skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As much as I love dailykos at times, considering that on top of the factual inaccuracy you point out, the non-watered down non-hysteric version [1] was pretty popular here a little bit ago, I think this article deserves some [dead]-ing.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=883316
Good question and I asked myself the same when I wrote my original response. It's difficult to get a truthful answer of what someone would pay unless they are actually paying but I'll try.

My DirecTV was ~$75/month with taxes which cost me around $2/hour based on 1hr a day. I switched to Hulu because my costs went from $75 to $0. I'd probably be willing to pay up to $30/month commercial free or $15/month with commercials.

I do wonder if Hulu will seriously be able to compete with cable when Comcast is on the board.
I used to use Blogger this way - you would give them your FTP info and it would publish static files.

Worked fine, I just didn't really like using Blogger.
I think it would be a lot more useful if it were easier to discover new scripts (I'm on a site, show me what scripts are available here), and if those scripts could expose reusable components with API's - say, someone could write a parsing component that would provide neat API to news.YC ;)
I only read the abstract and the Daily Kos summary, and am not a complexity theorist, but I have to say this seems a little facetious. Sure the valuation problem might be np-complete, so technically you can't "solve" it. This has a nice ring and I'm sure lots of members of congress are going to hoist this paper aloft in hearings while they're busy chewing out the CEO of Lehman.

But approximation techniques are being used all the time to obtain near-optimal solutions to NP-hard problems. If you can obtain a valuation for a complex bundle of derivatives that's within 10% of the true value, then it seems silly to claim that they whole practice should be tossed out the window. This is like saying salesmen should no longer be able to travel because we cannot solve the traveling salesman problem.
I too canceled DirecTV in favor of Hulu, but I prefer to not torrent the content and instead opt to watch it legally via Hulu or buy it from iTunes. If the show is not on either of those sources, then I just don't watch it. (Or likely even know it exists.)

The upside of this is that I watch far less TV because it has a real and immediate cost (especially if it's not on Hulu). The downside is that the endless buffering and stuttering I get on Hulu drives me crazy. I know that my ISP may be partly to blame, but that makes Hulu a lot less valuable to me than the downloadable iTunes option. There's been more than one evening were Hulu simply refused to work reliably and I ended up purchasing the commercial-free episodes on iTunes instead. Ironically, the iTunes downloads were so fast that I could watch the shows immediately as if they were streaming with the added bonus of actually owning the episode so I could watch it again later - perhaps long after Hulu removed it.
Is SQL also "unusable"? XQuery is quite a bit more powerful than SQL is.

RDF, on the other hand, isn't a query language. Wouldn't it make more sense to compare XQuery to SPARQL?
I hope these guys grow this to be an Appstore/APT alike software channel. There's definitely a need for that on Windows.
Edit: ok, they already did that http://baseshield.com/
http://lifehacker.com/5111431/greasefire-finds-greasemonkey-...
With the exception of 'ask HN'. Also I will upvote almost anything that I comment on, if it was interesting enough to comment on it deserves the vote, same with polls that I cast a vote in.

I'll never upvote techcrunch articles though.
I love my HTC Hero! :)
It's a two-valued poll, you only get a binary choice, if you upvote 90% of the time after reading an article and 10% before then 'after' would still be the best choice (and that's what it would be in my case, the upvotes I do 'before' are of ask HN articles that I think ask valid questions).
Pfft. Dynamic Linking isn't broken, Solaris is. For some reason I don't have nearly the same amount of trouble handling dynamic libraries on Linux or BSD as I do on Solaris. If code depends on bugs, then the code is broken and that is a bug. Packaging your own special version of a library may solve your problems in the short term, but it increases maintenance in the long term. This is the same whether you do it statically or dynamically.
You're asking me why people work at startups? It has cultural cache, a more relaxed/crass work environment, junior people can work on harder problems than they would otherwise, you wear "many hats", less large-company bs (though you trade that for small company bs,) and so on. There is an article on the front page about working for startups as a means of networking to eventually found your own, but that is a pyramid scheme.
Are you considering ever adding sponsored apps to the list of apps in the free version?
Making the author pay editing costs out of their royalties and setting up the royalties as percentage of actual receipts rather than per copy sold makes them look more like a vanity press than professional. It may be worthwhile, but they need to provide more detail, a short article like this makes them look worse, not better.
I'm guessing they do this in California on ALL phones that are subsidized right? This isn't just an iPhone thing. Any Nokia or Motorola should have the same thing happening to it. Unless it is an 'Apple tax' in which case that's just wrong.

While the State spends plenty of money, they also need to take it in. Last I checked the State was nearly bankrupt and needed to do whatever it could to raise money. Seems they are doing it.
I'm the same way. My best work has been happened on some of the worst days of my life. I think it's an "Everything sucks so I have to make something that doesn't" sort of thing.
Even with an IPO, if you work at a startup as a post-money employee you are trading 60 hour weeks for what? a fraction of a percent -- assuming you don't get diluted by later rounds (which is very likely.) To make "life-changing" money, your company then has to be worth billions.
I just found a single thing that I could not have done in any other way and it was invaluable.

I hope to score with this so I'm not going to lift the veil further, but in a couple of days I'll do a posting on it.

Greasemonkey has some really good uses. (and some really evil ones! Be very careful before you install greasemonkey scripts, always inspect the source to make sure you don't pick up malware and never install a greasemonkey script that does external imports or that attempts to augment the document with stuff that will load javascript from external sources).
Sometimes spreadsheets are too big to email, then people split them up manually, or try to get some one else to transfer it for them.

Sharepoint can solve this problem but setting up and using it is non-trivial if your not a techie (and maybe even if you are).
OK, the analogy is dumb, but the point stands on its own. Dynamic linking has been around for so long that it's a sort of dogma, never questioned. Of course you do dynamic linking!

Just step back and consider all the problems dynamic linking has caused us (DLL hell, package management headaches, C library incompatibilities, various ABI issues) and the sheer complexity of the systems invented to solve those problems (Side-by-Side assemblies; InstallShield, Windows Installer, and umpteen other install frameworks for Windows; LD_LIBRARY_PATH, ldconfig; APT, RPM, and umpteen other Linux package managers).
'being smart' != 'reason to reduce readability'
> developing something completely unrelated to GSM, UTMS, Wi-Fi, etc.

The point is that they could not have because that would be inoperable.
A sci-fi short film: http://www.vimeo.com/5445784

And some of my blog posts: http://www.nilkanth.com/category/noteworthy/
Jonah Lehrer: We learn more from our mistakes.
It's also impossible for a traveling salesman to find the best route between cities, but that doesn't mean that salesmen don't travel. Approximations are often Good Enough, and there are a variety of polynomial algorithms that produce Good Enough solutions to NP problems.

Everything in the real world is impossible, but we can try and get good results anyway.
Cheating for $20: Why collusion and price fixing is difficult to do
Ask YC: Hanging out in San Francisco tomorrow (Friday) during the day?
I'm flying out to SF tomorrow for Startup School and was wondering if anyone wants to meet up before the reception.

Maybe we can build up a large group to explore the city - my username @ gmail.com

Also, if anyone has any ideas about fun things to do please post.
'Holy Grail' Of Cancer Therapy: Researchers Protect Cells From Radiation Damage
Another UT student here. I've been reading HN for a ages and signed up just so I could reply to this; we should get a meet-up going some time.
I have to think that the author of the article added this statement precisely so that the reader would make the same inference that you did.

It could be that they legitimately spent time and money researching technology, only to have it brazenly ripped off by Apple, and they just realized it right now. Starting legal proceedings against a big company like Apple isn't something you do between lunch and your afternoon cup of coffee, after all.

(But actually, I made the same inference, and I think it's right. I am just pointing out how carefully-picked "facts" can lead you to believe something that you imagined is a fact.)
If it were someone other than Sen. McCain I'd be more willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. He was previously involved in an influence peddling scheme (Keating Five) and I can't quite figure out how his public position on lobbying matches the reality that he does indeed take lobbyist money. Something just doesn't add up for me.
It's disingenuous to state that Apple relied on Nokia's IP

Unless there is any truth in the "we got our patents into industry standards which Apple supports" line from the article.
Some info based on my experience in startup land:

It's pretty standard for (non-executive) startup employees to receive about 0.25% equity in the company. That equity usually vests over 4 years. This is true even for very early employees. So, if your startup is acquired by Google for $20MM, which is a pretty favorable outcome, you get $50k. Considering the vesting, that's less than $13k per year. If you instead went to work for a Big Company, heaven forbid, the difference in your salary and bonus would probably more than make up for that equity.

The far more common outcome, of course, is that your equity is worth nothing. The incredibly uncommon outcome is that your 0.25% is worth a million dollars or more.

In almost all cases (these days, at least), the only people to win big in the startup lottery are the founders and the VCs.

That said, founding a company is very risky and difficult, and there's a high probability of failure. Previous startup experience can go a long way to increase your odds of success if you ever do decide to found your own. It's much easier to learn all the hard lessons while building someone else's company. Then you can take that knowledge and swing for the fences yourself.
Me too! Blocking posts of annoying people is the killer application for GreaseMonkey.
Concurrency Patterns: Java, Scala, and Clojure
Representing polymorphism in a relational database always involves a hack. Computer programs operate on polymorphic data structures, so it is often annoying that the database cannot store this cleanly.
This title reminds me of an ancient Fortran compiler bug; a case where a programmer could alter the value of a numeric constant within the Fortran code.
Direct: http://www.icurrent.com/home

1. The web-design is enough to put me off, 2. these type of aggregators are not new.
Apple could offer a 'lite' MacOSX inside a virtualized environment (like VMWare 'appliances') for Windows, to give more potential "switchers" a taste before their first Apple hardware purchase.

To be really sneaky, they could include it in one of their automatic software updates to people who already have Windows ITunes or Safari... or even require its use in order to run ITunes on Windows.
EY's cloud services are great. I'm using it for Boxcar (http://boxcar.io) with a decent amount of traffic. The ease of adding additional instances make it an excellent service. Should you need it, their support guys are sharp.

If you're by chance already familiar with their filesystem layout, you'll feel right at home. If not, no worries - it's not hard to figure out where things persist at. You can write your own custom chef recipes if you have any requirements outside of the standard "here's the list of gems and *nix packages I need installed."

I've used Heroku in the past for "toy" projects, since it's just so damn easy to get something online. It's just lacking, though once you end up doing anything outside of the norm.
From what I understand, some proponents of NoSQL are even more minimalist than that--they are fine with the idea of relations, just not with storing them in a traditional RDBMS

I don't know about this. I would never use the word NoSQL... but I use object databases heavily and find them a better fit than relational databases for the majority of my work. However, I still store the physical data in a relational database. (Key => value.)

This is beneficial in a number of ways. You already know how to administer MySQL, you already know how to replicate MySQL, you already know how to back up MySQL, etc. This method also affords you the opportunity to reuse the database machinery in your application. You can extract attributes from objects as you store them, and later index/search them with the usual database querying infrastructure. The database does not know everything about the objects you are storing, it just knows a few key facts that you know you want to search on, so you can write efficient searches, but you are not limited by the usual relational weaknesses. (The "object-ness" is stored in a structure opaque to the database engine, like a JSON blob or something.)

As an example, consider cleaning out dead user objects that have not confirmed their email address after a certain number of days. If you were only using an object database, you would maintain a set of users to potentially expire. When they confirm their email address, you remove them from this set. Fine. The problem is the date constraint; you don't really want to scan the entire set of potentially-expireable users to expire users, you would like to be able to search for these objects efficiently.

That's easy to fix; when you store a user object, you can extract the confirmation status and registration date from the object and store those in real columns next to the opaque object data. Then you can "SELECT object_id FROM objects WHERE registration_date < NOW - 30 days AND confirmed_email IS NULL" and remove those objects from your system. Efficient, and it works as you change the structure of the user object, or add subclasses, etc.
Actually a lot of high ups like CEOs and senior staff email excel spreadsheets around. You'd be surprised.. I can think of about 3 or 4 examples of these types that I've come across off the top of my head.

Do you have anything we could look at? =) I think if you have the right approach and decent marketing you definitely have a market..

but the description you have is a little vague so it's hard to figure out what makes your app interesting and therefore hard to advise..
That's a great way of figuring out how the law is broken."Un-willful" patent infringement shouldn't be stopped. If a patent is likely to be violated without intention, that really means that the (social good) justification for the patent isn't very strong. The only reason it is even illegal is to stop companies from being willfully ignorant but still take advantage of the idea's prior existence.
His point that Clojure will prove almost as difficult as Java because you have to figure out what to make REFs of seems wrong to me. He is missing the point that the remaining stuff in Clojure is purely functional, and therefore really nothing like Java.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=898020
Great post, it's about trying the impossible. There must be a black hole in your mind that you have to fill.
It would be hard for them to "sneak" a gigabyte of software onto someone's machine, nor would it be ethical or sensible.
Facebook Developers Group for Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
I work at a big corporation now, but have recently considered the idea of founding/working for a startup. The more I read into articles like this, the more I lean towards the startup world.

I have job security right now (I've made myself valuable as the software guy in a hardware testing department) but my job leaves me unfulfilled. The startup world seems much more exciting and the opportunities for growth seem endless.

I thought they way I would get into startups would be by founding my own, but this article highlights the benefits of working for a startup before potentially starting one
The End of California? Dream On
It's probably even worse than that, in that one probability isn't evidence of cheating, whether you have found the optimal dense subgraphs or not.

The biggest I take from this (apart from it being an interesting analysis in itself) is that if there is an assumption of randomness in creation of CDO's that should be verified at creation.
Exactly. And as the work of this year's Economics Nobel Elinor Ostrom has highlighted, communities often work out cultural norms that resolve difficult coordination and trust issues.

A regulator trying to preempt unfair dealings with rules may have no chance, no matter how wise and disinterested, but people trying diverse strategies over time eventually settle on something that's good enough. (And some scams and business cycles are an inevitable part of that discovery process.)
Yawn.... <rubs eyes>

I had the "just one more turn" last night / this morning until 4am. I've been playing on Prince and yes it's really difficult being behind in technology all the time. My early game land grab and war rush nets me a very large territory but from there it's attrition. I hold my own mid game fending off opponents with a large military force and tactics, but by the year "1900" the AI already has modern armor and I just discovered tanks. I'm so far behind that I lose because some other civ made it Alpha Centauri. I didn't have enough nukes to wipe that civ off the planet. My last game I had a surprising loss due to a cultural victory. Now I know to fly the nukes when I see "$City has achieved legendary status."

This Facebook is app is very very dangerous. And the iPhone app that I just heard about here is even more so.

The game needs an addict lock out feature.
Mass extinctions: The story of how dinosaurs disappeared gets more complicated
So California is close to being the first failed state despite high taxes on luxury items.

Let me guess, CA has low taxes on property, so they have to tax everything else?
For most people I know who join or start companies, the primary goal is not to get rich – it is to work on something they love

i began my first startup with the sole motive of getting rich. yes i enjoyed the challenge of a startup and believed the product had potential but the overwhelming motivation was getting rich.

it was only after actually doing a startup and realizing how hard it is to get rich through that path, i realized i still wanted to do another startup but that my motivations had changed. the get rich motivation isn't enough 'fuel' to make me go through the stress of another startup. the only motivation that will work now is working on something i'm truly passionate about and enjoy.
Google Reading gets personal with Popular items and Personalized ranking
Agreed. Television may actually be the leading edge of the information revolution - it streams information, culture and entertainment to billions. Once an area is electrified, television enters the scene, and behind that comes... the internet? (Where's Bill Curtis when you need him)
What about the taxes I'll pay for the 2 years of service? IIRC, there are quite a lot of taxes built into my phone bill.
Couldn't you get the space efficiencies without the incompatibility headaches by naming the library like libfoo-SHA1_AS_LONG_HEX_STRING.so in addition to libfoo.so.1.2.3? They're already using symlinks in the lib directories.
similarly, queries in google spreadsheets are pretty amazingly powerful.
Micro Men from BBC had some startuppy themes when Acorn began, although it was more about the rivalry with Sinclair than the startup experience itself.

In my head I associate all kinds of survival movies like Cast Away, Rescue Dawn etc. being startuppy as well in the sense that the characters are surviving on their wits and persistence, against forces of nature and their own doubts.
Last mile costs do indeed dominate. But, last I checked, I pay for that in the form of a monthly fee to my ISP to provide service to my apartment. So nobody's "freeloading" here.

As for why neutrality is a good thing, well, the simple argument is that I've paid $X/mo. for a particular service. That service is an Internet connection at a certain speed and up to a certain amount of data transferred. Not "an Internet connection unless I use Skype or watch lots of Youtube videos, in which case it gets throttled -- sorry, 'quality-ensured' -- down to a trickle".

And that's as it should be, because that's what fosters innovation: if new and interesting uses for an Internet connection have to contend with throttling and degradation imposed by companies which are already being paid to provide the bandwidth, well, it seems to me that there won't be nearly so much innovation.

Is that reasonable grounds for regulation? History seems to think so; we've been enforcing common-carrier status on various related fields for quite a while now, and it doesn't seem to have caused floods of lawsuits or hampered innovation or infrastructure as the free-market argument says it should. And it should of course be noted that the cozy relationship AT&T had with the government (which regulated the hell out of it for many years) made it profitable enough to sink huge amounts of money into R&D, giving us Bell Labs, etc., further putting the lie to the free-market argument.

And, of course, that's without getting into things like subsidies provided to telecommunications companies to get them to build out infrastructure (since one consistent claim is that there's just not enough bandwidth to go around, this is particularly relevant) -- so far as I can tell, they've yet to hold up their end of that bargain, but I think the people who've had to foot the bill for them have a right to expect them to.
This just saved me hours of time. I'm flying home in a couple of weeks and reinstalling XP on 5 different computers in two days. I'm going to image the first HDD to the other 4 computers, but installing all the basic apps with one installer is a god send. Thanks!
I don't think they bought the domain raindrop.com yet, yet somehow the screenshot shows the app at raindrop.com.
Windows 7 is the best operating system on the market
That's a good point. I was just noting that even if someone voted 90%-10% the other way he or she would probably not respond to this poll truthfully, given the tendency here to look down on those who don't think before they do. I'd be surprised if "vote before reading" gets more than zero votes.
What's wrong with upvoting techcrunch? You figure they don't need any more help?