skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cool. The main thing I find confusing is the rating scheme. It's hard at first to know what constitutes "good".

The site rates movies where the benchmark is the quality of the trailer. If a movie has a 58% "voters said the movie is better than the trailer" rating, that means 42% of people were disappointed by the movie. Is this your thought? With this, maybe you should adopt more of a rottentomatoes.com scheme - anything above 50% gets a thumbs up? I'd like to mainly see some sort of notification of whether the movie is worth seeing based on what I know from the trailer. You have the power to decide what percentage is sufficient.
Year's Biggest VC-Backed Busts
'Ardipithecus ramidus' find extends human story
MetaFilter introduced its lifetime $5 membership fee after initially being free. Existing accounts were grandfathered in, which does a lot to prevent backlash. (If I remember right, LiveJournal also grandfathered in existing members when they first introduced paid features.)
You can do the __metaclass__ thing in Python too. We'll find you and tut at you if you do, but you can do it.
World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) simplifies design registration
Thanks, I'm going to keep tinkering with that, because you're right, it's a bit less clear than it ought to be.
IwannaLearn
Percentage of Internet Users Clicking on Display Ads Down by 50% from 2007
Brilliant developers are interchangeable to some extent - the result is descent every time regardless of who's doing it this time.

But I'm afraid they want something different.
PHP never was a trendy language.

It's a thrown together mess.
FWIW, I've read several accounts of companies switching from Rails to PHP because they couldn't find enough developers (or didn't like negotiating with the few available ones).

Of course good PHPers are probably busy too.
I made an interactive version of the chart with his later data (that now starts in 1774) here http://verifiable.com/charts/3937
(I also added the log version so you can compare them)
I can't wait working with "Chicago Boss" web framework with the upcoming "London Queen" Ajax framework and "Moscow Oligarch" distributed SCM.
<link rel="alternate" title="Is Perl Dead Yet?" href="/rss.xml" type="application/rss+xml" />
I agree with that arrogant part. I think also though, it does get annoying when people know full well what you are talking about, but then interject with some clarification or correction or disambiguation that really wasn't necessary.

The problem is that sort of interjection ruins the conversation and interrupts the communication of ideas that are bigger than the individual words that comprise them.
The problem with AI development seems to be the assumption that it's going to be a useful business tool. This is sort of like assuming that an artificial organism created in the lab will make a good secretary.
"The dot coms I have known were all doomed. Almost all of them were the classic two-founder startups going after a niche in the market. All of them needed outside money to achieve their goals, and in every case the outside money wrecked the company. Uncontrolled hiring wiped out the competence and the culture of these places within months. Executives who came in with the outside money were out of their depth and resorted to arbitrary decision-making and tyranny, and sometimes deliberately failed at their fiduciary responsibilities. "

I worked for a company matching that description precisely, and can attest to the fact that it really sucked, a lot. The strange thing for me was that it was a subtle shift from "wow, this is so exciting" to "I can't believe how much this sucks". I can't even pinpoint exactly when it happened.

In the beginning it was exciting. Lot's of money floating around, everyone assuming things would be wildly successful and we'd all be rich. Reality was a hard pill to swallow (I was the fifth employee of a company that grew to just over 100 then contracted to around 25). That said, I'm not really tempted to go to the corporate world. I can't just unplug my ambition and accept being a small cog in a giant machine. I would much rather take all the lessons I've learned on "what not to do" and channel that into a new (and hopefully better) startup.
Here is how to celebrate the completion of a project.
shareholder meetings, properly run AGMs and the SEC are pretty good at weeding out boards who zig-zag or bicker. million dollar plus investments in companies with very little oversight are a different story. This is why it's called high-risk, and VCs accept it- but in reality if 9/10 listed companies crashed-and-burned after IPO...
I disagree with the idea that the logarithmic graph is better. It makes it far harder to see the major (and most important) feature of the first graph: a period of relative stability in purchasing power between 1665 and 1945, followed by rapid currency devaluation.

Your graph obscures that feature, and replaces it with no useful information.

The best piece I've read about the 20th century shift to our current regime of inflation was Dalrymple's recent City Journal article. http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_3_otbie-inflation.html

Sure, inflation is just a kind of wealth redistribution. But wealth redistribution has certain effects. In general, it destroys more than it creates.
This is indeed way of topic, but let me try to put my experience in to words somehow.

I've found that 'smarts' have two components, an 'innate' bit that puts a hard limit on what you could understand given an infinite amount of time.

Then there is part that you control bounded by that hard limit, it is basically a function of how much time you want to put in learning.

Most people that I've met could go a lot further within their capped part than what they've done with it. For some reason or other they're content with the life that they've got and that should be more than enough for me to respect that choice. It doesn't mean they're stupid, or less intelligent, it simply means that people make choices about which part of their lives they wish to focus on.

For instance, family is for almost everybody I know (myself include) more important than smarts. My near family may do things that I can not see the reason in, but I'll support them in those choices because they are after all my family and it would be presumptuous of me to assume that because I can't see the reasoning they must be wrong.

Between spouses a similar dynamic can exist. To some extent it is priorities, to some extent it may be intellectual curiosity or some inner drive to want to know stuff.

These factors are almost never perfectly balanced, the bigger the gap the bigger the attraction has to be on other levels to overcome it. If you find that your spouse and you can not communicate about stuff that matters to you or to them then that's an obstacle. Some people avoid that obstacle all together by refusing to try to find someone that they could live with, others try and fail. And some succeed and live happily ever after ;)

If one partner feels 'superior' to another that is almost a guaranteed recipe for disaster, if there is one thing I've learned over time though it is that almost nobody has the moral right to feel superior over anybody. Intelligence is not the only yardstick that one could apply. There are many others besides, and some of those have nothing to do with being good at solving puzzles. (empathy, ethics and so on).
The world's largest wind farm opens
Ask HN: What's the Big Deal With Google Wave?
I've seen some of the demonstrations and read some of the features and I'm afraid I just don't get why this is so 'revolutionary.' It doesn't seem like anything we haven't seen before, it's just that now it's got Google's name on it.

Anyone care to explain what, if anything, I'm missing?
No, that's not a graph of inflation rate. That's a graph of price levels. It's not cumulative.
Perhaps too long?
but it's close to 10 dozen...which is almost a dozen dozen...

I dunno. Vagueries. :)
Should We Prepare for the Academic Doping Scandals?
I think that the fact that google is behind it is in fact that only thing that drives all this media attention, it means that if it is anywhere near successful that it is going to set the bar for collaborative systems, and set it considerably higher than it has been before.

Cisco and a whole bunch of others have been trying to put together a comprehensive suite of tools to do all this, but so far they've failed to make it feel seamless. Google might change that, they've certainly got the resources to make it happen.

Just like there was already free email before gmail and search before google came along, it's a major event.

But I agree with you that all the components have been seen before, maybe with the exception of a system like this having an API.
@1yellowbrick: let me know what passcode you were assigned, there shouldn't be overlap.
@nethergoat: you can now try our paid options (Pro or Webinar) free (30 day trial)
@deltaqueue: we're working on sharing only portions of the screen.
@khuo: thanks for the feedback on the messaging, I'll share it with the team.

-k
Kevin Micalizzi, Community Manager
Dimdim Web Conferencing
e: kevin@dimdim.com
Very difficult to believe (even rationalizing a success bias) that 60% are generating $1,000-$10,000 when 55% have costs of less than $1,000.
"They were all white college grad males."

I think it is irrelevant here - everybody is free to start a startup, this is not a sign of any conspiracy or discrimination.
This is what I love about HN I was coming here to comment on the fact that all these graphs that attempt to show value are never logarithmic, which is basically completely either dishonest or have huge gaping holes in logic. EVERY graph of anything of value will spike up at the end unless it is logarithmic.
Announcement - We lost our VC funding, we were bought for a small portion of what we are worth by a company that is just taking a few of the best employees and some intellectual rights.
I've been working on parts of project Indect since July, mainly doing things with OpenCV -- tiny little cogs of this whole surveillance system. Still I'm very troubled by it's nature and not really sure what to think of it...

I try to justify it to myself saying, (1) it's just so tiny parts and (2) if i'm not doing it somebody else will. Sometimes this works, sometimes not. On the other hand I see it as a chance for myself to get to know this system from the inside.

I'm often asking myself if it's ethically ok for me to write algorithms for such a system -- and I probably might stop because of these questions and the very nature of this project.

I'm seriously troubled as this really is kind of 1984 -- a highly automatized surveillance system networked with the police. But on the other hand, this is just the state of the art, and actually plenty of research projects around the world are working on exactly this subject. It will come -- the only question is when and how.

what would be your thoughts in that situation?
Gotta call bullshit on this one: Percentage of active users on your free plan

Only 6% of sites have >50% of active users on their free plan? So, 94% of freemium web apps have >50% conversion rates, and 43% have >99% conversion? Guess that means I'm really, really bad at converting free -> paid.

It kind of makes sense when inverted, but that's a really bad typo.
The making of the male brain (estrogen required)
Bill Draper and “Pitch” Johnson Look Back at how they started
and they did not require someone else's money to lose it.
There's a qualitative difference between Java and say Django in how easy that is, though. With Django you can write a couple lines of code and immediately see your results on the screen. Instead of having to figure out how things should work from the user's perspective, you can just try them out and see if they do work from a user's perspective. Often the results are pretty surprising, and suggest new ways that you can make things even better. It's hard to do this when your edit-compile-run cycle consists of "Write new class. Change some lines to include it. Rebuild JAR file. Redeploy. Restart servers."

The advantage of dynamic languages isn't that you get your coding done 5x faster, because most projects don't actually spend all that much time coding. It's that you can do 5x as many iterations in the same amount of time, which changes the way you approach your interaction design.
US energy bill backs nuclear industry
I think another problem is the expectation of what AI will look like at all. We think of intelligent human-like robots like something from science fiction, when in reality AI could just be a bit of code running on a standard machine with specific and likely specialized inputs and outputs.

Think of an AI machine working with atmospheric data as one "sense" combined with seismic data and some others, with the directed goal of predicting certain types of disasters (tsunamis...?).

Free will and emotions are other assumption we would likely not give these machines, so the worry of self-interest may not exist either, which would aid in making it good at something useful for us.
I was thinking more "I'm Bill S Preston Esquire" "and I'm Ted Theodore Logan" "and we're DIRECTED EDGE!"
It needs a "Chicago Closet" to go with it.
much more usable than my example, but the copy on write is tricky, which I alluded too. In the case of objects, you need the entire object in order to act upon it, which means you have to copy the whole thing. Of course, if this was an actual language feature, it could be done with some sort of tracing probably, which would make it more efficient. Not sure how you could do that from user code...
In less than 20 lines you've just converted me from a fence-sitter to someone that is going to install erlang and mess around with it.

Thanks!
Nanotech: 20 Years of Moving Atoms, One by One
Hot Collection of Free jQuery And CSS Drop Down Multi Level Menu Solutions
Music with hidden pictures (in its spectogram)
Not sure if this is what you're trying to say, but I see it as similar to some MBA somewhere claiming that QuickSort is a business tool. Sure it is... in the loosest sense of the term 'business tool.' AI is a generic term that has many different meanings to many different people. Many people still think of AI as a computer program/robot with sentience.
Survey: US residents don't want targeted ads
CCIE is the only cert that is a sure thing. If someone has it you know they're good.
The Man was once a startup.
Ask HN: What are you sitting on/in?
A strange question, but I am interested in what this audience sits in. I am in the market for a new desk chair and could use some recommendations.

I've thought about using a medicine ball, but I also like having a backrest and posture support.

I know the Aeron comes highly regarded, but from what I hear it has been "unseated". So please, give some insight into why you sit on what you do, and perhaps what would you like to be sitting in.

Thanks!
I have friends who have worked in corporate environments that were just as screwed up as what he describes.
Report: EC2 Running 40,000 Servers
I am confident that ongoing over-promising will make AI winter a continuing reality.
Tamiflu in Rivers Could Breed Drug-Resistant Flu Strains
It will be much more than just a business tool. But it wont be today.
Erlang is, IMO, a less well-rounded tool than Ruby in some ways. It does some things really well, but other things not well at all. If you take something like Java or Python, you're likely to be able to do anything with it, even if it's not really the best fit. With Erlang, you'll be the best at some things, and not good at all for others.

Also, Ruby is way less verbose than Erlang. A lot of pattern matching code seems to fail the "don't repeat yourself" in some ways - you write a lot of the same things, and just one changes.
I think all he's saying is "make sure you have good lighting and can be heard clearly." Good production values doesn't have to mean high budget or slick.
We have nested comments here. You don't need @s.
The problem with AI is that people try to call simple heuristics and learning algorithms AI, while what we're actually seeing is an overglorified Eliza.

The term Intelligence sets the expectation of "universal learning", not just solving problems we previously thought to be hard. And the research necessary to accomplish that, probably isn't even in the same direction as these fraud AI algorithms. The Biological Computer Laboratory (which died because AI took all the funding) under Foerster probably had a better shot at solving these problems than the AI Lab under Minsky ever had.

This overselling soaked up the funding with empty promises and killed more basic longterm research. Lets hope serious researchers find a way to get their research funded again, despite the AI shills.
The derivative of the price level (i.e. the slope on these charts) is the inflation rate.

The slope on the log-scale chart corresponds to the inflation rate in percentages, which is meaningful. The slope on the linear-scale chart is the inflation rate in "dollars per year" which is not. That's why the log-scale chart is more useful for comparing inflation rates over time.
Bean bag on the floor.
Cool thanx.
"real dollars" means something like "percentage of disposable income".

Also it's impossible to make a meaningful comparison of things you buy for money today compared to things that were bought for money two hundred years ago. Back then a lot more people grew their own food, for example. And they didn't work for software startups and buy all their tech equipment from minimum wage factories in China.
There was never any intention to exclude men from the event, but rather enlist their help in broadening the community. MINSWAN everyone. We're opening the event up to anyone who would like to attend. Check out the blog post here: http://bit.ly/2E9RLm
I use the hag capisco. Works well for keeping my energy "upwards": strong firm seat that rotates the hip forwards. I find the aeron too saggy. You can get it with or without a backrest. I don't use a backrest cause that forces me not to slouch.
Give me another example besides ringtones, please.
I took a class with leading AI researcher Patrick Winston in the spring... it really is one of the most fascinating fields right now. If there is to truly be an "AI spring" then it will likely require massive collaboration between not just computer scientists, but researchers in a wide span of fields including neuroscientists, general biologists, psychologists, and even philosophers.

Free will and emotions are other assumption we would likely not give these machines, so the worry of self-interest may not exist either, which would aid in making it good at something useful for us.

The question is, is it even possible to mimic human intelligence without emotion or free will? Who is to say they aren't wholly dependent on one another?

And if any group of people finds out how to imbue a machine with free will, I'd bet my life they'll go through with it.
We do have search engines, which are pretty sweet and vaguely related to artificial intelligence. The future of AI will probably be similar - we'll get more cool stuff, but it will not be Data from Star Trek, it will be something we didn't expect.
A big-assed post about Fireworks
Google Sidewiki - "Google Steals the Web"
Wintermute?
Boy how I loved mIRC. Granted I was one of the cretins populating MSNChat, this too was my gateway to programming.

I can remember the nights spent typing in trivial code, but it gave me such a rush! The feeling of being able to create things on impulse, to share code, and even being able to critique other peoples code, are things I miss so much.

This is why I've picked up Python, in an effort to reignite that rush. I miss it, a lot.
"It makes it far harder to see the major (and most important) feature of the first graph"

Not if one has learned to read logarithmic graphs. It took me a semester of solid state electronics class (full of log graphs) to get the hang of it, but once you're use to the idea that a straight rising line is exponential, it's easy to see what you say is the most important feature: rapid currency devaluation after 1945.

In fact, because it's a log graph, you can tell that it's rising faster than base 10 exponential, because it's still a curve and not a straight line.

In addition, because it's a log graph, the large values on the right doesn't dwarf the smaller values on the left. Now, you can see details of what the price change was like locally in time across the board.

I'd say there's some useful information there in a log graph.

Now if you were saying that log graphs would be dubious to use for the general public, then maybe you'd have something there.
Latency in mobile - more needs to be done
This is sensationalism.

What this graph measures is the move away from asset-backed currency and towards a finance-based central bank. That creates inflation, which is true. It also decouples growth from gold mine output, which is more important.

Try graphing GDP per capita across the same range, and note that there's an equivalent jump in the derivative at the same time.

Basically, this is a feature, not a bug. Macroeconomics can be terribly dangerous in the wrong hands.
And thus was created Java, which deliberately breaks your wrists the first time you use it, just in case you were planning to write bad code.
OpenInternet.gov
An inside look at Microsoft's massive Chicago data center
Well, I upvoted your comment, because it was useless but informative as advertised. ;)
Why I Didn't Renew My Subscription
Amazon expands frustration-free packaging
While a valid argument, I wonder if it was at all necessary to even enter into the discussion.
Concur.next — Java
I'm sorry, you're right. $20k is not a lot of money, but I did overlook the fact that most of the ideas are just that—ideas, versus an actual built business which seems to be in the minority. (Hey, at least it's better than Shark Tank.)

I stand corrected, though it wasn't the main point.
Less omega-3 in diets responsible for obesity, heart disease and cancer?
Strange. This must be a difference in perspective based on unique characteristics of carriers in the United States. As an American, SMS and MMS are ubiquitous, but they represent a brutal cost structure that makes me not want to use them at all.

As for WAP, I've seen a lot of phones equipped with it that go unused based not just on the same reason (the cost structure of internet access on those phones) but also on usability: it wasn't until Mobile Safari and my iPhone's flat rate that I even wanted to attempt mobile internet access on a regular basis.
Ask HN: Who is using wave?
Looking for other people with wave accounts. I have one, but nobody I know does.

Add me as a contact: jon . gilkison at gmail . com

Not a lot to do by lonesome :(
Big leather sofa. Reclining. Plenty Cushions.
Isn't the proper term "throughput"?
Can't seem to see this at work. Saving to see later at home.
It's 'Unfortunate That the American Dream Has Been Demonized'
Nissan to Take LEAF Electric Car Reservations in the U.S. in Spring 2010
This guy should not have been working for a startup. That's the main lesson. For people that like them, they're really good.