skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few years back, my advisor and I went through the process of applying for a patent for some of our reseach, via our university's IP office. They would only pay for the provisional patent -- we would have to come up with any funding for a full patent (like $20k) and they would still own the patent. That doesn't give much incentive for researchers to push for patenting and commercialization.

We just dropped the idea, given that it would take a lot more work to develop the idea to the stage that a VC would be interested.

What he said about funding is generally right -- at least in the CS world, most research projects are only implemented far enough to get a paper published. The funding (and tenure system) doesn't really reward any further development.

The one exception that I've seen is the NSF SBIR/STTR program: they can give you some angel-level money to get the project beyond a research prototype (and do not take any equity!).

edit: I've also heard that the funding situation is better in Europe, but I don't know any details.
Retrievable iPhone numbers mean potential privacy issues
I'm glad I read this article before I got the app for my iPhone, I was actually excited...imagine being away from the laptop and TV and being able to catch a presidential speech.

Too bad. I still might get it though, it looks sharper then the other news apps out there.
What does your deployment look like? Nginx/Apache in front of Thin/Mongrel?
One could just as easily equate high speed internet to Cable television. You don't get charged more for watching more.

In the end it's somewhere in the middle. But the reality is that companies are making money now off unlimited access and those handy anti-trust laws we have prevent all the Internet companies from banding together to implement metered access. So even if it did make more sense it's unlikely a provider could implement it without losing out to competition (since again the current model is profitable)
Right, that's the type of example I'm looking for. We're just five people, so one room is fine. But now I know that if we outgrow Campfire there are other options.
Thanks for all the suggestions everyone, I will look in to Canadian immigration when it comes to it.

If it's too much of a hassle, I'm going to have to consider India.
Over the next few months this feature will be added to http://tweetminer.net - one way or another.

Of course it would be great to use a service like this to do the heavy lifting rather than code it myself...

But why would I pay $400 per month for 500 searches per month... when

a) 500 searches per month cost of $4,800 per year

b) 500 searches wouldn't be enough to service my target user-base of 10,000 users.

c) I could roll my own in less than 2 weeks

To be viable for an app developer like myself - the pricing structure would need to make it impossible for me to even consider rolling my own.

BTW - I'm not trying to dis the service, looks nice, just pointing out the pricing structure seems to be wayyyy too high
Anyone remember the "terabytes on an inch of scotch tape" holographic storage that was "coming soon, we have a working prototype" oh, about 10 years ago?
"We are seeking to create an attitude-free, newbie-safe and mama- friendly tech event to encourage women to join the Ruby on Rails community."

Wot no rockstar and porn-imagery fueled hijinx? That's no Rails conference.
It's probably also worth mentioning that if a site has a video tutorial describing what it does (or what the company does), I pretty much just forget the whole site completely and go elsewhere. I just don't have time for much more than a quick scan of a bulleted or numbered list, or maybe a page of copy.

Just one opinion..
Yeah, but if Hindu men like ice cream, and I don't want Hindu men, I might not like men who like ice cream either because a) it's what Hindu men do, or b) I don't like people who like ice cream to begin with, and I don't like Hindu men for that reason.

So it's not totally unrelated.
Company registration, 2 sewing machines, table, costume jewellery, buttons, wages for the sewer, wages for Grandpa, attendance costs for Ohio show, liability insurance, other overheads, ... sounds cheap!

Her job would contravene child labour laws in the UK, http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Parents/ParentsRights/DG_4002945 :
The youngest age your child can work part-time is 13 years old, with the exception of children involved in television, theatre, modelling or similar activities.

I had thought there was a family business exception but I appear to be mistaken.

Also recent (this year?) law changes mean that under 16s (IIRC) can't be company directors, previously it was either very low (5yo) or unlimited, can't quite remember.
Advertisers definatly want to know who they're hitting, if they don't then they're a small town shop not understanding their job.

It's important to be able to show how you impacted the consumers awareness, and if you're able to motivate their purchasing decision process then that's definitely something to brag about.

When an agencies account comes up for review they need to show what type of ROI they gave back to their client,No one wants to lose a big account in a review because they can't show how they succeeded!

Source: Advertising guy :), ask me anything!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=851363
It's not flamebait at all. The data is all about people's responses to generic questions about what they're looking for in a date. They don't say "I don't want to date Muslims" and have that reflected in match scores. The match score is based on things like "I hate people who squeeze the toothpaste from the middle."

It's quite interesting.
Ask HN: Programming with Visual FoxPro
I've the opportunity to work in an interesting project. The problem is that I would have to program using Visual FoxPro and I don't know if I should.

I'm beginning to program using Python/Django and I really like the language. I've some projects(mostly web) that I would like to develop in the future.

What do you think, to program using Fox could be useful for my future projects?
> The untold story in US health care is the second you say you are uninsured the bills magically evaporate.

I have the exact opposite experience. I had no health insurance for about 2 years, and despite my pleas, I paid 3-4x what I expected, and certainly at least 2-3x what insurance would have paid, for even simple procedures like dentistry, fever, etc. Forget the Emergency Room.

Going without health insurance in the U.S. is basically not an option if you have any hope of affording such.
That tech is already taken care of, I visited CO recently and they just scan your license plate and send you a bill once a month or you can get an RFID chip in your dash that they can scan. No stopping, no lines, no surly emotionally damaged (no wonder lol) CSR's taking your money etc etc.
No, see, they run a unit test on you.
Your visitors might not actually ask you the questions, but you can bet that anyone visiting your site for the first time is at least asking themselves similar questions in their head: What is this? Why should I care? Who built it? How much does it cost?
They left out the axis on the "message reply rate" diagram as a teaser for the next blog post.

I just copy and pasted the image onto the axis. It shows that white and native American males are more likely to get responses than the other races.

http://www.codexon.com/temp/mrr.png

And I wrote a small analysis here if you can be bothered to take a look.

http://www.codexon.com/posts/okcupid-dating-statistics-shows...
It may actually break down well before that. There is probably something akin to the Laffer curve for the power of the central government. I.e. at a certain point, making the government more powerful will make the country poorer.
Possibly, maybe they would even have time to go and build that other classified ads site to prove the people at Craigslist wrong.

The number of people that are willing to tell you how to run your business that do not run a comparable business always amazes me (and then there are the ones that don't run businesses at all...).
Metaclass programming in Python, Part 3
Celebrating fast failure at Seedcamp 2009 [video]
Either that or they were bought out (marktplaats.nl for instance).
No, they'd do duck typing, which could be a potentially embarrassing situation.. :-)
I don't think text messages are going to be "killed" by anything in the very near future.

Except by constantly-increasing prices. (Some people pay 25 cents to receive a spam message. You can buy an entire newspaper for that amount of money!)
On a more serious note, I think its a good idea to hold outreach events for getting minorities working on your platform or industry. There arent many women in tech, trying to do something to increase the number is a good thing.

A man whining about not being able to attend a single tech event is laughable. The industry (and the culture of the industry) is so overwhelming male dominated. It's not like you are missing out on anything.

If events like these help get more women involved and participating in the industry or community, then more power to them. It certainly beats not doing anything to attract minorities.
Foundations of Constraint Satisfaction
Yeah, the scare quotes are well placed. I believe FiveRuns shut down half of their services in the last year and had pretty much stopped updating their corp blog for a year or so (except to announce service closures).
People are values, not types.
"if I read you right essentially the system is either purposefully screwing the insurance companies in order to be able to give care to those who need it but can't afford it,"

Yes; this has been discussed several times in the recent healthcare debates, but it tends not to get much attention. The private health care system is already subsidizing the public one above and beyond what has already been documented.

I have a friend who is a social worker. Privately-insured clients pay something like 60-70 dollars an hour. Government insurance pays barely enough to cover the cost of the office for that time. I find it ironic that this person is in favor of the current health care plan as it stands in Congress, as the evidence is that it would simply put this person out of business entirely. (You are free to vote against your self-interest and in what you believe is the collective's self-interest, which I have done before, but I don't think that's the cause here; I think it's an unexamined assumption that once the government is in charge, it will for some reason magically decide to pay more, an idea that I find rather unlikely personally.)

This happens all the time, everywhere, and is one of the reasons the idea that switching over entirely to government health care is going to solve all our problems is a complete joke. It looks to me like removing the private insurance subsidy that almost nobody talks about or acknowledges existing could very well crash the system overnight (as in literally the day the private insurance was disbanded), as I doubt my friend would be the only person who discovered they could no longer afford to practice, at all. I'm guessing because hard numbers are hard to come by, but it's not hard to come by enough information to see how pervasive this is; bits of it show up on every medical bill I get.

The real, fundamental problem with the health care system is that all the price signals are terribly distorted, and the government's proposed solution is to completely break them. That's not going to work for health care any more than it works anywhere else.
While it's easy to appreciate the intent, there has to be a less backwards way to accomplish it.

Maybe run a workshop where the behavior/environment you find offensive is explicitly verboten?

Post it on the walls: this place is "attitude-free, newbie-safe and mama- friendly" and you'll almost definitely drive away the people you don't want there.
Ruby-On-Rails Startup FiveRuns Acquired By WorkThink
Considering that they already discriminate in the admissions process, I doubt this is a problem.
Time Management Strategies For Internet Business Owners
She even got a taste for what people liked which is probably far more useful for an artist.
IMO what people like is not what an artist should make, crafts people make stuff people like, artists make stuff that makes us think, if we like it then that's sometimes a bonus. It's a subtle difference.

Sometimes "artists" create things so ludicrous that no-one could possibly want to buy it because they think that it must then have a strong message, if they're famous already Saatchi buys it for a few million and the soul of humanity mourns.
Thanks for the link. I wish I would have been enlightened so early on. I didn't realize the stupidity of typical college life until I was in my last year.
That's great and all, but Palm really can't afford situations like this. If they want to be a viable alternative to the iPhone, then they need to not behave like Apple when it comes to App Store crappiness.

Rather than trying to emulate Apple, they need to have a clear difference and pound on it: "Oh, you think the Apple App Store sucks? Check out Palm, we treat you right!"
Good point - I can't find anything twitter does better for me than my current behaviour, but if others do then that's great; I might find a use for it in future.
Cucumber-nagios: monitor your web app with behavioural tests
To the author: That's too funny that you were doing this at Dartmouth college. I commented after your last post to HN on this topic that I'm helping (by teaching tutorial sessions with the prof) do much the same thing in a linear algebra class this year. This prof was attending Dartmouth college during the time you mentioned! No wonder this all sounded so familiar!
Makes you wonder what the Earl of Cromer would do about the present trash situation in Cairo http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/world/africa/20cairo.html?...
Content sites should incentive their users to buy things in a traceable way. When I worked in affiliate marketing, there were publishers that gave purchasers a percentage of the commission. Sharing a bit of the advertising revenue encouraged the user to not forget to use the affiliate code or whatever.
I think you missed the point.

Most people don't own an iPhone.

Most people who have iPhones don't exclusively talk to other people with iPhones.

And most people don't buy a data plan just to send or view an e-mailed picture message from their iPhone-owning buddies.
To put data based on 'race & religion' out in the open to me is already a thing that is not excusable (besides the lousy definition of such things as race and religion, both of which are floating, not discrete).

There is a massive pre-selection problem here (people that frequent dating sites, rather than people in general) and the link to 'hacking' is a very tenuous one.

I've seen Michael Jackson referred to as a hacker here, so I probably shouldn't be too surprised.

This is not a hack, this is some statistical analysis with input data of dubious value, pretty pictures and all, drawing conclusions that are completely off the wall.

"Jews and Agnostics get along better with people"

"Muslims of both sexes and Hindu men get along worse"

"Catholics are more universally liked than Protestants"

Please, if that isn't flamebait I really don't know what is.

Where are the control groups, where are the standard deviations and so on.

Effectively this is a dating advert for programmers.

This is infotainment at it's best, statistical noise at its worst.
One of the big improvements ruby enterprise edition made is to make Ruby's GC copy on write friendly. This allows you to run a lot more ruby processes per frontend in a web environmet, since you're usually ram limited.

Afaik 1.9 didn't address this.
Create beautiful, client-side charts of your RRD files
I imagine that's why they just hired two directors of developer relations.
It doesn't really make sense. Apple was offering a competing hardware/software product to the IBM PC -- they were not writing software for IBM PCs as an alternative to MS-DOS.
He's really using money as a proxy for identity/reputation/culpability. If you have something at stake, you are less likely to act like a jackass. Craigslist's propensity for scamming (and positive frictionless interaction) is because of its anonymity more than its cost.
jazzychad, how do you get the data?
"no way to measure effectiveness of physical advertising"

With the largest exception being internet advertising there isn't a good way to really see if an advert is physically bringing people into a store.

Advertising can lead to purchasing decisions but the general traditional purpose is to establish an emotional relationship between the consumer and a brand and or to raise awareness about said brand.

Examples:

Campaign 1 Coca Cola
Refreshing, new drink that you enjoy with your friends and quences your thirst during the summer (focusing on emotional relationship)

Campaign 2 Truth.org
Smoking is bad! You're going to die! Rah Rah Rah! (focusing on awareness)

Campaigns were made up fyi

They have ways to measure how these messages are received. In terms of the purchasing decision process, advertising won't really affect the consideration aspect; marketing will hit that harder which is where you'll find people "actually [getting] sent to their stores".

I would agree with the person who posted earlier saying you should expand your idea to see how cell phones can affect the advertising industry in new ways entirely; you're on a good track and if you want help let me know!

Source: Advertising guy
So here's my take from a python lover that works with old MS technology (ASP in my case).

It all depends. There's nothing wrong with working with an older technology when you have to. Not everything is state of the art and it's good to understand that developing from a blank canvas is nothing like developing on a legacy system. It's humbling to think that at one point, the author of the system you will be working on sat down and thought about how wonderful their new baby would be too.

That being said, it's draining to work with dead technology. It doesn't matter how wonderful the project is, you can't escape that nagging feeling that every minute you spend in the dead tech is a minute you're not spending learning the new tech, and that you're falling ever so slightly behind.

My level of python knowledge hasn't improved as much as it should have since I began learning it back in 03 ish. Since then, with django and others that language has exploded, while I have plateaued. This is because 80% of my working hours are spent in dead technologies.

It's something to ponder as you make your decision, but I'd need more information to point you in a specific direction.
...poorly
Konqueror runs everywhere now doesn't it. Is this Konq 4.2 on KDE3? or Konq on Windows? Also from the screen shot it looks like it's still loading, the frills round the K are uneven??

Fine for me in 4.3.1 on KDE4 on Kubuntu 9.04.

Trying on browsershots ...

[Edit] nothing especially shows in the major browsers indeed looks pretty good in most things; I would say it looks like gzip is not on and YSlow gives the site a grade D. Some large images which could take an age on dialup.
It's probably worth mentioning that this blog post put a big dent in the Patri Friedman's Seasteading 2009 conference; Mencius and Romer were both scheduled to speak, but apparently Romer was so offended by the blog post that he declined his invitation. Mencius was then disinvited.
"... 1) Reduce your message to its simplest, clearest, easiest-to-understand form. 2) Make it fun. Or sexy or interesting or informative ..."

For anyone who wants to read an antidote to this drivel, try Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" ~ http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html
Despite Ballmer's attempts at FUD[1] until we see the source code we don't know that Chrome OS is entirely different from Android. They both use the Linux kernel and Chrome OS's new window manager just might be inspired by Android's window manager. Eric Schmidt himself said:

> “There’s a great deal of commonality,” Schmidt said. “Eventually they may merge even closer.”

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-googles-schmidt-on-chrome...

[1] "I think that’s a little tougher for them now because they basically tell the hardware community Android is dead, Chrome is the thing or maybe Chrome isn’t the thing. Maybe it is Android. The cacophony there is probably helpful to us in the grand scheme of things and I don’t know why they would have chosen to do it, at least the way you read the press. It probably has a lot to do with internal squabbles, but I just don’t know."
Although the World Cup is the most well known (and watched) soccer tournament, it isn't that representative of soccer.

1. It's mainly a knockout tournament which obviously increases the variance

2. International sides aren't a cohesive team like domestic club sides only playing a handful of times per year leading up to the tournaments.

Compare this to the domestic leagues where the league format reduces the variance and players spend most of the year working with who they're playing with on the pitch. In the EPL, the #1 ranked side going into the season probably wins the league 75% of the time. It's a much lower number though for the domestic cups because of the knockout format.
Except "relation managers" are irrelevant when actions blow goats.

Sending a PR director to a guy whose family you just shot isn't going to help much.
I think they would. People enjoy debate, and there's certainly a huge need for high-quality debate.
I am not sure what exactly is meant by "strictly editorial content. Are we talking about newspaper-style Op-Ed pieces and the like?

It's been my experience that the most ravenous consumers of these type of materials are essentially looking for a named essayist to argue their personal position. As such they tend to pull from places which serve as echo chambers for "their team," be it Huffington Post, Reason.com, or Townhall.com.

I, further, believe you will run into copyright problems if you try to reproduce (as opposed to merely pointing to) pieces from Kristol/Krugman/Hitchens.
Does this use your (soon to be public?) api? If so, any news on when it is going to be available?
VRF is the new Black: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Complexity
I don't think that would be as effective as directly marketing an event at a group of people. A group of people who might feel that traditional events in that field were just not welcoming.

In fact, I think you'd just end up with a pretty normal tech workshop (male dominated), but without some of the (rare) 'edgier' content that some of the Rails guys seem to relish. Business as normal then.
The differences on the race graph are so small as to be insignificant.
The difference is Mozilla and Apple don't have 9X% market share.
University researchers don’t know how to commercialize their discoveries

I realise I am going to be kindling for the next HN bonfire for saying this... but...

... some of us don't want to commercialize our discoveries, and in fact we are in academia partly because we find the commercial world so unattractive.

Now please stop throwing things at me and go back to your start-ups.
I'd love to see a Nondisclosure Agreement included in there.
Current emissions may mean 4°C temperature hike before 2100
What the providers bill the insurance companies, and what the insurance companies pay, are two different things. Ever read those "explanation of benefits" statements? I happen to have one here that lists the doctor's submitted fee for a covered service as $179. The insurance "contracted fee" was $50. So really the doctor got $50; I don't know what happens to the other $129, probably a tax write-off of some sort.