skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some content would be nice, rather than the implication that I'm just an ignorant blub-er.

So, once again, how about some of that data you say you collected to back up what you're saying? Which "more powerful techniques" are you talking about?
Yes and No. Sure, there are guns objectively worse than both the M16 and AK47 in any context. But beyond trivial examples of almost implausibly bad knockoffs, a universal qualitative scale remains impossible to define.

Perhaps it would seem less wild a concept if framed as:
you can't build a truly useful qualitative scale until you know the context.

You can trivially sort things into 'good' and 'crap' - it just won't get you very far.
May be if Yahoo put up a contest and asked Flickr users to create a logo with Yahoo branding, it would have created a good PR, a better logo and time for Flickr users to digest the fact that this is coming.
because of the example the US sets

If only that were the case. Why would we ignore the example set everywhere else in the world where there exists private services? Even France has a greater level of private services than Canada.

Incidentally, the US "example" as being free market or private market based is simply demagoguery particularly when you look at how regulations drastically distort the system (ie tax benefits exclusive to employers and the non-portability of most health insurance). Further, again, the issue with the amount spent per capita on public healthcare in the US is very much similar to Canada - so I'm not sure what example you think that the US sets as it could also be one of government influence and the disastrous effects of statist bureaucracy.

Unfortunately it would be futile to find another family doctor as we have a severe shortage of family doctors in the area. It's so severe in fact that any specialists are forced to spend at least some of their time in part as family doctors and still if you're new to the area you won't be able to find a family doctor. Fortunately, I have no pressing issues so I'm keeping the March appointment - it is still however remarkable and laughable that such a situation exists for such a basic level of care while we have the audacity to try touting how great our healthcare system is to the rest of the world.
SMS prices are much, much cheaper in the developing world. I've heard you can get cellphone data plans in africa for less than a dollar a month?
iAccelerator is in Ahmedabad (at least that's what the faq says). 500,000 is enough to lead a comfortable life. It is about 1.5 to 2 times the yearly salary of a fresh C.S. engineering grad in Ahmedabad. But remember this is 500K for a team of 2-3 people.

Edit: I stand corrected, this round seems to be happening in Bangalore where 500K is closer to 1.5 times than 2 times the starting salary of a new CS grad.
I ask HN fellows to reply with arguments not with anonymous downvotes.
I agree that $10k seems to be a very decent amount for a startup in India. I am hoping that they have success so that more will come up.
"I completely agree with the point that if taxing the private sector to raise money to fund startups only works if the public sector is better at predicting success than the private sector. And I think the public sector is worse at that."

I can think of a number of flaws in this logic - for one, the public sector may not be as good at predicting winners and losers, but public investment can still be valuable if the overall level of investment is too low. The comparison is not strictly with the same amount of money being invested by the private sector - it is also the same amount of money being used in non-startup investment ways in either the public or private sector. Additionally, while the private sector will exclusively target companies with the greatest potential return on investment in cash terms, opportunities will be lost where the social benefit of the startup does not translate directly in to revenue, cash and profit.

That's assuming that the private sector is in fact better at picking winners, and as I allude to in my last point, that their definition of a "winner" is the most beneficial, neither of which are proven.
Yeah and mobile devices and so on. I was curious as to which 5 were meant though. Thanks.
If you happen not to be as smart as the Great Doers, then imitating them might turn out to be a bad idea.
He is probably wiping sweat off his face on his sleeve. Bangalore and more so, Ahmedabad can get hot and humid.
It's only logical to conclude that Chrome standalone must run at least 8 times faster than Internet Explorer 8? Otherwise their gui would be much slower.

Why wasn't there a post about this before? This post must be complete bullshit.
Don't think of Online Banking as something that just allows you to not go into the bank, if you do, you're thinking in terms of a first world experience. There are billions of people in this world who have no access to banks, or would not dare trust their money to unregulated and corrupt individuals that head these so called banks. Heck, I have in-laws that keep the bulk of their money in a stove on their balcony of their apartment...and that's in Kiev, Ukraine!
The Terracotta JVM clustering software also allows you to use more memory than a single Java process normally can access by, firstly, spreading your app across a cluster and, secondly, by paging ojects to disk to make additional space.
I tried http://news.iaccelerator.org/ and was disappointed.
30th street is pretty far away, and I've got no project to work on. I like the idea of a Philly meet-up, but right now I think I'll sit this one out.
I guess I should have specified valuable keywords. I don't have a SpyFu account, but if "7up cake" and variants are examples of their best keywords, I wouldn't call that a big win.
I hate having a car. I would love to see autonomous vehicles...but 40,000 deaths with 3 million injuries is not a big enough target when 3 Billion people on this planet live on less that $2.50/day. We have bigger problems to solve. I put my vote on improving "Government Transparency".
I remember that species of spider; they're scary as hell, and have killed somewhere around 20 people through fear alone. The good news is that they're not aggressive. I bumped into one of their freakishly strong webs once, and thought I had hit a tree branch (!), but when I looked up I saw an enormous spider cowering above me.
Plus Kate too.
> that sort of government action mainly encourages /hoarding/ behavior

Citation needed?

> Spending more on public goods like health care helps

I think most of us are fine with government supporting the public good, building infrastructure, etc. But it's a little sleazy to directly fund startups. I mean, if my uncle donates to Obama's campaign, will my business get special treatment? (That's how it works here in Illinois, or so it seems...)
This is an interesting source of "death-of-a-thousand-cuts" performance problems in C++ codebases, as well. Code you never even execute can slow you down; stack-unwinding code for unhandled exceptions takes up precious icache bytes between the bodies of useful functions. Good luck finding this with a profiler; every function executes epsilon slower, since a cache miss is that much more likely to fetch its body.
your wrong basically because a 301 returns "found" Google will follow it and use the data, we will blog it tommorrow with proof
When you announce an incredibly amazing product that clearly blows what your competition has currently shipping without even as much as a launch date plus or minus a year, it's vaporware.

The effect is twofold: it inhibits sales of the competition (who would want a Wii/360 when they could buy an Xbox 360 now and expect this mind-blowing Natal by Christmas?) and takes space on specialized media, limiting the free promotion their competitors could have gotten had Microsoft stuck with realistic products.
I'm one of those people and am happily using Microsoft products through BizSpark to develop web apps. Yes, I could use python with django or php with mysql (and have in the past); but I can build products better and faster with asp.net/c# (it's what I know and like best). And now that I don't have to pay huge licensing fees before I make a profit I can do that.
Great things aren't going to happen by just having him on the payroll, Microsoft would have to make good use of his abilities by giving him resources, time, meaningful work, and not undermine his efforts. If they just throw him into unfocused micro-manged bureaucracy then it's just a waste.
This is an excellent explanation, and gels with what I've understood on the topic.

The most relevant case I know is Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Tel...

in which it was determined legal for one phonebook to copy the listings of another in order to create an aggregate directory.
Hosts you use for your projects answered
I think the talk itself is better than the slides or the blog post, but I don't know how many people actually sit through talks. Mike and Nate killed in that talk.
They have a lack of vision. That makes it impossible to determine if they do have a lack of talented engineers or not.

Besides that, what kind of talented engineer stays in a company that lacks vision?
IPhone Developers: We use our iPhones in bed, allow us to disable landscape
I know I can't be the only person who uses their iPhone in bed, specifically to read news, books, and various social networks; because of this I end up using applications that allow me to disable landscape mode because if you have tried this you know how frustrating it is to turn over to your side and suddenly the screen flips and it's impossible to read.

Certain wonderful apps like Stanza (e-reader), Byline (RSS Reader / Google Reader Sync), and Tweetie provide this option. I love them for it.

Some apps do not provide this functionality however (Facebook, NetNewsWire, and even Safari) and I hate them for it. I absolutely can't stand using an application which frustrates me in bed. Maybe I'm crazy.

or

Maybe developers should offer this simple switch in their options to turn this off. It may just be that I'm the only person yelling about this but I know other users get frustrated by this as well, it's simply overlooked at times.

So, join me in asking developers to kindly provide this option for us. I'm looking at Apple as well, Safari is a huge pain in the ass while laying in bed.
Given a framework like Moose (entirely fair, since you've dragged Rails into the discussion), I'm not seeing anything yet that can't be done with Perl. I sort of get the feeling you haven't used Perl in a while and aren't familiar with any of the modern object frameworks.
http://www.freebase.com/view/en/y_combinator
The stack unwinder should be a separate function altogether, not interspersed with your code.

Activation record cleanup, on the other hand, will be inside your routines, and will be executed both in cases of normal and abnormal exit. But this isn't the responsibility of exceptions; you have to do this cleanup even on normal exit.

Code that runs only in exceptional cases is comparatively rare. But with exceptions, you can move that code somewhere else entirely; and with PC-based exception handling, the space cost is only borne when an exception is thrown, when the PC lookup tables need to be paged in. In this scenario, the tradeoff between exceptions and error codes becomes relevant: exceptions let your code get smaller at the cost of a hit when an exception is actually thrown, while error codes bloat your code.

Of course, all of the above is not specific to C++. C++ has other deficiencies which can lead to suboptimal pathologies in practice.
It's not a useful phrase, because nobody knows what it means

The fact that language evolves is no excuse to just randomly mangle and distort it. English isn't even my native language and I bloody know what it means.
Though probably not a start-up anymore, I don't think Zoho has taken any VC money.
This is simply not possible for them.

Making the browser and web applications a viable alternative to their cash cows (Windows, Office, BackOffice) would seriously compromise the fat bonuses even mid-level executives get and would seriously jeopardize top management's position in front of their shareholders.

It simply does not happen this way. Not with a big public company that enjoy a monopoly with insanely fat margins.
Great call, I forgot about them. You are right, they just mentioned how they had no investors as it related to Zimbra's unpredictable future.
The world has bigger problems than car accidents, but think in terms of bang for your buck. Fighting poverty is hard and expensive. Autonomous vehicle technology could be had for a fraction of what gets spent on pork projects during any given week that congress is in session.
Ask HN: Anyone going to SF for the Health 2.0 conference?
Wondering if there are any Health 2.0 hackers out there...
but isn't that what economists themselves are trying to do all the time - describe the whole of the world with either incomplete or unproven theories or both? at least we can see the results...
WTF are they doing with all this money?

Seriously I'd pull my money out of T. Rowe Price at this point until Twitter at least shows _some_ revenues.

At this point it seems Twitter's business plan is to continue to raise money until they can't and then try to pull the rabbit out of their hat.
Yeah, we just moved our blog stuff around today -- funny to see this old post making the rounds again.
I am not actually against unit tests, but I have seen it being taken to unhealthy extremes. For example at some companies there are automated tools that check that every method has a unit test. In the end people write unit tests for Java getter and setters and so on. Mind numbing as that task is, people also end up writing bad unit tests just to silence the tool.

A lot of unit tests make sense, but I suspect they also offer plenty of opportunities for idling time away.
Uh, right, because talented people only ever live in Silicon Valley (or the largest 20 cities, or whatever). Every startup's prospects relate to their geography uniquely, and the herd has nothing to do with where any particular startup should be located.
It is definitely an interesting blog post, at the very least. I started watching the talk (Thanks for mentioning it, I missed the link when reading the blog), but I won't have time to watch all of it until tomorrow. From what I've watched, however, you guys (all three of you) have a really good stage dynamic.
"It's a false corollary to expect lowered taxation to immediately equal greater spending - especially in times of economic flux, that sort of government action mainly encourages /hoarding/ behavior, which isn't good for the economy's health."

Hoarding usually means saving, and saving usually means investment, since most people save in interest-bearing accounts that one way or another turn out to be investments. You definitely want a good mix of investment and spending (not too much or too little of either) but it's rather ham-fisted for the feds to invest the money themselves.
@rbanffy:

First, it is entirely possible for Microsoft to continue to reap rewards from Windows while improving their browser at the same time. The two are not mutually exclusive. I reject the perspective that says the browser will win at the cost of desktop APIs. Everything has its place.

Second, while Windows may make shareholders (and your hypothetical "mid-level executives") fat today, they are under no illusions that it will make them fat tomorrow. Innovating for the future is an earnest and honest goal at Microsoft. This includes the browser, too. Who is to say where the next cash cow will be?

(Also: for some strange reason, I can't reply directly to you. Why would that be the case?)
That's all Mike (he's an Improv guy). I'm really happy with how the talk was received; it's the most fun I've ever had doing a talk.

Advice to startup entrepreneurs re: public speaking: hire someone who does improv.
Government printing money increases capital? Do you even know what "capital" means? By your definition Zimbabwe has extreme amounts of capital ... that seems to have done them a lot of good.
Thanks for doing the math. I appreciate the pursuit of curiosity here on HN. There is a different issue here to be curious about, and that is exactly what a calculation of broad heritability definitely predicts. It predicts a lot less than what many readers unfamiliar with genetics might guess. It happens that some of the leading authors on human behavioral genetics just wrote an article about what heritability does and does not mean

Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220.

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/cdir/2009/00000018...

(one online abstract)

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122587149/abstrac...

(the main link to the article)

Alas, a peek behind the pay wall that was available the other day when I posted this article here on HN

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=838534

is now dead. But I have the full text of the article at hand, as I am currently attending a weekly journal club with some of the authors, and one key paragraph from the article must be read by anyone who draws conclusions from heritablity figures:

"Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)."

This simply reemphasizes a point that is familiar to anyone who has studied genetics carefully, namely that the pre-Mendelian concept of heritability says nothing about malleability, the degree to which a trait can be influenced by environmental variables.

Angoff, W. H. (1988). The nature-nurture debate, aptitudes, and group differences. American Psychologist, 43, 713-720.

Mange, A. & Mange, E. J. (1990). Genetics: Human Aspects.

Kaufman, Alan S. (1990). Assessing Adolescent and Adult Intelligence.

So the statement above that heritability somehow constrains the expression of IQ or of consequences of IQ such as occupational success is actually conceptually incorrect. But I appreciate you going to the effort of doing the math.

Another thought is that relating one correlation coefficient to another with linear algebra probably depends too heavily on applying linear tools to a not fully linear model. Increases of income are plainly linear and are on a ratio scale. (There is a zero point for income, and each dollar increase in income has the same magnitude anywhere along the scale.) But IQ test standard scores are at best ordinal scales, so it is already an abuse of mathematics to treat them as a linear variable, or to treat a figure derived from them as a linear variable.
And that's why "Improving Government Transparency" is a good place to put your vote.
Yep, this has driven me bonkers since day one. In fact, if I could easily tear out the accelerometer(s) totally I'd be the first to do it (I find games that use them next to unplayable).

I listen to podcasts every night going to sleep and if I want to find a different podcast to listen to, it dives into Coverflow (which I can't imagine anyone ever finding productive, but weirder things have happened!)
Why are you confident to say that the full crisis has hit?
I am totally with you. When I open my mail in bed and I turn on my side, suddenly the whole screen flips over and I just hate it.

However, I really don't see a way to differentiate between bedtime landscape and normal landscape. Honestly, the initial annoyance and having to reorient my brain for the landscape change is less annoying than possibly having to go into a setting and disable it before it happens. Once it switches I get used to it I just don't like it at first.
Here's an idea: take defensive driving and get insurance. Or to make this applicable to the subject at hand, write unit tests and write maintainable code. It's surprising how much doing both increases the effectiveness of either.
He seems to be more of a UNIX kind of guy.
The presentation by Cliff Click at the JVM language conference made that all a lot more clear; it's a shame the article on Artima doesn't go into much in the way of details.

Basically, the limitations on conventional VMs are at least somewhat imposed by the underlying x86 architecture. The Azul box is a custom processor specifically designed for the JVM, so it can do things like write barriers around gc in a single hardware instruction. That, in turn, allows them to produce a fairly pauseless garbage collector: I believe he claimed something like 10-20ms at most for a 100GB+ heap. Contrast that to the several second GC pauses you'll often get on a conventional VM with just a few GB of heap.

Their boxes are also designed to massively scale up; up to 54 cores per chip and 16 chips in a single box. I believe they use localized L1-caches, shared L2-caches (between each 9 cores, I think), and uniform memory accesses across all the chips in the box. The end result is incredibly high memory bandwidth. The other bit Click talked about was how they can profile under load with basically no overhead, unlike the standard JVMTI interface.

They used to sell a lot of gear to financial services companies, as I understand it: I get the impression that for high-load transaction processing their boxes would pretty much smoke anything remotely resembling a convention server or array of servers.

Again, it's a shame the Artima article didn't really talk about any of that. The fundamental limitations are more primarily in the JVM interaction with conventional x86 chips and the really cool work Azul has done is to create a chip (not unlike the Lisp machine of yore) specifically designed to make the JVM run fast and scale up.
If you're measuring success by GNP, then it is trivial that the government taxing then spending on something is only worthwhile if the government is making more effective decisions on that something than the taxed people would have through the free market.

You're right that that reasoning ignores social benefits other than GNP. However my experience suggests that it is easier to claim social benefits than measure them. And when you can't reliably measure a benefit, delivery tends to be very inefficient.

That isn't to say that government can't meet that bar. Economic theory says that private enterprise deals poorly with externalities. It is hard for a private enterprise to recoup the value provided by national defense, police, clean water supplies, public health inspectors, etc. For that reason it is economically efficient for us to be taxed so that the government will supply us those services.

However startups are a case where a person who is good at picking then nurturing entrepreneurs recoups the value from doing it well. Therefore there is every reason to believe that free enterprise does that job well, and so no reason to believe that the government is likely to do it better.

In that situation underinvestment is a signal that the market doesn't believe that the returns are there. Artificially improving those returns therefore should stimulate investment. And I believe would do it more efficiently than attempting to directly pick winners and losers.
Online service makes minor change, users complain. News at 11.
"Otherwise, start your business where you’ll be happy and where you’ll find like-minded people." Seems this was one of the reason YC left Boston,
For apps whose interface can spare the space, a simple 'orientation lock' toggle button could do the trick. Is there a existing/obvious default icon to use for such a button?
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