skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "We see the games as an opportunity to return to being a friend to the world."

There's been a bully in the schoolyard all year, bigger than all the other boys; he's stolen your lunch money any number of times, given you a few black eyes and blood lips. In the last couple of weeks, a few other big guys transferred to the same school. The bullying suddenly stopped and now he wants to be friends.
And with Snow Leopard, you can assign your own keyboard shortcuts - and they'll even show up in the menus! System Preferencea->Keyboard=>Keyboard Shortcuts->Application Shortcuts (click on the plus sign)
Part of the problem with that is in reporting. The stuff that ends up on your credit report is only there because companies (credit cards, banks, collections agencies, etc.) report the information to the credit bureaus. Convincing those companies to also report to you -- especially given general corporate distrust for the "open source" concept -- would be a tough sell.

On the other hand, if there was a way you could gather all this information without relying on third parties to actively notify you... that would be both cool and incredibly frightening.
His post rate is around 15 answers a day. Considering that most of these are highly-rated (and thus, not stuff like "lol you r dum"), it is likely that this eats up a good portion of his workday.
Google can't copy a BRAND! Your brand is a DUCK, they surely can't copy that! Also, patents, protect your project with patents, then enforce them!

If you've got a unique or brilliant idea or invention, then file a patent on it!

Eric is the CEO of FreezeCrowd, Inc. http://www.freezecrowd.com

a great new social networking site launching soon for college students and alumni.
Because none of those contracts affect Google's IP.
"Seriously, though, it's probably not a good idea to throw diuretic hormones out of balance unless you really know what you're doing."

And it really does something for you. I tried Vasopressin in the '80s, and the effects weren't worth the trouble to acquire and use it.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=858163
Have you read at least the titles of the chapters of the book?

Or the official Apple documentation (http://developer.apple.com/safari/)?

http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/samplecode/iPhoneO...

http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/documentation/Appl...

Edit: where in the book did you see how to use geolocation, vibration or any other feature which is not available with a web app developed for mobilesafari?
So you're saying that "they weren't right for their jobs" is wrong. What about the "burned out" part? What do you know about why they left? Did they just move on the more interesting things, like so many startup people do?

Genuinely curious here, as I don't know, or know much about, any of the people involved.
The tragedy of the commons works like this: If everyone follows their self interest and goes fishing in the lake, pretty soon all of the fish will be gone and it will take decades for them to repopulate. If you somehow (how to do it is a coordination problem) arrange for only a small number of people to fish, they can bring in reasonable number of fish every day for many years.

The upshot: In some markets, like consumer electronics, supply and demand regulates things very efficiently. In others, unconstrained individual interest can ruin everything.

In the financial markets, individuals acting rationally for themselves can cause damage to the overall economy: crashes, bubbles, bank runs, etc.
Also, this is really neat. Definitely something DuckDuckGo should look into.
http://www.smallmeans.com/tools/siteflow/
The streaming didn't work at all for me. You can download it directly here:

http://media.palantirtech.com/palantir_demo_reel_final.mp4
Maybe that's what he spends his '20% time' on?
Update: As usual, this "story" was a mistake that was corrected within hours. Yet another case where a 24-hour delay would have helped.
Now imagine you're not a billionaire in your own Lear.

The Games are supposed to be a symbol of international spirit. How could America even hope to win them? You can't claim to be "exceptional" and above the rest of the community, then ask that same community for support.

America was tolerated before, because it had money. Now it has less money, and the cracks are beginning to show.
Wonder how their YC application video was?
ICANN goes International
Interesting view on the Tragedy of the Commons and whether it is an accurate assumption:

http://www.britac.ac.uk/pubs/src/keynes95/06sec5.cfm
Even having read a few popular science books a few years ago (50-year DNA anniversary), it's been too many years since AP Biology. Could you/ others please recommend a few titles (articles, books, titles), at the AP Biology level, on (a) proteins and RNA, (b) genes and DNA ? Thanks in advance!
oh, private companies and individuals do this all the time just as well :)
Maybe one could invent a small "personal container" with all the stuff, that can easily be transported around. The generic housing could have slots for the personal container.
" If everyone follows their self interest and goes fishing in the lake, pretty soon all of the fish will be gone and it will take decades for them to repopulate. "

Or, everyone follows their self interest and realizes that they will need to work out some agreements to moderate fishing or there will be no fish.
or maybe... more like lifetime of a nightmare
The question is, would you love it when they asked you to leave because you're not brilliant enough?
$15,000 in revenue in the first month is impressive. I wonder how many business dev and customer support people they need to want the 250K. It seems that the business is healthy enough to hire based on revenue, which is what I would do instead of getting funding. The hosting cost seems almost negligible at this point, too.
Graag gedaan ;)
My intention is not to use Marx to justify anything; I just want to lay focus on something he and Engels got exactly right and which is being forgotten: capitalism is amoral (a term that is not be confused with immoral). As a result of this, parts of their analysis are extremely valuable and it's a damn shame the anti-communist tendencies have swept that under the rug.

By stating that evolution is an amoral process, I completely condemn any form of Social Darwinism: you cannot derive moral values from amoral principles. Evolution is completely amoral: that which reproduces itself, will continue to exist in some form, independent of our moral judgment about it. Social Darwinists are therefore guilty of the naturalistic fallacy

However, the same goes for capitalism: that which increases capital the most stays in the best position to keep increasing capital. Because of irrationality and a lack of market transparency, the best moral intentions on the part of individual humans cannot prevent immoral consequences from arising. I'm not saying any of those immoral consequences are unique to capitalism. I am saying they are unavoidable when you let capitalism go unchecked.

It's not clear why the government is the only institution in society that can avoid failure

And I cannot prove it is. However, as far as I can see, no other institution has the power nor the mandate to guide capitalist forces. This is the exact reason you have things like the Federal Trade Commission and an Antitrust Division in the DoJ, both on a government level. Who else could do that job?
4.4 Million Years Old, 15 Years of Work, 11 Science Papers, 1 Fossil
P2P is already changing the filesystem panorama. Right now, Dropbox is the hype but the real rocket sauce is in Wuala [1], which was recently bought by Lacie. I can see, in the near future, a wave of external "disks" bundled with the Wuala filesystem offering loads of gigs "for free".

Also, I've been trying other P2P storage solutions like Tahoe[2] and totally loved it. It's GPL, Twisted based, portable and very easy to install.

[1] http://wua.la + http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xKZ4KGkQY8
[2] http://allmydata.org/
"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

...but the badger knows the most important thing: how to eat hedgehogs.

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/6216749/Hedgehogs-...)
Beware of simplistic conclusions of very basic game theory, especially if it's coming from RAND.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons

This documentary enlightens a bit on the subject and is quite accessible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_%28television_document...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=404227395387111085#

(AFAIK not released outside of Britain due to footage rights issues, a real shame.)
No it doesn't. He said that the expression, 'the rich are getting richer,' is a generalization (which it is) but that it is 'true enough.' Money is a tool with which you can aquire more wealth, but all the tools in the world are worthless if you don't have the knowhow to use them.
Having 11 papers at once in Science is almost unheard of (especially when they're all by the same group of authors!). It's reserved for Human Genome Project level efforts.

So what's the big deal?

A prof at Berkeley (Tim White) and his team discovered a fossil (Ardipithecus) more than 15 years ago. It's a rare partial skeleton which sheds light on a branch of primate evolution (the human/chimp common ancestor) that we haven't had much direct physical evidence about. Seems they have opposable big toes among other interesting features.

Over the last 15 years, White & co. only allowed their collaborators to look at it, and others in the field have gotten annoyed and accused him of hoarding the find. See a representative dustup from a few months back:

http://anthropology.net/2009/08/25/science-suffers-from-the-...

Fast forward to a few days ago. Science publishes this monster issue dedicated to the find. It sets the whole paleoanthropology world atwitter.

http://www.sciencemag.org/ardipithecus/

Here's some further commentary:

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/fossils/ardipithecus/ardipithecu...

And now you're up to date, at least on the "inside science" aspects of this.
Why do you have to have skis, surfboard, bike and kites just for you all the time? It's not like you can use them all at once, is it?

Maybe I would understand if you used one item per day, but I don't think even that's the case. Probably most of the stuff you mentioned is simply lying around 90% of the time, taking space and amortizing.
I'm friends with Andre at Nitobi, and he assured me that things are cool and apps are getting approved. I was still hoping that there was some kind of Apple statement about this. The blog post was very reassuring, thanks!
Don't Forget: You Can Use Amazon SimpleDB For Free
Nor does the MVP contract.
Windows Azure Table Storage supports schema-less data. You can give it any sort of entity and store them in something similar to a table but without schema restrictions. I use it for one of my projects and love it.

http://www.microsoft.com/azure

edit - Thought I would also point out you can whatever language you like to use it. You use a REST API to perform all your queries.
Growth does not imply the use of more resources. Economic wealth comes from knowledge and command of atoms. Software is wealth, books are wealth, and so on. Such wealth clearly requires a baseline of control over resources and energy, but we get more efficient with it over time so it's not the linear relationship that so many seem to think.

There's a lot of growth left to do, and all precluding our growth now will do is make damn sure we never actually build a sustainable society, because it's not possible with our current technology.

We'll worry about how to manage a non-growing economy when we get there. That situation is so unlike the current situation that even speculation has rather limited value.

(See also: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2417 , which is too long to put here and not entirely on topic, but is fleshed out a bit more.)
What's interesting about what you just stated is that the only reason current patents don't stifle innovation is that there is enough unpatented prior art that someone can build a bridge. If someone did patent a simple bridge as stated above no one could build a truss bridge cause it would infringe. It would in effect stifle innovation.

Patents only work when in old industries?
A robot dog might be the better alternative.
Maybe this demo reel makes sense to their target customers, but it made very little sense to me. Not sure if it really tells a story to members of the general population.

Also, I personally felt that the "eye candy" wasn't so impressive. Looked like any other ERP/B2B system out there. Aside from the criminal clip art and the maps, it might as well have been.

Music was grating after 30 seconds as well.

Still dig the company name though.
A "Hulu for publishers" won't work if publishers don't step up their game
The problem is that company's will either conduct no analysis of their own software engineering processes or they will conduct an analysis but the data for it will be hidden meaning that it cannot be verified or reproduced.

So everyone has a theory, but there is little data to support the theories and getting that data is very difficult.
I agree with you. (I've moved past loving Ayn Rand and her cult of assholery, rest assured.) At the same time, I don't necessarily mind rude people as long as it's not excessive or dull. I respect people capable of being both forceful and polite something incredible, though, and have been making an effort to learn how to be the same.
I'll Be Working on the Railroad: California's Bullet Train Gets on Track
> Or, everyone follows their self interest and realizes that they will need to work out some agreements to moderate fishing or there will be no fish.

This can have downsides, namely the sort of "credentialism" that's often derided on this site (licensing for interior decorators, etc.) All the players in some industry decide that it's in their best interest to appeal for regulation which will prevent others from entering this industry.
I wouldn't intend to work there and let myself be kicked out.
That's a piss-poor attitude.
I clicked on the link expecting some revealing statistics showing that the smart were getting richer.
I once emailed Peter Norvig about about one of his Amazon book reviews. Surprisingly, he replied back within a day.
I managed to "fool" myself that my own app was faster by adding a snappier animated gif. Perception really is everything.

http://garmhold.blogspot.com/2009/09/make-your-ajax-apps-see...
I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that harshly competitive environments have their value systems straight, but it bears mentioning that at Enron traders and deal makers were on the evaluation boards for the risk assessment group.
I've seen these guys come up a few times over the years, and I think what they're doing is amazing. When I watched that video, I didn't just think "Wow, this is something cool" it was more of "I want to be involved with this". Working on the kind of stuff shown off in that video was just about as close to my dream job as I have ever seen.

On that note, I wanted to point out one screenshot in particularly, which just blew me away: http://blog.palantirtech.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/hh-d.... That has got to be one of the slickest, best looking interfaces I have ever seen. Some of the contrast is a little bad from a color-blind perspective (the titles for the widgets are very difficult to read), but the way they jammed so much information into a screenfull is amazing.
That will be some blog plugin that detects if you were referred from a social networking site, and then asks you for votes.
The UK's view might be considered saner since if you can prove you came up with the intellectual property on your own and didn't copy it could be argued that you have a joiont right with the other patent holder. Not sure if they interpret it that way but it would be a logical outgrowth of the view.
I can disagree by deconstructing the ideas to relatives of Social Darwinism, the friend of colonialists and the entitled alike.
Talented young surfer with Asperger Syndrome
It should also be noted that Andrew is an active HN member and goes by the screen name AndrewWarner.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=AndrewWarner

I also love his mixergy interviews, very inspirational.
Is the Obama Administration Supporting Calls to Outlaw Supposed Hate Speech?
"And beyond that, I’m worried that the Executive Branch’s endorsement of speech-restrictive “international human rights” norms will affect how the courts interpret the First Amendment, so that over time, “an international norm against hate speech … [would] supply a basis for prohibiting [hate speech], the First Amendment notwithstanding.” And that worry stems not just from my fevered imagination, but from the views of Prof. Peter Spiro, a noted legal academic who is a supporter of this tendency. That’s not fearmongering on his part, but hope (hopemongering?) and prediction. So anything that an Administration does to endorse international speech-restrictive norms might well have an effect on our own constitutional rights as well."
The one that got away
I didn't know music this bad existed. WHY would you use it in a demo real?
That site is SO 2007.
At least in principle, I do not see why it cannot. Growth implies that the GDP is going up, considering that IP/software/etc can all contribute to the GDP then as long as people continue to work creatively then it can in principle grow indefinitely.
I'd define "rich" as |wealth|

You may define it differently, but that's language isn't it.
If you own skis (or any of the other items), you don't just own some skis; you own those skis. They're sized to you, you've used them the last 100 times you went down a mountain, you're accustomed to exactly how they handle, and the left ski boot's padding is a little more spacious because your left foot is a little bigger, and has worn away the padding more.

Yes, you don't use them, but between the custom fitting and the emotional attachment, they aren't fungible anymore. Which is, I suppose, the point of the article: if you declare something to be freely exchangeable, then you can have a much more freewheeling style of life.
But Ms. Spears wouldn't invest it herself. She'd place it with some popular wealth manager her friends recommended.

The spread between him and Mr. Buffet wouldn't be that high. I'd bet on $10m with a decent manager vs. $1m with Buffet any day.
Immediate-Mode Graphical User Interfaces [vid]
Neither does MVP status. Does google force its employees to forgo doctor patient confidentiality, or attorney-client privilege? Does google force its employees to avoid signing up for game beta programs that might require an NDA?
This actually might be a hit as a simple little Facebook app or something.

http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/2007/07/09/startup-71-jump...
I wouldn't rely on poor people's altruism as on a valuable contribution to others. Even if giving those 2 cents was an important decision for the woman considering her poorness, the piles given out by a richer man were much more valuable. It is absolute value of a contribution that matters for a receiver of good here.
The real problem is that it attempts to break down the whole image in a single transform, rather than splitting it into blocks.

There is nothing wrong with an optimized set of basis functions, and tests have actually shown that an overcomplete set of basis functions does actually give better results than a complete transform like the DCT. Albeit at higher computational cost--an RD-optimal overcomplete transformation, even if basis functions are already known, is NP, related to subset-sum IIRC.

Even if you're not going overcomplete, tests have also shown that optimized basis functions are useful. However, there are two catches here. The first is that if you try to make an optimal basis function set over a huge amount of real-world input data, you will get the DCT! The second is that the problem of creating an optimal classifier--that is, to split inputs into groups which would get their own set of basis functions (and then optimize for each of those groups)... is also NP. Though it might be possible to approximate it efficiently with K-means.

However, regardless, you want to perform transforms on relatively uniform areas of the image. Thus, you want the individual transforms to be small enough to cover relatively uniform areas and localize nonuniformity as much as possible. That's why JPEG uses 8x8 blocks, not a full-image DCT. That's also why H.264 has two transform sizes (and effectively a third if you count the heirarchical transform in i16x16 blocks): so it can adapt to uniform areas of different size.
I can't believe this was written in Swing
Has anything like this been done for other site graphics?

It would be great to be able to customize fg/bg colors of rounded border images or background gradients without firing up photoshop. It would be even nicer if it could scrape the colors out of your site's css.
"Do engineers just need interesting technical problems to remain happy?"

I landed a programming gig working on robotics projects, and working on interesting problems makes up for a world of sins :)
Inspirational dialog
A web application where people can go online and post events they saw taking place and/or ask if other people saw such events. I wagered the biggest draw would be people trying to find out more information on crimes and you could possibly partner with local law enforcement like CitySourced is trying to partner with local government.

"My car was stolen today outside of 7-11 between 3 and 3:15. Black dodge truck. Did anyone see anything?" It would be community driven and targeted at locals. I imagined the draw to get people to participate would be to help "clean up" the community. Imagine a centralized resource for people to post about what they saw on 9/11 - assuming the government wouldn't shut you down.

UFO's sightings, missing pets, amber alerts could be other such usages.

Thoughts? I'm seriously considering developing this if it's well received.
But lottery winners are not the right example. Those who inherit wealth will be far different than lottery winners, not least because their parents tend to instill values and practices that help produce wealth. They also have greater access to schools and universities, etc etc.

In the USA, in particular, wealth is very very heritable. I'll try to dig up some studies, though I have work to do today...
He would have to sign a Microsoft NDA. So he does X at Google based on his knowledge of something he can't disclose. MS says "Google did X because their employee broke NDA."

Come on -- basically any prudent company would do what Google did. That doesn't make it good or bad, in and of itself, but it seems silly to say some of the things people are saying on this page just because a company took the standard, cautious route.
Not to be nitpicky, but in startups every little bit helps, you should change loose weight to lose weight in the "start a business" goal. Loose refers to the opposite of tight. Lose refers to the act of removing something.

Other than the dialog boxes that pop up like crazy the site is interesting. One thing you might want to elaborate on is how the system uses the data you provide to fine tune the algorithms.

If you are crowdsourcing the data for goals how are you going to prevent malicious activity from corrupting the goal set?
actually, you should start your search with:

http://www.ramseeker.com/
One thing I noticed is that while there are quite a lot of posts on his site about "agile" and "methodology" I see basically nothing in the way of technical stuff (meaning working code) on his front page or in his tags list.

Sets off my spidey sense for PHB.
Visualizations like that are one of the few things swing is awesome at.
We had a full network setup where I took them, with a fair amount of real hardware (of varying manufacturers even [a few AdTran boxes]). Perhaps that is a rarity, I'm not sure. :)
You don’t know Daft Punk? Have you been living under a rock?
Building a Product Catalog with Amazon SimpleDB