skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Although a nice idea, it suffers from the fact that it would be very difficult to get that many people on the same page. Smaller groups are able to come to decisions much more quickly and will be able to move faster.

The lobbiest advantage is that they can afford to raise money quickly and be able to focus it on specific issues.

Although every citizen can together raise a ton of money, once that money is raised it will be very difficult allocating it.

Imagine if people had to come together in order to raise money for museums rather than relying on large individual contributions. It's likely that many fewer museums would exist.

For a deeper look at this I recommend reading the book by Mancur Olson - The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities. It takes a look at special interest groups and their effects on economic growth.

http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation-Rigid...
I can't see anything but publicity. They want to matter, and didn't really sell as many as they wanted. The funny thing is that quite a few people on this board could write the proper sync. No one really needs an agreement with Apple, all the information is out their.
I don't think that this was a replication issue based on this comment :

>Booting a new instance, re-creating the volume from a >recent snapshot, doesn't help. The exact same problem >persists. Why? We don't know. Amazon's figuring it out.

If you can recreate the volume from a snapshot and hit it with fresh instances and run into the same problem, this is quite worrying. If it had resolved after a restore from backup, I would have felt better about EBS. As I see it there are only these options :

1) There is a general, systemic failure in EBS. You ran into it and highlighted it to AWS and they are fixing some problem. If other people are not having the same problem as you, I would be more inclined to think of #2.

2) Some usage pattern violates an assumption that was made when EBS was designed and screws it. Restoring from the backup reproduces the usage pattern. This could be simultaneous connections or # of distinct files in the volume, for example. One way to test this would be to split the data in the drive into a larger number of smaller EBS-es (EBSii? whatever the plural(: ) or throttle the simultaneous connections and see what happens.

did I miss anything?
Remember that there are good lobbyists too. I know an industry that was nearly accidentally legislated out of business. They spent most of 6 figures on a lobbyist to find the right people, and give them the right sentence to be added to the bill. Industry saved.

If you want to stop the "bad" lobbyists, you need to develop a more accurate description for what it is you are fighting.
GTD is life changing. 1+ for that.
If only there wasn't a history of popular things being fads (or of fads being popular) for those who decry to base the decrying position on.
"You can't prove any negative."

You found your lawyer hat! But you couldn't believe what it was saying. Remember, lawyer shoes are not your shoes. There's a reason they are detested so. But it's worth it to learn where they are coming from.
May he rest in peace. For the ones he left, my most sincere condolences.
More like this:

♂♂♂♂♂ ♂♂♂♂♂

♂♂♂♂♂ ♂♂♂♂♂

♂♂♂♂♂ ♂♂♂♂♂

♂♂♂♂♂ ♂♂♂♂♂

♂♂♂♂♂ ♂♂♂♂♂

♂♂♂♂♂ ♂♂♂♂♂

♂♂ ♀♀♀♀ ⚥

Male 92.5 %
Female 6 %
Other 1.5 %

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=749617
Software Patents: A Personal Story
Following your logic, if you're in the business of selling pencil sharpeners, relying on the existence of one or more third parties selling pencils, who in turn rely on a market of people who want to use pencils, is also not a 'real' business, because who knows, the third parties may decide to start selling a self-sharpening pencil and stop offering the regular ones, effectively cutting you off.

Now, the above mentions one or more third parties. Having redundant providers significantly reduces the risk of being cut off like that, but while having a known single point of failure may seem stupid, it's not as if only businesses that don't have any are real.

Whether or not something constitutes a 'real' business does not hinge on that business' dependencies or any other risk factors. Whether you'd want to be a stakeholder in it is an entirely different matter.

How many of us in the software world would actually have a real business within this definition of dependencies if you consider how quickly we'd all go in the red if google somehow ends up blacklisting us? With a somewhat grown-up business, you don't need 100% of your sales to evaporate to be in serious trouble..
The number one most useful piece of advice to dealing with email has been to respond quickly.

So I read a lot of things on GTD but didn't end up adopting most of them. What I did adopt was their rule that if you can respond to or deal with something in less than X minutes (2? 3? forget the number) then do it immediately.

This made things so much more manageable and has kept my inbox size down tremendously. Before I found that it had filled up with lots of emails that I knew I should respond to or had to do something to follow up on, but just hadn't yet.
Very sorry to hear this - my condolences
Facebook Prototype Measures Gross National Happiness
The kind of person that is involved in a startup is typically smart enough to be able to hide the symptoms of depression. These are people who are used to achieving great things and so hiding vulnerabilities is something they get very good at.

My thoughts and condolences go out to you and the people affected by this tragedy.
No problem. The site definitely has potential. It might be a good idea to add some kind of chronological aspect of the goal system into it too. By that I mean to have the goals sorted by chronology in addition to rank. Most goals have a linear progression that if the suggested goals are ranked in a manner that is consistent with the natural progression of attaining the goal it will help in make the system more usable. If you wanted to implement this system you could take a look at how people order the subgoals when the goals are added to the main goal. You could also keep stats on what goals are added in addition to the goal that someone just added and do a netflix style "We noticed that you added 'get married' as a subgoal to your main goal of 'live a full life' might we suggest 'find a date' as a correlated goal?" or something along those lines. Good luck on it and I look forward to seeing your progress.
http://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov/ColorTool_appletMac.html
If you get enough people involved, you'll have a force that not only has the money but the power to vote politicians out of office. Then you can work to persuade politicians to enact laws that will make it harder for corporate lobbyists to influence legislation.
You really think this is good publicity?

I don't think it is.

I think it makes them look like Apple's product offering is so powerful that the only way to compete is for Palm to hack their way into it.

I also think it conveys the message that at any given time a key feature of the platform could stop working.
if the population knew which congressperson deserves their $3, they would know which congressperson deserves their vote
Maybe its just me, but there seems to be a stigma regarding the act of seeking counseling. However, people should seek counseling just as often as they would a general practitioner as the mind needs just as much care to stay healthy as does the body. In any case, it's immensely gratifying to have someone who you know will not feel burdened by your issues and can offer you guidance through a very troublesome period of life.
The points you're making here have nothing to do with my argument.
Thought about that - but hard because when you're suddenly growing, all emails seem high-level :)
I'm not sure I see how this is "hardball" for Apple.

The risk for Apple is that someone else's product will work as advertised.

The risk for Palm is that at any given time, Apple can choose to turn off their product.

Palm isn't playing from a position of strength here. Every time this cat and mouse game cycles, more people hear that Palm's sync is unreliable. Palm never impacts Apple's product.
And what's the message they're hoping to communicate? "Look, everyone, Apple's locked up the media distribution market"? Because that message gains sales for Apple in the real world.
OTOH, since Github has some of my money, they have a bit more of an obligation (and incentive) to keep their servers up. Free services come and go as the owner pleases. (Hello, ma.gnol.ia.)
The people don't have to be on the same page for every issue -- some will have opposing views -- but even with opposing views, at least it's the voice of the electorate and not corporations. Contributions are made on a per-issue basis so they are self allocating.
Slicehost is not really a "cloud provider". You buy a VPS and use it "forever".
Neural networks have been untrendy since the late 90s. This has decreased research since then. The general opinion of practical people now is that nnets with a single hidden layer are one of the major workhorses in the classification/regression toolbox. Neural nets with many hidden layers (needed to really advance the state of the art) are still a work in progress. There has been a lot of work on "deep" networks, usually focusing on unsupervised training, and then either sticking an support vector machine on the end, or finally training a single supervised layer. Practical people don't really use that stuff yet.
There's a development impact...Apple has to find a way to close them off. Then Palm writes a new workaround, and Apple has to expend more effort again.

The underlying statement to Apple is: if you don't want Palm to do this, you have to open up the dialogue...
In the same way that I wouldn't ask an artist to design a software library, I don't expect myself to choose colors, layout, or design correctly. When shown choices from designers, I can tell which ones I like, and which ones work, and so on, but hacking graphic aesthetics is something that takes years to get good at, as any kind of hacking.

I would recommend that you hire a designer, or make friends with some designers who can help you with this.
Even Google is down from time to time.

Basically, Bitbucket is having some downtime because of Amazon. But if it wasn't Amazon, it could be something else -- failing hardware, earthquakes, disgruntled datacenter employees, whatever. At least the Bitbucket folks can theoretically sit back and relax while Someone Else fixes this (rare) hardware problem.
The $3 could be divided among all congresspersons whom vote in favor of their issues, and it could be pre-allocated for potential supporters so politicians know how much money is available if they support it.
Investors already know this. Venture capital will always call for the creation of an option pool, and the option pool is always dilutive to the pre-money (founders) rather than the post money. That is, if they are creating an option pool that's going to be 10% of the fully-diluted capital stock, and they buy 30% of the company (on a fully-diluted basis), they will get 30% and founders will get 60%. That's just the way things work.
Bayesian methods for adaptive models (1992)
It's a pain for all of us who knew him through HN and TS, and it's a greater pain for those who worked and mingled with him daily. You will be missed, Dan.
Igor's Guide to find the perfect name for your product
Lobbyists advocating corporate interests that run contrary to the common good.
He can if he wants to; but he should also provide evidence stronger than "try Google". Otherwise he comes across as an irrational and unstable troll.
I'm not going to go back and forth with you. If that's true, it's self-evident.
Cheat sheets for front end web developers
> Now, the above mentions one or more third parties.

Exactly.

> Whether or not something constitutes a 'real' business does not hinge on that business' dependencies or any other risk factors.

If a business is created with the explicit goal of being in the position of building right on top of another business for which there is no alternative, then I doubt the right of that business to call itself an independent business.

Sure, no business is without risk, there are always factors that increase or decrease the risk. You should always be trying to minimize those risks, and if there is one thing that is a huge red flag for investors or buyers then it would be a dependency like that.

The 'What if you get cut off' question is absolutely unanswerable. If you manage to get it to the point of a contract with termination clauses and such then that's a different story, but until then, to just build your enterprise on top of an API and hope for the best is not a good long term strategy.

Your point about google is well taken, I'm happy to report that my business depends for less than 2% of it's traffic and income on google, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Of course there are numerous examples of companies that did great building for instance software on top of the microsoft platform, but worst case there would have been other operating systems that they could have ported their software to in case microsoft would go under.

If a company like twitter or facebook would go under or decide they no longer want you or that you become too much of a threat you're done.

Instantly.

And you don't even have any recourse, simply because you never had a contractual right to be there in the first place, after all you use an API at the providers discretion, and nowhere in their terms of service does it say that you have a right to access, no matter how popular or profitable you are.

That's not the same as being in a business relationship, even about something as mundane as buying and selling pencils.

The self sharpening pencil, by the way, has been done:

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

And, more in jest:

http://www.pencilthings.com/product.php?productid=100664?utm...

But they didn't put any pencil sharpener producers out of business, though I suspect the typewriter and the word processor may have caused a few of them to find different sources of income.
There is more than one way to do it in any language.
who gets to define "common good"?

(and who can lobby that committee?)
- A mobile app that tells the user what is the best plan based on his calls profile and current network, etc
- a Google-calendar like app where advertising is time-based, like events, sports, TV shows, etc
Ask HN: what mobile apps need faster cpu/gpu?
I've recently been exploring the world of mobile devices (from phones to netbooks to laptops or even entertainment systems in cars) from the point of view of what processor/gpu guys can do for the software guys.

Lets assume we could give you an immensely faster processor/graphics combination. What types of apps are you itching to build but can't because the platforms don't have enough horsepower? I'm assuming an integrated processor and graphices device with the latter usable for compute as well (think OpenCL/Cuda/DirectCompute etc).

Thanks in advance for the inspiration to build your future platforms :-)
I'd been going through his comments here...

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fallentimes

It's actually a great read. I didn't know him personally but as someone who knew him well enough to recognize his user name I'm saddened by this. The last thing the world needs is fewer smart people who honestly speak their minds.
The colors you choose shouldn't matter on what others choose. The colors you choose should convey your brand. Doing something different with your color scheme may even be a benefit in regards to being the purple cow.
That's cool [!] but should they be calling it Gross National Happiness? If you think so, have a look at this:
http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2008/10/12/polls-and-the-dewe...

Btw, according to Helen Birtwhistle [http://clive-shepherd.blogspot.com/2007/09/are-facebook-frie...] (press officer for the Institute of Ideas):

- the average Facebook user has 150 friends
- the average American has two close friends
- 25% of Americans have no close friends

So the Q is: How representative are active Facebook users of Americans in general?
Did you add the 5px row of black in remembrance of Dan?
There is probably an opportunity here for a realtime "pagerank" for the various streams people use. If you think about it its a similar problem to the one google solved and look where that got them.
The reason the military guys got this so fast was that they already
knew what he was talking about.

the idea he is really talking about is John Boyd's OODA cycle[1].
It's a conceptual idea for decision making - a fast iterative feedback
and decision cycle.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

EDIT: Oh. I just got to the part where he simply says "This is based on the OODA loop by a fighter pilot named John Boyd..."

This is an /excellent/ book on the subject.
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Strategy-War-Strategic-History...
Putting more money into the system seems like a perverse idea, but in Washington money buys access and influence. Corporate lobbyists will continue to do so regardless so we must counter that in some way. Politicians need resources to get elected and remain in office so they are naturally attracted to whomever can meet those needs.

It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs -- you need enough resources to feel safe in your position before you can function effectively. Right now corporate lobbyists are providing those resources to politicians, and if politicians don't play ball, the lobbyists will take the resources away and give them to the politician's challengers.

Politicians can rationalize it away with expressions like "you can't govern if you're not in office." This is a bad position to be in for the American people. It's hard for us to win in a game like this unless politicians have a better option for raising money to get elected. However, if the people are able to overpower corporate lobbyists, then maybe we can persuade politicians to enact laws that reduce corporate lobbyists' ability to influence Congress.

Also, the ability for the community and system to debunk propaganda is key because you're absolutely right, it could amplify corporate positions if people keep buying into it.

Propaganda works in part because we're so busy that we don't have time to verify all the claims. With the help of the community, the system would make it easy for people to get true information on the issues they care about.

Most propaganda I've seen can be easily debunked with hard evidence (links to the actual bills, etc) -- you just have to take the time to look into it. When you reveal the secret to a magician's trick, it loses its effect, and that's why putting lobbyist's methods front and center could go a long way to reducing the effects.
we've been here before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690656

I had to look for a long time to see why the dupe detector didn't pick that up, 'adam.blog' vs 'adamblog'.
But you did authoritatively claim that nearly all of Visual Studio is managed. The conservatism of Visual C++ alone makes me doubt that.
So sorry to hear this tragedy. My condolences go out to all those involved. Another reminder of how fragile life is and how important it is for us to live our lives to the fullest in memory of those we have lost. We also need to help and show our sincere love and support for all those suffering from depression, anxiety, or anything for that matter. My hope is that Dan's time on earth spreads contagious loving memories which inspire all of us to live our lives with love, modesty, and empathy.
I put it on our todo list. should be pretty easy to implement at this point.

Thanks!
Good to link to the prior discussion, but that item is no longer open for discussion, so it's not inappropriate to re-post if an interesting discussion is to continue.

feature request: dupe only detected when discussion is still open.
Tom, Dan seems like just an impossibly awesome guy.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392341
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=338357

I'm so sorry for the loss. Dan, I hope it was an adventure. Peace be with you.
I also refuse to use wireless keyboards and mice. Have had far more aggravation from them than convenience.
The Pareto principle is an observation. It does not declare that all distributions are Pareto distributions. The application of the observation to optimization is not itself the Pareto principle.
Wow... I've just spent the last ten minutes re-reading every email I ever exchanged with him. I can't believe this happened.

He was a fantastic guy and my heart truly goes out to everyone else that'll be missing him.
Sometimes I semi-arbitrarily pick two colors that feel right with each other (on a white background), and start there.

I makes adjustments over time, the more I look at something while I work on it.

Often I poke around with assorted tools to see what pops up.

http://delicious.com/jamesbritt/colorpicker
The American people. The people submit issues that are important to them and others vote up and allocate micropayments to issues they support. The amount of support behind each issue would indicate the level of common good. Then politicians have the option of supporting those issues or not.
I created another personal account to follow just those people who offer solid signal/noise.

That's the one I look at most often, while @jamesbritt gets looked at mostly when I'm bored or otherwise not busy.

There's some serendipity in the noise, but mostly it's noise.
I wrote sloppily. I meant the GUI when I referred to Visual Studio, and not all the compilers, linkers, utilities, etc. I apologize.
Google is not party to the contract, so they have nothing to fear. You can not be sued over a violation of a contract that you are not a party to, that's just plain silly.

In fact, any number of google employees could have singed any number of NDAs with other companies without ever having disclosed those to google or being required to do so.

And google could never be sued for violating those contracts, tortious interference would be limited to those cases where google would force the employee to breach their NDAs, naturally limited to any confidential information that that employee might have (my guess: not much).

As long as that's not the case I really don't see why simply letting this guy have his 'status' could ever be a problem.

If microsoft wants to sue google I'm pretty sure it won't be over something as petty as that, and if they do it'll be a minor blip on googles legal bill and a bit of bad PR for microsoft.

Now it's significant bad PR for google, they come across as petty and paranoid.
Classified ads
high end ads
Amen. All good advice.

One of the truly insidious things about depression is that the sufferer often knows that it's just brain chemistry, that it's just "all in their head". That doesn't help.

Depression is not a sign of personal weakness, misguided thinking, or flawed character. It's a medical condition, like diabetes or glaucoma. There shouldn't be any moral judgement attached.

There's still a hell of a lot that we don't know about depression. However, there are treatments that help. If you suffer from depression, one of the best things you can do is to find a psychiatrist (an honest-to-god M.D.) that you can trust and work with.

And if you know someone that suffers from depression, bprater is absolutely correct. 100%. Offering someone that kind of support may be more important than you know.
Really sad. Dan was a smart and funny guy. He had a great way of looking at life and very confident.

The world will definitely be a poorer place without him.