skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Isn't that ... Intellectual Ventures Patent Troll Nathan Myhrvold?

He'd BETTER wipe out malaria. It'd do his massively guilty conscience some good.
Hitch is a general term for a knot for attaching a rope to an object: I know of dozens of totally different hitches. Half-hitches, clove hitch, taut-line hitch, timber hitch; are all ones I can tie right off the top of my head with no review; and there are others I have forgotten details of like the camel hitch and pipe hitch. using the correct hitch is important; some slip in situations where another can hold well.

Bowline is the only real loop making knot I use.
Bends are for connecting two ropes: the most common is the square knot, and its variation with loops used for tying shoes, but the sheet bend is more generally useful since it can connect ropes of 2 different sizes, where square knots slip badly, and it is easier to untie; there are also more specialized bends that I have occasionally used.

If you have been boating and rock climbing with your apparently limited knowledge, you have been lucky. Start with a few knots, then add to them as needed, it's not hard to learn dozens of very useful knots and hitches, as long as you don't try to do it all at once.

Useful and ornamental ropework is a fascinating craft, which should appeal to hackers looking for something different to do, it can be both practical and good looking. The linked article mentions Ashley's Book of Knots which is a good reference, but Hervey Garrett Smith's "The Arts of the Sailor: Knotting, Splicing, and Ropework" has better descriptions for getting started and Graumont & Hensel's "Encyclopedia of Knots and Fancy Rope Work, 3rd ed" is the most complete reference.
A bit harsh, for something so speculative.

It's a rare founder who has no offer he'd take. In fact, if you have shareholders or employees with options, and someone makes you an offer that's significantly above the expected value of your company, fiduciary responsibility requires you to take it.

You can bend this requirement to some extent by overestimating your expected value, but there is always some number you'd have to take.
I can't speak for Mint, but not everyone is interested in creating a revolution.
You know, that's a really good point.

In fact, if he's really skinny he might actually be doing the world a favor. With 2/3 of the US overweight the chances are pretty good that the airline would have sold the ticket to someone fatter...

There are so many other things to get your underthings wadded about, I just don't understand the negativity about how this kid's chosen to spend his month.
The article has more on this issue than I have quoted.

I don't know exactly what those individuals meant by "absolutely not", however I'm not seeing a conflict between individuals, but between attitudes (which also exists within an individual.)

When conducting research, individuals vary in their attachment to theory; even within the one researcher, there are conflicting tendencies to follow theory or to test it. I say tendencies, because there isn't a strictly rational way to know when to begin or stop a particular line of experiments. It is, by nature, unknown.

When established theory says that something definitely won't work, one is less encouraged to try the experiment. Therefore I think it's important to celebrate each new discovery - especially when it undermines a theory.

I think you have misinterpreted my comments, especially the longer one.
In the past year I've seen way too many of these "Look at this forgotten economist who predicted everything" articles. Keep in mind that Minsky assumed the existence of a central bank.
You need to be careful with clove hitch, it's a great knot, but it can fall off if the rope gets slack.
The only feed consumers that do not support Atom are controlled by (and solely used by) Dave Winer.
Check out the TicketStumbler redesign
"Crooks use identity theft to claim this stuff on behalf of poor folks and sell it at higher prices in the market"

may i suggest- what you 'think' as identity theft is plain old black marketing after stocking up piles of 'stuff' supposed to be in hands of the poor. They don't steal the identity of the poor(or middleclass or..) They sell tons of subsidized rice/wheat and other rations at market (or above) prices (to the people whom it was actually subsidized for!). So identity theft, not!.

"The hope is that these IDs will replace all forms of identification and store information that will let all these departments use the same card."

Nandan Nilekani and the hype of id-cards. What happened to the election card? wasn't that supposed to be "the" card to identify anyone/everyone. Then everyone finds out - if you are registered in one state, you are an alien if you move to another state. So phase it out and bring the pan card. Wasn't the pan card supposed in a similar us ssn -unique to everyone? These experiments have failed, so now to the next experiment with hi-tech. So now everyone carries 3-4 identity cards (along with a new card with the new added biometric - 'wow' factor and nice smart chip)

I am not being a pessimist, just realist. It's nice to have this smart card, but implementation and success(as in operability) is questionable. If it works kudos to Nilekani.

having said this, I am curious to know of 'smart cards' implementation in large countries/population. I have seen these smart cards (possess one) in very small countries (singapore,hong kong....).
Use a figure-8. It's easy to tie and untie and it doesn't have any sharp bends to risk kinking the wire.
I think people misunderstand this recommendation a lot of the time. It doesn't mean that concerts are actually more lucrative then records ever were. That would imply that the record industry of the past 50 years was stupid because concerts and t shirts were always available to them as a way to make money. Concerts are a less good way of making money then records were but records are a worse way of making money relative to the past. This is a trend. Records are getting worse all the time. At some point, it makes sense to switch to the second best thing, concerts.

One thing hasn't changed, this is a popularity business. That means that giving away or subsidising some stuff to sell others is likely to stay part of the game. One major difference between selling concert tickets and selling albums is the margin. A concert can happily use up the whole ticket take or more. Concerts that spend more can be better, so it's not like selling a zero marginal cost product.

Marginal cost considerations are something that needs to be considered by this new concert star crowd. That David Byrne post is elbow deep in that.
I am too. I am sick of Google trying to "build a faster internet" giving out tips on how to optimize PHP3. Enough marketing bullshit.
20 Business Names/Signs That Will Make You Say WTF
Doloto: Improving the Performance of Web Apps Transparently
MS Research - Ripley: Ensuring the integrity of client-side code
(Probably because there are now nearly too many languages to count.)
"When buy and sell orders come into an exchange, they are first flashed to those paying to see them for 30 milliseconds — 0.03 seconds — before they are available to everyone else."

One thing I don't understand about "flash trading", and what I've never seen an explanation of in the media: How does this interact with price-time priority?

In a regular old auto-matching system, if the spread is two ticks wide and a buyer sends an order to lift best offer (instead of just improving best bid):

1. If you had a sell order at best offer in the front of the queue the time the buy came in, you're matched, and it doesn't matter if you try to cancel your sell a nanosecond later.

2. If you had no sell order, it doesn't matter if you improve the sell price a nanosecond later --- you're not matched.

So does "flash trading" change either of these? Or is it just a fancy name for "getting market data real fast" --- similar to what you'd get by colocation, but artificially enforced (e.g. they delay everyone else's data by 30ms so the "flashers" can see it first)?

(edit - formatting and grammar)
That article is a bit out of date.

There are two new formats - one is a new format called WebOTF, which is a new binary format consisting of a raw font plus compressed XML metadata. The other is EOT Lite (which is likely to be renamed to something without "EOT" in the name), which is a subset of the old EOT functionality that IE has offered for several years, dropping the more controversial aspects such as rootstring (essentially browser copy protection) and font compression (which is patented).

Both parties are happy with both formats, and I believe Mozilla are planning to support both in the next version of Firefox, so the end result is likely that both become part of any standard.
Ask HN: Why doesn't Y Combinator have a separate link for teams?
Granted there are sites to find a co-founder but why doesn't YCombinator have a link like "TeamUp" where people post what they're ideas are, what they can do etc. It'll be helpful in forming a team, especially if you know that they're already a YCombinator Junkie so there's already some sort of a connection.

There are other entrepreneur networks but it seems like everyone is scattered among the networks.
Sarah, it's called selection bias. The companies that are changing the world aren't rushing to get on stage for a blog conference that garners no tangible benefit in their target markets. What's the value prop for TC50? Getting in front of a bunch of investors and bloggers with 50 other companies and trying to rise above the noise for the attention of a questionable judging panel? (what gives these guys any authority in markets they don't understand?).

Investors are a dime a dozen in the bay area, and bloggers are starved for content (including TechCrunch), so they'll cover you anyhow if its relevant - and not in a flood of 50 other posts in under 2 days. Net tangible benefit to TC50 to the revolutionaries?: $0

The collective decision about TC50 in our office was, "Meh, why waste the time?".
I can see that, but note that there are always budget constraints, and it would not be unreasonable to ask whether there are other more cost-efficient ways of killing mosquitos or fighting malaria.

How many malaria-carrying mosquitos are there? Billions? Trillions? What would be the cost of burning them all with lasers? Given that biotech has made quite some progress, a more efficient solution would be perhaps to infect male mosquitos with some disease that does only kills female mosquitos, and when they f*ck the females, they would pass on the disease and remove malaria-carrying bugs from the face of the Earth.
Awesome. Kudos on actually doing something new with text editors. I use emacs because it's the best out there, not because I think it's the best possible. I think it's cool that the config is text. It gives me hope for something like dired (absolutely one of the best features of emacs) too.
Very interesting idea, but not at all what I had in mind.
Summary: Doloto acts like a proxy sitting between a web application server and the browser. It dynamically modifies the javascript code so that only the frequently used code is sent to the client, the rest are kept as stubs to be filled in later (i.e. delayed evaluation).

The research comes out of Microsoft Research, and has been used on projects like BingMaps(http://www.bing.com/maps/) and gMail.

Key point: The web application does not need to be aware of Doloto. From the client and the server's point of view they are still communicating directly.
I agree. A complete waste of money if you ask me. An expensive, fake gesture to seem as if they are actually trying to educate the youth, instead of simply complianing about not getting their cut as they always do. And at the same time, in recent news, they have forced Pandora to pay royalties. Cover up.
Because apples are oranges. I'm waiting for the "Memo to apples: Yo, where's the citrusy appeal that I've come to expect from oranges?"

Seriously, that a commentator wouldn't succeed in a particular field doesn't give absolution to those in said field. A journalist is not an entrepreneur. No crap.
We've found that startups are much more likely to succeed when the founders have known one another for a while. If we set up something like this, we'd be implicitly encouraging people to go down a path we know tends to result in failure.
Summary: Using .NET to create web applications and the Volta compiler to automagically generate the required JavaScript code allows for a uniform development platform.

The problem: the client code that was once trusted because it lives on a server not resides on untrusted clients. Ripley sits between the server and the client, and runs a replica of the code running on the client. Any input on the client is sent to the replica to be run as well, if the outputs do not agree the code fails.

End result: Faster response time on the client(due to the use of client-side code) but integrity of computation.
Having gone through a few startups myself, and currently being at the tail end of one looking for an exit, I know at some point the desire for growth can be trumped by the desire to generate a return on your investment and move on. For us on the line who have only put sweat equity in, we're much more likely to hold on for more growth (and a bigger pay day) while those who have put millions of their own dollars on the line are looking to trade in their senior/junior debt and move onto the next investment.

Even for a company like Mint (of which I am a long time user), at some point their business model has a maximum angle of growth, and unless they went to a freemium-based model to generate recurring revenue, the short of it is they're running out of room to make money on their userbase.

That being said, as a user I'm very distrusting of Intuit taking Mint and running with it in any direction but into the ground.
I bet the cost of sharing a song is much less. Let's say you have a new song that a bunch of kids like, what do they do?

They check p2p programs to see if they can find it, if they don't find it that way (or they skip that step) they check torrent sites for the album, finally after they have exhausted options the weigh cost/need whether or not to buy it on itunes or get the cd.

After judging the cost I bet less than half or even less than a quarter actually buy the song, they will just move on to the next great thing and leave it at that.

There is another interesting subset that itunes has brought out though and that is the group of people that check itunes first and pay for their music... something that people should really pay attention to.
About time. It's total cheating and should never have been allowed.

http://bellringer187868.wordpress.com/2009/07/25/the-bingo-b...
There are good ways and bad ways to go about it.

You have to think about your goal. Is your goal to get the teacher to correct their mistake and move forward? Or is it to boost your ego?

If it's the former, it's probably better to approach them later, in private, and point it out politely. They will correct the problem next session, or send out an email between sessions.

Either that, or be very polite, e.g., "Excuse me, Mr. Smith, but you wrote down <wrong stuff> there. Why isn't it <right stuff>?"

If you say, "Mr. Smith, you're wrong. It should be <right stuff>, not <wrong stuff>" you are strictly speaking correct, but you'll humiliate them. It feels good for your ego -- I'm smarter than the teacher! -- but probably won't advance the class.

This isn't about the "sorry state of education," it's about knowing what people feel when you blurt shit out in class.
Simpo pdf to word
PDF to Word Converter for converting PDF files to Word documents.
I use EverNote
Please.

$170 million is "fuck you" money. Aaron and I'm guessing many of the top founders/executives made enough money to never ever have to work again. Fake revolutions are cute and all, but think of how awesome it would be to never ever have to work for the man again. They can do anything they want...for profit, not for profit, TBD (Y Combinator). This wasn't some BS talent acquisition; this was an absolute shitload of money to make in a very short period of time (3 years!).

Techcrunch and many others constantly harp on how people should be working on stuff that can help save the world. But the reality is, most of us have bills to pay and a table to put food on. With FU money you can do whatever you please without worrying about your family.
Is it me, or is 37 signals being disingenuous.

They rail against people who take VC money. At the same time they take money from an investment firm. They they say that their taking money was okay because they wanted the advice of the investor: http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/bezos_expeditions_invests... Other people taking money to get access to investor advice is bad and a disease.

They rant against startups that pursue the eyeballs business. But then they publish blogs that are frequently contentious and create drama in the startup community. Really, RoR aside, if DHH didn't swear at conferences, or if 37 Sigs didn't throw rocks at other people's business models, would have heard abou them as a company? They like being the "bad boys" of the startup world. Bad boys get eyeballs and 37 Signals upsells those eyeballs.

The only problem that I have with 37 Signals is that they constantly say that they aren't doing the things that they are actually doing.
I found this article useful: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html?_r...

It has a timeline diagram which explains it well.
Mint could have IPO'd, is the subtext here.
I have hosted some sites, and I don't mean hosted as in put them on a machine that Rackspace or someone else hosted, I mean hosted as in I put their computer in my closet on the business class cable modem I have.

It all depends on the client and the site. For high traffic sites where the client has money, I direct them toward other hosting, or getting their own internet connection to their office that can host it. I do have a server with a lot of one-off projects on it that never took off and got to the point where the client invested in a real setup, various startups that never proceeded past the web site stage.
Why is it the student's responsibility to protect the teacher's ego?

Here is the admittedly unusual way in which I look at it: In most cases, the school system (including the teachers) is implicitly claiming that students are better off in school with them than anywhere else. When a ludicrous claim like this is being made and enforced, I don't see why they should be cut so much slack.
I have a very healthy diet, I work out almost daily, and love my job, wife, and life. Still a night owl.
I don't know...being a public company kinda sucks.

Unless you're into substantial overhead costs ($10 MM per year), red tape, excessive meetings and chief diversity officers.

I'm not sure if an IPO is the subtext; I couldn't imagine 37signals ever going public. Then again, at one point in time I could never imagine them taking venture funding. [1]

[1] http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/bezos_expeditions_invests...
From the point of view of mint.com employees and even moreso the investors in mint.com, this may be a wonderful deal.

But from the point of view of a consumer of financial software, this is terrible. Intuit's products have been terrible and getting worse. I do better with a spreadsheet than their money management software, and it isn't even money management software any more, it's just an advertising platform that also keeps track of your money. The only good thing I can say about them is that their chief competitor (Microsoft Money) is as bad or worse.

Mint.com was different. It was great. Maybe it will continue to be different and great. Maybe not. But if I were to guess, I would guess that it will change for the worse.

My only REAL hope now is that someone else decides to come along and build something great. And then maybe THEY will sell it for another $170 million. Intuit, Microsoft, the phone company oligopoly: they all seem to be a new form of monopoly where competitors cannot break in to the market because the incumbent is too rich.
It's actually a terrible explanation. I understood it better before.
Yes I like the look of the clojure one, but actors are just one of many (flawed) libraries in Scala, I am sure a similar solution could work there.
Is there such a thing as too much freedom?
We say don't take money up front. Money up front is the sin: You're entering into a financial arrangement when you have no leverage. It's the worst possible time to do business.

Re: Eyeballs... Our problem with action for eyeballs is when you have nothing to sell the brains behind the eyeballs. Just building an audience with nothing to sell (beyond ads) is what we rail against. But building an audience that could also be your customers is something we encourage.
Personally, I think it's a problem of trying to cut corners. If you accept the full mathematical complexity of your design, you'll be forced to create a tractable design. Many people create designs that would be intractably complex if they bothered to try to understand them, but they don't try to understand them. They just hope. They'd rather spend 10x time debugging and making random adjustments to make errors less likely than spend x time creating a design that actually works.
Yeah but it is counter-intuitive to open a business with the intent on being bought or anything along those lines.

This just feeds big companies and will likely cause innovation to happen slowly through common user perspectives and reduce competitive businesses.
I find the Jefferson quote toward the end rather ironic. Jefferson and his compatriots were fond of explaining why anything was worth trading for freedom, yet the author is suggesting that the Mint founders should've passed on the guaranteed "freedom" the acquisition money provides for some trite devotion to slaying Goliath.

If you want change, make your own change. It's no one else's responsibility. Even if it were, the founders are now better positioned to execute on any idea they have in the future with few limitations. How shortsighted.
"Fuck You money" is such a myth. More on this soon in another post.
With apt-get.
Really? Who is doing this and making money on it? If there are margins on it, someone is doing it. Otherwise it's a shining billion dollar opportunity.

Of course the other problem is getting it in the channel. People who also sell Pepsi/Coke will probably be discouraged from giving away your product. You could target places like hospitals, parks, events, etc...

In any case, I'd love to see the companies who can do this.
I just like when people who have neither the skill nor motivation to change the world berate others for not doing so.

I prefer when writers provide extraordinary prose, too, but she has no prayer of doing that.
Purple Numbers: http://www.eekim.com/software/purple/purple.html http://www.burningchrome.com/~cdent/mt/archives/000190.html http://community.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?PurpleNumbers

As noted, his blog is published through an outliner, so this is a logical side effect.
What do you mean by "loss" of Fireworks? It is still sold by Adobe as part of CS 4.
The First PDF to Word 2010 Converter Supports Windows 7
Isn't detecting mosquitos much harder than killing them? How do they solve that? Echolocation? I'd love to win the war against malaria with robats!
I look forward to it. Just remember I'm not saying they should do nothing, but rather they can work on something that doesn't need to be monetizable.

I think the post will end up being contrarian just to be contrarian. This site and YCombinator were created as a result of "fuck you" money.
I wish I could downvote this. It's amazing how people still give attention to Dave Winer. Haven't we gone through this before?
Are you claiming that money does not have diminishing marginal utility? (i.e., the famous "s-curve"; it's in AIMA but I can't find a convenient picture with Google.)