dollars to each other. I've had a friend/roommate owe me a month's rent without any problem. At no point were we every "putting a dollar amount on the friendship".

It's often a bad idea to mix friends and business/money. That doesn't mean it is always a bad idea.
Why Capitalism Fails
In 2010, votesimple will run for one congressional seat in one district in the United States. If elected, we will establish a website where all Americans can read...

I like the idea, but I don't think you would ever get someone elected as congressional seats are supposed to represent the constituents of the state/district. Why would anyone in elect someone that is going to listen to all citizens vs those who they are stated as representing?
Ok, that's good to know.

I do have one other question: You supply a "Accuracy" score, describing how accurate your predictions are. However, you supply probabilistic predictions, how do you get an "Accuracy" rating from a probability like that?
http://pikluk.com

I consider this crazy because abandoning the development and having it just sit there seemed crazy to a lot of people. Pikluk was a damn great idea with a few paying customers who are absolutely in love with a tiny percentage of what actually got implemented.

But in the end, after exhausting some personal savings, we just could not find the resources to keep working on it and we lacked PR to sell it on eBay for a six-figure sum.
I made a Python script that copied itself and launched the copies (It had the ability to mutate too though by randomly changing the copies). I thought eventually it would evolve into a sentient being. But it would just tie up all my resources and freeze the computer.

One time something interesting happened though. I noticed the latest copies had commented out the mutation part of the code. They had "evolved" to not mutate. I'm guessing that was the best strategy to make viable offspring.

My take away lesson was that mutation has to come from the environment for early life forms to advance.
Yeah $30,000 to DIE!
Yeah, but flying private means no TSA, no queues and you decide when to fly.
"Corollaries of this principle:

" * To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates. Arguing against weaker advocates proves nothing, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates."

This reminds me of a plea I made to HN participants

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555734

to avoid ad-hominem arguments against controversial claims when facts are available to refute the claim without reference to who supports the claim. Sometimes people with mostly bad ideas have a correct opinion or two.
Artificial Intelligence Helps Diagnose Cardiac Infections
The first time I tried on a pink shirt, I briefly wondered how it might reflect upon my level of (in)security, as our culture had always so emphatically told me the two were connected.

Careful study of the mirror revealed only the same old familiar geek in jeans, work boots and a shirt that --while brighter than anything else I owned-- just didn't make a difference either way.

I couldn't help but conclude the whole notion was bullshit pop psychology; cousin to such useful social tools as horoscopes, fortune cookies and dream analysis.
eurodns.com a bit on the expensive side but had great service. You can also register Asian names through them.
Great suggestions icey! It's one we've heard from quite a few travelers. Our focus is on giving travelers the tools they need to better manage their travel in real time. Right now, that means delays, but integrating upgrade availability is on the roadmap for the near future...

Stay tuned--and keep the suggestions coming. Always appreciated!
Yeah I know that feeling...

I've been working on a CMS called Picl for the last 6 months or so, it's already in production with a few client websites. But every so often I look at it and go 'why? wasn't there enough CMS's already?'. I just have to remember to look at the original design goals and remember that it is still a good idea!
FCUK == chav, not high-end.
Apple lied to public about Google Voice app rejection
You can see the solution to this in something like XIV's chunk RAID (I suppose this is an extreme form of declustered RAID) where a 1 TB disk can be rebuilt in 30 minutes because all disks in the system perform rebuild in parallel. I think Xiotech and Drobo also use chunk RAID.

I am concerned that no one in the open source world appears to be working on chunk RAID. We may end up in a situation where it's fundamentally unsafe to run Linux/BSD software RAID on our 4 TB disks.
Looking for partnership
Hello,

I'm looking for a partner(s) (preferably long-time) to start iPhone development.

Preference would be for someone who has coding AND graphics skills and has already worked with the iPhone SDK; and I wouldn't mind two individual partners (coder + designer).

I have already a few ideas of my own and won't mind sharing them when the time is right.

If interested, you would obviously provide some sample work as I'm looking to avoid producing (later on) crApps (pun intended).

I'm obviously talking here about "revenue sharing". I felt I had to clarify this in order to avoid conveying the wrong message.

Thank you in advance for your interest.

I can be reached at the following address:

fares [dot] fayad [at] gee mail [dot] com
Youtube is totally the wrong acquisition analogy.

Intuit : Mint : Yodlee :: eBay : Skype : Joltid
I used Pikluk for a while with my kids after thinking of an idea around the same area and then finding you did it.

If its any consolation you did a very, very nice job on the interface.
Somebody got some numbers wrong: "20 kilowatts (26 horsepower); and 'Sport,' with 29 kilowatts (39 horsepower)". 20 kW == 0.26 HP, 29 kW == 0.39 HP.
Let's talk about sex ... with robots
http://www.imageboard.net/ (possibly NSFW content)

It's sort of a pixel art discussion board. You would have to check it out to really understand it.

It was fun to build, but it would be hard to commercialize. Plus nurturing a community that is more interested in quality art than anonymous penis drawings would be more work than I have motivation for.
Perhaps, but calling yourself a revolution is kind of like calling yourself insane or weird or unique or a celebrity; it's just disingenuous. If you have to call yourself something...

It's out of context because I wasn't saying to be "selfish" and do nothing. I was saying they could work on whatever they wanted regardless of whether or not it's monetizable. There's no way to know that without context.

>Many founders set out to create a company for the sole purpose of selling out (which in the author's context included Aaron).

You don't know that. Aaron could have set off to build a long-term profitable company, which they appeared [1] on their way to doing. But 170 million dollars is 170 million dollars. Almost everyone has their number especially if they have shareholders and vested employees (which 37s does). Their responsibility isn't just to their customers, but to their shareholders, employees, vendors and other people in their life. Who's to say their customers will be treated worse because of the acquisition (granted, Intuit has a poor track record, but this thread has enough assuming in it already).

You run in to the same problem as the OP does: a lot of assumptions without any real knowledge of Aaron or the company's dealings. Instead you're relying on blind assertions and tunnel vision to judge others.

[1] Based on lead gen affiliate fees and the amount of users they had. Unfortunately I don't know this for sure.
I have a whole directory on my personal laptop of abandoned projects, that I've worked on over the past few years. One that I still would love to see built on is the concept of a Fisheye Editor. I wrote a prototype in Python Tk: http://apgwoz.com/fisheye-edit/

Another idea I had, which I thought was good, was building a Twitter like site to track what you were eating, and marry the concept with Reddit style voting and a collaborative filtering + Bayes classifier to find new things to eat. I had a working demo, but never tried to promote it. The idea of the Bayes classifier was to eliminate ingredients you strongly disliked. Not sure if what I did worked entirely correctly since I didn't amass enough users to get feedback.
This: http://mentorapp.org/

For me this was a potential solution to one of the fundamental problems with education: it is full of unchallenging, unrelated-to-life, contrived tasks. When any process (creative writing, math, coding) is harnessed to a fascinating, meaningful-to-students goal I believe you get motivation. And creativity.

So this service would just help mentors and apprentices in all sorts of fields find each other.

This idea was originally inspired by Dr. Tae's presentation:

"Building A New Culture Of Teaching And Learning: Why is skateboarding a better model for education than school?"
In the article, they mention that capuchin monkeys don't "barely showed capacity" for meta-cognition in their experiments. So, going on their evidence, even within mammals there is a wide spectrum.
"I know this sounds like a semantic quibble, but words mean things."

RAID is a redundancy mechanism. It's there in the name. rdiff-backup is a backup tool.
If you are looking for a free tool for rails deployment, check out my project http://wiki.github.com/wr0ngway/rubber (The Quick Start section gives a good feel for it) - while the EC2 account isn't free, its not too bad, especially if you aren't running a full time instance. I've also done some abstracting out of the ec2 bits, so theoretically you could write a slicehost/other adapter if you were so inclined.
I work in IBM SWG, we have been asked to use Symphony for our presentations. No one told us to stop using Office.
5% isn't as modest as you think once you take into account inflation and taxes, and the fact that the stock market isn't going to magically go up 10% every year (as many people erroneously assume). Living off of 2% of your assets is a safer and more sustainable assumption.
JOSMARY
The article describes an experiment where dolphins demonstrate a measure of self-awareness. In happens in the form that they demonstrate hesitancy in decisions, which implies knowing that their decision may be wrong.
I have to agree with Sotomayor here. And mind you, I am not anti-business at all. I think corporations should have the same "business" rights as people. They should be able to enter into contracts, sue for non-performance, and generally have all the economic rights and protections of a person.

But rights like freedom of speech just do not make sense for corporations. They are based on purely human considerations which are just non-existent for fictitious entities. We know that a human being feels oppressed if he/she cannot speak his/her mind. But does a fictitious entity? Of course not. Note that all the actual human beings that are part of the corporation (i.e., stockholders, employees, directors, etc.) have their own free speech rights and can exercise free speech as long as they make it clear they are not speaking on behalf of the corporation.
I'm not sure I like this implementation a lot. For instance if I've some kind of struct inside my application that is allocated a lot of times and is rarely put into a linked list I don't want to have the two pointers overhead in all the instances of this structure.

On the other side it's a win about cache locality, and even mmeory-wise when the object happens to be linked to a linked list most of the times (you win a pointer, 8 bytes in a 64 bit arch).
The point is that you should argue against the best theory advanced by the strongest proponent of the poorly-hidden alien crowd. How you argue against that point doesn't really matter, so long as you're being intellectually honest. (no ad hominem, straw men, etc)

What the article is arguing against, is the method of dismissing the poorly-hidden alien theory, because some crackpot who advances it believes that aliens live in his bathroom drain.

One cannot simply inspect this one drain, find no evidence of extraterrestrial life and then dismiss the entire poorly-hidden alien theory.
Lunar rock larceny
I only really started being interested in fashion over the summer, when somebody mentioned J Petermen, I followed the link, and fell in love with the site's style. So I'm very much a fashion noob. But from the first few forays I've made, that's the feeling that I got. Fashionable clothing is much more intimate than the more generic clothes that still make up most of my wardrobe.

A few years ago, I wouldn't have understood paying extra money for something that serves the same general purpose. What I didn't understand then was what you said now: It's all in the detail. I can buy less expensive clothing, but it doesn't feel as good and it doesn't look as good, and I think that the extra money spent is worth it for how it feels. Hell, you can even get a feel of it when you wear an American Apparel t-shirt versus a Cafepress one, and that's not a foray into fashion at all.

That's why it's fun for me right now, going to university with a bunch of fashionistas. Last year Abercrombie was everything; this year, the fashionable people are obsessive in their knowledge of clothing. And I love it. I don't know if I'll be able to afford their level of obsessive outfitting, but even if I can't I'm hoping that just being around stuff like that will rub off on me.
btw, I just read your user bio page. It says "Before web I've been doing fairly low-level high-perf C++/Win32 work for industrial automation". That is my exact background - my case with C/assembly working on the real time OS for GE Fanuc's 90-70 programmable logic controller. What drives real time systems engineers to want to build kid friendly interfaces?
http://dfranke.us/pfs.html

Though, I've recently been contacted by a high school student who intends to implement a subset of the idea for some sort of school project. I'll be interested to see what he does with it.