skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, if the facts are important to the prospect, the prospect asks about them. I didn't read anything in this post about them supplying false answers to direct questions.

You are not obligated to provide SEC disclosures along with your pitches. I do that, and it's a horrible habit and something I've been trying hard to break. It communicates nervousness and lack of confidence.

Again: you can't just make stuff up. If the prospect asks, "how much of this stuff actually works", you need to be clear --- "we're still in the design phase". But if the prospect doesn't ask, the prospect doesn't care, and you let it go.
That's a very valid point since for most people gems.github.com comes after RubyForge in the source list. Oy... makes me think running 'gem install' without --source is just a bad idea.
The origin of health insurance as an employee benefit in the US is that during World War 2 wages were fixed, so employer provided health insurance was a government approved way to give more to the employee through benefits. Basically it's a bad hack to get around a bug.
"Parker? burp Never 'eard of 'im."
I can't really argue with that. Blast you.

There isn't enough information in the story to know what was really going on. Some possible contexts are a lot more venial than others. I think what irritated me was just the gloating tone of "we sure put one over on them"... but perhaps they didn't mean it that way.
As a white, it makes me somewhat sick to my stomach to think that I might have benefited from affirmative action. If Asians are better than me, score better than me, I shouldn't displace any of them in the university.

I almost always assume that blacks who are in any kind of engineering, math, physics, or hard science schools are placed there because of their race. I don't want to be thought of in that manner.

Now, was it wrong that the first thing I thought of when I saw a black in the engineering department was affirmative action? Maybe so, but what is one to think when affirmative action programs are in place?
What to tune in MySQL Server after installation
It means that after it dies on the second day of heavy use, on average it will not die again until 1M hours later.
Help Zachary Christie
This is more about anxiety than luck. It seems the 'unlucky' volunteers had a higher level of anxiety and thus a decreased ability to detect opportunities.

Anxiety and stress can interfere in many activities.
propose to ycombinator a site in lisp

get initial funding and fanfare

switch it to a more stable and easy to maintain language
what is one to think when affirmative action programs are in place?

I wish I could be 100 percent sure that today's affirmative action programs operate like the first one I heard of (in 1968), when the idea of the program is that it connected students who didn't have college-educated parents to colleges that easily gained applications from children of alumni, but didn't get many applications from first-generation college students. Then what I would think of anyone admitted under an affirmative action program is, "It's only fair that he is here too, even though he didn't have the advantage I had of being a third-generation college student." But it's not clear now, college-by-college, just what happens in detail when the admission committee meets to decide whom to admit.

The great majority of United States colleges admit nearly all of their applicants. Hundreds of colleges have explicit open-enrollment policies. So this whole issue only pertains to a small subset of the most desired colleges, colleges that reject the majority of their applicants.
The borrower is SLAVE to the lender. This statement has been true since the creation of the floating rock. Our grandparents knew this. That's a big reason why they are the "greatest generation". They live by this creed and thus prospered. We ignore it so we pay...and pay....and pay.

There are two issues I have with our system.of education
1) who said that college was all that important
2) why is there a necessity to jump from high school directly to college.
The apprenticeship model works ten times better. In my opinion an aspiring lawyer would do much better if he just got a job working at a law firm. By working his way up he/she would gain valuable experience, hands on training, and here it comes MAKE MONEY. Even if he worked for peanuts the experience alone would be worth more than a college or university could ever teach. I would bet any amount of money that, after the same eight years the apprentice would have spent in some pampered cocoon of a college/university, he/she would be a better lawyer than 99% of Yale or Harvard graduates who at most may have done an internship. The same goes for doctors. Even still, if the individual wanted the college experience let him have a year or two to learn how the world works. It's not doing any of these teenagers any good to go from the sheltered atmosphere of mom and dad's to that big and expensive procrastination of true life we call college. By experiencing life and understanding the value of a dollar, individuals will be better prepared to make proper financial decisions. Furthermore, by waiting a few years and not throwing people (in there most immature and naive stage in life) you avoid the ignorance and stupidity that is college life.

If an individual decides to seek their higher learning from one of our countries institutions the first lesson taught should always be: the borrower is slave to the lender.
I enjoy how RubyForge is run by RubyCentral. I don't know if this is the long term replacement for gem hosting, but it would be good if there were some sort of (hopefully transparent) organization behind the service (beyond a temporary alliance of companies) to guarantee funding.
Even if the crime carries an automatic death sentence, it's still worth the risk.
If you (or your coworkers) wrote the bug once, and you don't make an effort to understand what the bug is, how do you know you won't write it again somewhere else?

I think an attitude of trying to leap over gaps in your knowledge is really destructive. Where do you draw the line at "this is too much trouble to understand, I just won't bother?" It's our job to understand the machine to the best of our ability.
> The companies named apparently provide a service that these entrepreneurs can not provide for themselves.

Do they? What have they funded? What success has followed their coaching?

> They bring in the money.

Do they? Again - what have they funded?

And even if they do, lots of folks have money. If they're admitting that they're dumb money....
As a white, it makes me somewhat sick to my stomach to think that I might have benefited from affirmative action. If Asians are better than me, score better than me, I shouldn't displace any of them in the university.

I think this issue of fairness is a distraction. Focus on changing the world instead.
Ask HN: Tell me why a room-and-board-and-bandwidth incubator is a stupid idea
So a little while back, I bought a big old brick house in Richmond, Indiana (for $8000). (cf. http://big-old-house.blogspot.com for the blow-by-blow). It's really a whole hell of a lot more room than I need, and - the kicker - it's not alone. There are a boatload of beautiful old brick buildings here, just no economic reason for anybody sane to buy them. There's even a 23-unit building of single-bedroom apartments two or three blocks away from me, standing empty. Lots of these houses are standing empty; there's just nobody left to live in them.

So I had this stupid idea, and I'm not even sure it's a stupid idea: why not sponsor young (or non-young) entrepreneurs by giving them rooms or small apartments, server space, good bandwidth, and home-cooked but free food? In return, perhaps a percentage take of whatever they came up with during a certain fellowship period, or whatever other venture capitalists take as their cut. Later in the game, actual capital would be available (it's not on the table, not from me, not right now). But the idea is to build an active and close-knit, quasi-academic, community. There was definitely an era in my life when I would have jumped at such an opportunity, and I'd still seriously consider it.

So tell me: in how many ways is it stupid? I love these old buildings; given just a little economic rationale, they're eminently salvageable (people built to last in the 1880's and 90's).
Attend? Pitch?
Nuclear Plants Cautiously Phase Out Dial-Up Modems
What was your experience like with the HSA?

I had one friend that tried one and had major issues when they were forced to go on a long term medication.
Just to make sure I understand the point, are you suggesting that small businesses should drop insurance as a benefit and encourage their employees to move to the public option, or is it that the existence of a public option itself will assist?
terrible.. i gave up after the second ad interrupted him mid-sentence.
so prioritize. learn a set of valuable skills that will allow you to support yourself. then drop out.
This is an 1884 case law.
Totally true. Anxiety saps all kinds of brain power.
I think if you just call it "food/housing for equity" it would be more accurate than calling it an incubator. Regardless of feedback, you should give it a shot!
College admissions ain't YC. If schools actually admitted students based on merit, I'd be against this. But since they admit mostly based on grades and SAT scores, I find it difficult to complain.

(And while they do theoretically factor in other stuff, for the most part that just means that in the event of a tie they choose the person who made a documented appearance at more after school 'clubs'.)
The "no defense" proposition isn't entirely accurate. This particular court in 1884 said that necessity was not a defense to murder. A FL, GA, SC, NC, etc. court in 2009 may disagree.

A defendant could also assert insanity or diminished mental capacity as defenses. Today necessity can be a defense to murder in some jurisdictions and some facts. So it is not precluded per se as this decision says. I have no idea whether international law could be controlling here or what that international law is.

Of course all of this is semi-moot because US criminal law is dominated by statute, not common law.
Why is this not a default property of thead elements? Why does it need to be turned on? Not that this is the greatest injustice in the history of CSS but it seems more straight-forward than agreeing on a box model, anyway...
Hell, I'd be tempted with this kind of deal. The face-to-face networking opportunities alone would be worth it.
FYI, the whole idea of affirmative action used to bother me enormously.

But not so much now that I realize that working for others is not a desirable goal.
The folks who say the Macintosh has better short-cuts don't get the fact that in Windows you can do anything with the keyboard, on the Macintosh, there are many things which you cannot do with the keyboard.
What? NOOOO!

Damn it, I liked having the official BitTorrent be open source. It was nice. Now what are we going to do?
Ask HN: Effective use of Twitter?
I may be clinging too much to the past, but I have yet to find any particular interest in reading Twitter feeds, and have yet to think of a good way to use one myself.

Any folks here have examples, either your own or someone you know, of effective use of Twitter?... Either for increasing sales/clients/business, or for literary purposes, or whatever?
effective use of twitter: http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays

edit: i'm serious.
Business turn around advice
Business Recovery, Insolvency Advice, Turnaround Services and Business Debt Advice from Phoenix Business Recovery Consultants Devon.
Well, true. I think of it as an incubator because I envision a whole lot of people working on neat stuff in the same place, which is what I always figured an incubator should be.

As to giving it a shot: man. I'm not sure what the threshold population would have to be to make it work. I could house, like, one person starting next year. (Or two friendly persons.) If their venture paid, that would work, but given that most don't, it probably wouldn't. If I also had some capital, well, there's a three-bedroom place two blocks away for $9000. It looks in pretty good shape from the outside - buy that plus my carriage house and I could house about five people. The odds start to look better in that case.

Once the ball started rolling, well, house prices would unfortunately go up. But maybe not so horribly much, yet. There's plenty of room for growth.

The town would eat it up. They're desperate for anything that might jumpstart something more like an economy.
Not quite my style of reading, but great concept! Thanks!
Floating house could ride New Orleans’ floods
That's exactly it! There's a really rich tradition in this town of communal meals. Sit down with five or ten or twenty of your technical peers for curry every day? For free? You'd have to get a lot of synergy going with something like that.

Perhaps the follow-up topic should be: who's in?
Not stupid at all, Brilliant!

I'd be very tempted, I am not location locked working on the current startup, broke, and definitely sounds like a interesting deal.
He has convolved luck with happiness.

If someone believes he is happy, he is happy.

If someone believes he is the lucky, he is not necessarily lucky.

Seeing the world rose colored glasses does not make you any luckier, it makes you happier. By only asking for those that self-identified as lucky or unlucky, he has failed to isolate the variable of happiness.

Here is an excerpt from the book which points out the author's faulty reasoning.

"On average both `lucky' and `unlucky' participants lost about £2.50. Wiseman's conclusion: `The results indicated that luck wasn't due to psychic ability'."

In this quote it is revealed that the people who "felt" lucky really weren't lucky. In fact, they were about as lucky as the people who felt unlucky. The people who were "lucky" also expected to win twice as much as people who felt "unlucky". So his whole experiment is flawed.

This is the type of optimism hawked by many self-help gurus. But then again, it doesn't really matter if your situation really has improved with these "tips" as the Romans found out with church and bread and circuses. Keep the plebs amused and fearful and they will willfully ignore everything else.
Yes, but with the right design and marketing, you could probably make bit of money from the idea. Seems to be Dyson's plan.
I actually have some experience in university admissions procedures at the University of Wisconsin. It is interesting that Princeton is being sued because it was one of the schools following a program that many had considered to hold some promise. It is based on socio-economic standing. So Mr. Li is saying Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites were admitted to Princeton, even though they were less qualified. Now I don't work at Princeton, but I am familiar with the admissions there. I am almost positive that lower and middle class students were admitted to the University in lieu of better qualified students from the elite classes. Probably causing Mr. Li to be rejected. The article alludes to this fact when it talks about poor whites being given admission over better qualified wealthy whites. I am also all but certain that poor asians were given admission over better qualified wealthy asians at Princeton that same year. Though I don't have the data to back up these assertions, it seems that the gentleman in the article does.

It is pretty safe to say that the nation's universities will be watching this law suit with great interest. It will determine whether this socio-economics based admissions practice is wrong or if it is acceptable. More importantly, if it is acceptable, under what circumstances is it acceptable?

This one will be VERY interesting. Not just an ordinary affirmative action suit. This one is quite out of the everyday.
(note/update: for this comment, I'm mostly considering the 23-unit building)

If not for long-term, maybe for programming camps/meetups/etc? Something similar to Big Nerd Ranch[1], or many of the other teaching sessions.

With a very low cost of room and board (and people often traveling to meetups anyway), you might be able to find people who want to host (weekend? weeklong? longer?) events at your 'hacker complex.'

And possibly have long-term residents that qualify for discounts on the camps? i.e. live at the 'hacker complex' over the summer, enjoy the hacker culture of all of the people coming in and out, and go to the events that interest you.

[1]http://www.bignerdranch.com/schedule.shtml
Hmm, I'm getting a 502 Bad Gateway error from nginx
Going back to the original topic, I think that being active in FOSS, even at low levels @ a couple hours a week, is a good way to keep evidence of some skillset. This should hopefully help getting back into the workforce.
The world is what you make of it.
Or if you've actually got money, you could live here for rent and not sacrifice equity, or buy into the equity pool yourself.

There are lots of tweaks you could do on the basic model.
Seems interesting, but why not use a fully dynamic window manager instead of the side to side thing?
Lycurgus of Sparta: "The city is well fortified which hath a wall of men instead of brick."
I think the problem would be the isolation. It could end up as the blind leading the blind. The advantage of most of the "accelerators" is that they're run by successful entrepreneurs, bring in more to serve as mentors and provide a network of successful entrepreneurs on top of that. Since you'd be competing with that, you'd probably only get the folks that didn't get into those places and then the most successful startups would leave to go to startup hubs.
Another factor that I should also probably add to this is that if you and your wife are looking for convenient night-life and a less suburban existence you are probably better off looking hard at the Mountain View & Palo Alto area. Some of the areas we have been talking about (LG, Willow Glen, Campbell, etc) are much more suburban house-with-a-small-yard and might be a better fit for a family that is considering kids in the near future. If this is not something you see in the short-term then MV and PA will give you access to more activities and events for singles and young couples. Castro St. in MV and University Ave. in PA have more bars/clubs/restaurants and both areas are more convenient for trips into SF including the option of taking the train in.
Making a Living by Posting Links 2 Google
I find it darkly humorous that people express surprise that institutions which publish studies in support of racial discrimination, file briefs with the Supreme Court in favor of racial discrimination, write (and write, and write) in favor of racial discrimination, and have officers with six figure salaries put in charge of their departments of racial discrimination, might actually be engaged in racial discrimination.
Second on unnoticed exclusionary behavior. Making sexist assumptions which are "reasonable" because there are not many women in the field may very well be self perpetuating.
AT&T targeting Google Voice to stop "traffic pumping"?
Open-source alternative to Yahoo Pipes
You can restore (in Snow Leopard, at least) by activating Expose, using the arrow keys to select the minimized window, and pressing Enter. It's not as simple if you've hidden the application's window set with Command+H, however (I still don't understand the purpose of that shortcut myself.)
Sniffer honey bees trained to detect bombs
Like this example of bold but concrete thinking on a future computing metaphor.

Two of the concepts seem very heavily Palm Pre-inspired: The window management scheme (reminiscent of 'cards') and the gesture areas on each side, one of which is used to launch apps just like the Pre
Agreed - they could have been clearer and it wouldn't have been as painful an experience for all involved.

I'm not trying to disagree with that point ("they handled it badly"), I'm trying to make the case for the fact that their business model makes those snafus more likely, and we should expect that.

If they trained or paid their staff better, it may have been handled better. But if that adds real dollars to the price of seats, then people start choosing another carrier.

@ brucini, please understand I wasn't saying cheap cost = lack of basic customer service, just that it likely equates to cheap customer service. In an airline example, it probably also equates to cheap planes, cheap maintenance workers and pilots, and lower standards of maintenance quality. I would hope there were never any crashes - that would be an absence of basic maintenance - but equipment faults, delays, and cancellations due to cheap maintenance? Well, it's a risk you take (and, frankly, which I'm willing to take in some situations) when you decide to buy the cheap option.
The Rust Belt needs ideas like this to stop being the Rust Belt.

If it works, maybe you should consider expanding the idea over time – make it into something that can incubate the neighborhood and the town, not just the startup. I bet if you talked to city government, they'd jump all over this.

You wouldn't be alone. I actually posted something a few months back to this effect: http://shortformblog.com/us/need-startup-funding-look-no-fur...

I like your concept. Would love to see where you take it.
I would seriously consider this in a major socal city.
Out of curiosity, would you rather pay to watch?
Affirmative action doesn't bother me. So what if the SAT-tutored and AP/IB class-taking kids from suburbia couldn't get into Harvard, Princeton or Yale? Boohoo! It's the end of the world when they go to the Duke, CMU, or Cornell where upon graduation, you have finally (phew!) saved the family face after all by going to medical school, law school or becoming that engineer - so that your Asian or Jewish mother has something to good to say about her son at her friends' dinner party.

Without the elite ivy league schools offering 100% financial aid (vs. middle-tier state schools that try to amp up their U.S News & Report Ranking by offering full-rides to high SAT scorers from the 'burbs, and hence could not accommodate 100% to need-based financial aid), a lot of urban kids wouldn't be able to afford college at all, not even state school. Also, schools that could afford to let down their average SAT scores often pick students based on their "narrative". A technical forum may sneer at the qualitative over quantitative, but it means that schools consider their applicants' background, what odds they had to overcome in their environment vs. say, how much money someone's parents spent for their child's Princeton Review classes.

However, I agree with you in that affirmative action have a lot of inefficiencies. For instance, a lot of under-represented minorities from the 'burbs and prep school game the system by offering a offer that colleges can't refuse: high SAT score and diversity, but haven't overcome any serious odds as an urban student would. A lot of colleges game the system by claiming diversity on their admissions broshure, when recruiting a lot of black/hispanic students to their freshman pool - but do not do a proper job of trying to graduate their minority students at all.
>Perhaps, instead of a free-net, what's needed is a for-a-nominal-charge-net?

We had those. They were called things like Compuserve and Prodigy. And they didn't do well, as you recall.

The problem with spamming is that it is very profitable. And it's not clear that a micropayment for each email sent, each facebook message, each blog-comment-spam is going to significantly cut into the fat margins of the most profitable spamming rings.

At most, a surcharge will weed out the small fries, leaving only the big successful spamming rings without any competition. Not exactly a big victory.

And like you say, the spam targets "the least savvy segment of the population." If only there was a way to directly link the credulous fools to the scruple-less cheats, we could achieve a worldwide system that more effectively fleeces the idiots while leaving the rest of us in peace. Alas, such a system is not on the horizon.