skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes unfortunately this is the chasm that all of us have to jump. I've had a hard time reconciling this BUT I think there are a lot of ways that you can create a work environment which measures individual performance well enough to compensate appropriately.
Of course this will require each employee to be able to do more than just one role and will need them to be involved in sales as well.
Another way to get past this "mental block" is to let your employees do something they really love and build your business around it. Ie like Patagnoia which lets people take off a whole season to go surf.
Well, if you pay online with a credit card, you're hardly anonymous. Even if you use PayPal, there's still a trail.
We've stated explicitly that these are "INCREMENTAL" savings. We do not assume that your PC is on 24x7. If it's on all the time, you'd stand to save much more.

Why don't you sign up and have a look at how much users are saving? We've had 36 downloads over the last week - friends in our immediate network. They're your average joe user - none of them leave their PCs on at night. Enpower kicks in when they forget to power down, and you'd be surprised to learn how often that is.

Please don't call an app from a startup spyware. It's unlikely we'll ever have the resources to do what it takes to look "squeaky clean" from your lofty perspective.

Green Facebook apps have seen much more adoption than we aspire to achieve. Little Green Patch, a social gardening game has 1,889,557 active monthly users. (http://www.facebook.com/applications/%28Lil%29_Green_Patch/7...) They state their advertisers will donate towards reforestation if you exchange "packets of seeds" with your friends. I think our effort could be just as meaningful, if not more. I do admit that a download is a significant barrier and we're not aiming to reach magical numbers within a week. It'll be slow, and we're ready for it.

And finally, if 30 million kWH means so little, why spend a 100 million dollars of taxpayers' money (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Nellis-Solar-Powe...) to pump that amount of clean energy into the grid? Surely, the Government must know better.
Let me guess, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign?
MD/DC/VA Entrepreneurs - Bootstrap MD (Panel about money for startups)
Yeah, I just ordered a Corsair p128, should be here tomorrow or the next day. Cannnn't wait.
BTW, we'd have to re-architect to avoid the whole world in one repository. And even if we could figure out a clever way to do it, it would likely present organizational complexities.
what's the challenge? to dedicate more coverage of mashups? i don't at all agree that its the aggregator's responsibility to expose and promote a certain niche in its data. seems contrary to their point: blindly aggregate the data, present the trends, let the user do the filtering. in my opinion, once you start curating, you become a portal.
I'm still a little wary of the reliability of these drives. I think it's prudent to wait at least another half-year. It isn't the long-term lifetime of the memory itself, which is fine. It's the tendency of the drives to be dead within a couple months.

Go to newegg and sort the reviews by date on some of the most popular ones.
What has been discovered are not of the exact sort of magnetic monopoles that Direc predicted, but these spin ice crystals have clearly divided north and south poles with measurable separation between the two poles.
The problem I had with this article is that while it covers the case of people who are "losers" monetarily but have meaning outside of work (Pam, Angela) it doesn't cover the case of people who find that meaning in their work ; the latter category includes most good scientists and engineers and many business professionals as well.

That being said, the engineer position is also fairly privileged: the pay of a Silicon Valley engineer -- even if you take into account the standard of living (provided you live in a part of Bay Area that's comparable to most suburbs e.g. San Jose, rather than a hip part of SOMA) -- is more than middle management in most other parts of the country. The starting salary for a software engineer out of college can be as high as $75,000-$95,000. They can live a very comfortable lifestyle, where additional money (outside of "fuck you money") just brings diminished returns. This isn't true for many scientists (postdocs generally make a pittance).
Bye Bye Bluetooth
Come 2010 and no longer would you be using Bluetooth for short range file transfer. Apple, Intel, Cisco (and other major players) along with WiFi Alliance have together come with a set of standards for WiFi Direct. This will convert you Wifi gadget into a access point.
True; I would say that 'pure craftsman' type of person would be totally comfortable with the 'loser' position in this analysis. They would not be looking askance at the 'sociopath' types; whereas another type of person might be saying, "Hmm, these executives are making 100x as much as me, and yet my work is quite critical to this business. Is that really fair?" etc.

Again, I want to emphasize that I realize these terms are shockingly harsh--and of course, if we're staying with this analysis, one or another of them applies to every single person in a (medium to) large organization. I'm trying to use them in a neutral, not inherently insulting way, even if that's almost impossible to do :) I'm just trying to extend the analysis of the article a little, and so I kind of have to use its terms (and of course, it wouldn't have drawn as much attention if it were phrased in a more neutral way, etc.)

It could be that the original article's analysis is just flawed, which I would consider a valid position, etc.--but I'm just going along with its terms because they do seem to fit shockingly well (to the point that the whole thing seems like a bit of a punch in the gut when I re-analyze some past experiences).
I think people are too caught up in the confusing UI. Wave is going to kill a lot of companies once it starts catching on. It may require some better front-end tools for Wave to get there, but it will happen. The way collaboration works in wave is really good; it's just a little unpolished right now.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=879439
Smart move. I got bit last Dec with my 80gb Intel X25m completely crapping out on me. The drive stopped being recognized and despite a week of troubleshooting, and trying to restore, it was completely lost.

However, the next drive I bought was an 80gb Intel X25m. The speed difference of these drives are truly amazing

Buy yeah, I now back up my drive to an external disk.
I'll jump in the queue! maplambda [at] gmail _dot_ _com_
Survey: Do small businesses use social networking?
Why I Want A Gradient Camera
This describes potential replacement to film-inspired design of digital cameras -- instead of measuring local intensities, measure local gradients. The result would be ability to capture HDR images with a single exposure and better noise-handling characteristics
Iron Mountain introduces a cloud storage API
5gb was just about enough 10 years. Different times, different size requirements. People do more with computers nowdays.
3D Fingerprinting - More Accurate, Faster, Touchless
Conversation... On Winning a Nobel Prize in Science
September Search Report
TC50 Winner RedBeacon Is Now Live In The Bay Area
If the alternative is a end of season not-sale, I would have to say yes. (Same here).
[eBook] Elements of Statistical Learning: data mining, inference, and prediction
If you have stock options, even a small slice of the company, it's not wasted effort.
2) That's called "cramming" and you should report it to the FCC so that (hopefully, someday) they can put those guys out of business.

Already done it, apparently the (scam) company was started by an ex-high level At&t insider. But yeah they sure did find a way to take 20 dollars from me without me having to do anything.

And yes it is micropayments, I guess I'm just surprised and angry that the closest I got to micropayments was a scam.
Just found CouchDB solving peer-based replication, and it's not structural.
I think wave could kill twitter. The with:public option is already just like looking at the twitter stream.

Wave is very open for anyone to make their own clients to use wave in whatever way they see fit. With the right client, Wave could be a much more powerful twitter.
Want That Early Chrome OS Build? You Got It.
This type of language can be confusing. It is not a "real" magnetic monopole but an "emergent" one. The collective behavior of all of the spins in the material shows the experimental signatures of a magnetic monopole. The idea is pretty simple to visualize - if you take a normal solenoid, the magnetic flux lines come out of one end and return into the other end. If you take the solenoid and stretch it into an infinitely long infinitesimally thin string the magnetic flux coming out of one end looks exactly like the magnetic field of a monopole. This is an old idea called the "dirac string". In these spin ice materials the magnetic moments of the rare earth atoms in the crystal are "geometrically frustrated" and cannot become all aligned or anti-aligned as in a normal magnetic material - so they apparently arrange themselves into strings, and the ends of the strings look like monopoles. (note that a line of tiny dipoles has approximately the same field as a solenoid)

Here are some other simple examples of particles with "emergent" properties:

(-) The conduction electrons in metals interact with the ions in the lattice as well as with each other through electrostatic forces, nonetheless they can be approximately described as a gas of non interacting electrons with a different "effective mass". In some cases (e.g. graphene, bismuth) the "effective mass" can be zero, in other cases (e.g. actinide compounds) they can be nearly as heavy as a proton. Of course the electron mass is still ~10^-30 kg

(-) In semiconductors, when an electron is removed from the filled valence band (e.g. by doping) it leaves behind a "hole" which behaves like a positively charged particle. negative charged electrons and positively charged holes can actually interact to form an "atom" called an exciton which shows a spectrum just like a hydrogen atom. This is a collective "emergent" behavior of the entire semiconductor - there aren't really positively charged particles or hydrogen-like atoms in the semiconductor.

there are many other more exotic examples
Financial Grants For Single Parents
These are all pretty good examples.

That being said, I recently spent some time reading through the source of both Gemcutter.org and RailsDevelopment.com and found both to be very educational to me personally:

http://github.com/engineyard/rails_dev_directory
http://github.com/qrush/gemcutter/
You can call it curation if you want and thats fine. I think with aggregation comes a responsibility for pattern finding as well. Its not enought to just present the naked information. Besides responsibility I think it makes sense, it makes business sense.

Checkout "Against Transparency" by Lawrence Lessig - http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/against-transparen...
You found articles on 30+ year old dead-obvious technology solutions to long-solved problems to be more interesting?

To respond in-kind -- maybe this indicates that you just haven't reached the level of expertise necessary to appreciate the nuances of the topic addressed here (regardless of whether you agree or disagree with his opinion) -- and moreover, perhaps you lack the perspective necessary to differentiate between architectural astronauts and people presenting real issues.
Ask HN: I want to do a video tutorial for cheap on OSX. What tools should I use?
Wanting to a video tutorial with a voice over. What software is there (ideally free) that does a good job at this?
Professional video editing has developed workarounds for that problem as far back as the 80's. Basically they do the editing on a low-res version of the footage (it's called an "offline edit"), then export it as an "Edit Decision List (EDL)" and then the big computers crunch on it overnight using the original, hi-res footage and produce an "online" edit. Companies like Avid sell specialized servers that have an in-built LCD screen on their case so that you can see the programme as it is being processed.

Online editing is still quite CPU intensive so I don't think that SSDs alone will change that workflow but it might still help somewhat at offline editing.
Template languages and code maintenance
Check out my PythonTurtle:

http://pythonturtle.org
The Google Wave chatting tool is too complicated for its own good
I think the author has these options covered:

- If you do it because you enjoy it, then you are, by article's definition, a "loser" (in terms of potential monetary gains) [1].

- If you do it in order to learn about running your own startup, then you are "sociopath-in-training" (ala Ryan from The Office).

And that's it. The author doesn't claim you cannot have happy and meaningful life as "loser" (by his definition), deriving pleasure from the work itself.

He just tells that for "losers" somebody else will reap a significant part of the monetary reward for the value that their work creates.

-----

[1] Similar principle works for "sexy" jobs - that's why poor game developers get abused so much.
The awesome part about it is that your database can be very easily replicated "to the cloud" for backup/sharing purposes.

This is an attractive feature of CouchDB that I'm considering for a web application too.
yes: blindly aggregate the data, present the trends as they happen, and let the user filter for what they want. it's not a river's responsibility to present a miner with a nugget of gold.
hi! i added to the spreadsheet too. If someone from this thread can invite me, i'll share the invites too.
Being the king of the hill on a sinking ship isn't exactly impressive.
Biggest news you’ve never heard: Earth isn’t warming
It is also extremely concise, perhaps too much so occasionally for pedagogical ease. It really does come pretty close to covering "all of statistics" in 442 pages, an impressive feat. But as you can imagine it certainly doesn't beat around the bush much. So if you're looking for something with multiple applications, covering the same material from different perspectives, etc., or just want more hand holding, this may not be for you.
I assume that the final treaty would have to be public, which raises the obvious question of why the drafts should be secret. Perhaps the media industry lobbyists don't want to be embarrassed by any proposed copyfascist terms that end up getting dropped from the final version. Or perhaps the negotiations are secret to prevent people from linking each treaty provision back to the company that proposed it (collective deniability).
I agree wholeheartedly with Paul, but you do have to balance it against the amount of work involved. Something that's fulfilling at 40 hours a week can be grinding when you're at it 60+ hours a week.

The problem with working as an employee for a start-up is that you're required to have the commitment of a founder, without the upside. There may be some people who will knowingly invest their youth in buying someone else a yacht, but in my experience many startup employees are unrealistic about their chances. Most businesses aren't going to change the world or make average employees rich.

From a rational perspective at least, I think it's hard to justify being an employee at an early-stage startup unless you're there to build the experience and contacts necessary to start your own company. There are plenty of medium-sized companies out there that offer similar opportunities for employees without their bureaucracy of a bigcorp or the risk and time commitment of a startup.
I don't understand how a more powerful message system will make email as "asynchronous queue of messages" obsolete.

As far as I know, gmail is a surface abstraction of wave between Google's private servers.

I do understand that most email tools suck, but that is the fault of the tools and email culture, not "asynchronous queue of messages."
Don't know about math intro book, but I can't think of "free pdf" and machine learning without also thinking about

http://www.autonlab.org/tutorials/

Probability for Data Miners, for example, has much of the basic math you need for machine learning algorithms, for example.
Is it possible to replicate a users' local database into a shared "cloud" database (many-to-one) or does the "cloud" have to have one database per user (one-to-one)
Ask HN: What are some other uses for folding@home style computing?
I'm doing a senior project, and want to put together a folding@home style program to do something cool/useful for real people -- any thoughts on possible uses of massively distributed computing?
Real article: http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/10/13/13re...
... And you gained .5% because you can count online subscriptions as subscriptions. They didn't break it out but I bet they had a similar dive in paper sales.
> Please don't call an app from a startup spyware. It's unlikely we'll ever have the resources to do what it takes to look "squeaky clean" from your lofty perspective.

Sorry, you're right. I've edited my original comment to be less damning.

> Why don't you sign up and have a look at how much users are saving?

For one, it doesn't look compatible with MacOSX. Additionally, I have little trust of 3rd party native code.

> Little Green Patch, a social gardening game has 1,889,557 active monthly users

My opinion of Facebook apps is that they are useless, but also (some privacy aside) harmless.

> And finally, if 30 million kWH means so little, why spend a 100 million dollars of taxpayers' money (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Nellis-Solar-Powe...) to pump that amount of clean energy into the grid?

100 million was spent to build a facility, not purchase a years worth of output. Solar panels should last at least 10 years, so divide that 100 million by at least 10. Additionally, funding solar installations is viewed as an indirect means of funding solar panel research, and not as a simple purchase of energy.

> Surely, the Government must know better.

I think that we all have an intuition for how government contracts are awarded, and knowledge isn't on that list.
I think you're correct - but I think that almost everyone is missing the point and just talking about the client. The current Google supplied client is optional, and will change. What's more, other clients will emerge that do different things, are simpler, more complex or just different. You could - and I'm sure someone probably will - write email-like clients, or even IMAP-Wave gateways which enable you to use Outlook/Evolution/Whatever and participate in waves via traditional email paradigms. Clients that looks like twitter, pidgin backends (hey - it's just XMPP, this is probably already there), clients that just lifeblog everything you do into your personal life-stream wave (tsunami?)
Wave is a platform. It would be pretty amazing if that platforms killer app. happened to also be the very first client anyone wrote for it. I would imagine that a lot of conversation like interactions that we now have by other means - placing orders, technical support, supply chain management, etc... will become waves, but I don't know what will be the killer app.
>> "I think people who think Google Wave doesn't get it will be eating their words later, much like those who thought the same thing about the iPod (most of the geek communities turned their nose up at that too)."

I'd somewhat bet the opposite. Geeks will be raving about wave and how it's realtime, XMPP federated, technically impressive etc etc, whilst the average person on the street will have no clue what it does and why they need it.
So HN, LW, and OB aren't the havens that I thought.... Just fucking great.

Or did I miss something and σ is actually relative to the average intelligence of a group? Does stupid = not intelligent? I'm going to have to re-read this and scan these comments better.
It's not retarded.

You make a false assumption that halogen-free directives are about being green. It's as much about safety as anything else:

For some applications there is a concern that halogenated plastic materials will release corrosive and toxic gases if ignited in a fire. The corrosive element of these gases has the potential to damage electronics wherever the smoke travels, and the toxic element can be potentially hazardous to persons if they cannot easily evacuate from the area.

Applications where corrosion potential is of particular concern include communications data centers and phone switching stations with large amounts of expensive electronics. As a case in point the fire called “the worst disaster in telecommunications history” occurred on May 8th 1988 in a Hinsdale, IL Central Office facility for Illinois Bell. The fire cut local service to 35,000 suburban Chicago phone customers and was estimated to have cost many millions of dollars in recovery cost. In the after effects of the fire the central processor of the phone switch, which was not directly involved in the fire, had to be replaced reportedly due to the effects of acid corrosion.

The toxicity of smoke is of highest concern within enclosed spaces where means of escape by persons are limited; examples include mass transit rail cars, ships, and Offshore Oil and Gas platforms. There have been several tragic fires that have occurred involving transit vehicles over recent years that have brought heightened concern to this issue. In a February 2003 incident, news reports of a fire involving two trains in a Daegu, South Korea subway station told of how toxic fumes and heavy black smoke prevented firefighters from making a quick rescue of those trapped. 120 were killed and many others injured in that incident.

http://www.gocsc.com/uploads/white_papers/E47B142616A84C3F90...
I agree for the most part, but incidentally you would never (def x 1) and then (def x 5) in a running program -- you would use an atom, ref, or var instead. Redefinition of a symbol is permitted so you don't have to quit and restart your REPL every time you rewrite a function.

A more meaningful objection is that you can shadow a local with a different local in Clojure, like this:

(let [a (some-calculation)
b (something-else)
a (some-function-of a b)]
a)

which is essentially what is being done in the Python code.

I don't think there are many strong arguments to make in favor of Clojure over Python other than concurrency and macros, and maybe the immutable hashes.
Ah, good point, without the breakout even that is meaningless.

That also means that if this is a conversion issue that it may be a one-time affair.

The next years figures will tell that story.
I'm interested but it doesn't work in Ruby 1.9. I fixed the issues with Banajour itself but there are also several dependencies which don't work with 1.9 either. Too soon!
The problem with social media outlets like twitter and Facebook is that they're too broad for small businesses to use. For example, ppl don't just go to Facebook or Twitter to connect with small businesses.
http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_12_24_01.html
I thought we were past all the definitional bullshit behind the global warming vs climate change fiasco? The theory of human-caused climate change doesn't call for a steady year-by-year, much less season-by-season, increase in temperatures everywhere. It does, however, call for dramatic extremes - early crop-killing winters here, prolonged droughts there, and some truly monstrous hurricanes in the years to come.
Mac sales grow 11.8% as Apple takes 9.4% U.S. market share
The typical employee's <1% share won't even make up for the overtime they put in unless their company turns out to be the next Google.