skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the mentors at the Founder Institute had a really good advice for running meetings (board meetings or any management meeting or staff meeting). I can't find a link to it right now, but it goes like this:

- asynchronously (wiki or other technology), update everyone before the meeting

- synchronously (meaning face-to-face, the actual meeting), you are not allowed to say something that you didn't write down on the wiki, unless it's a question.

Consequence: the catching up of information is done asynchronously before the meeting, not wasting anyone's time, freeing up the meeting for actual brainstorming and problem-resolution.
$96 sends "The overcharge on transaction 677348921 has been refunded to purchaser 2475244. If you have any futher questions please dial our busy call center at our convenience. <beep>."

$100 sends "Hi, we overcharged you how much? Nintety six dollars? Here, call it a hundred, keep the change. We weren't trying to skim six months interest on $96 from you maliciously and we're human and take a personal interest in your problem caused by our company and by us, we're not faceless and mechanical, we have kept your money but we've paid it back and more, have the small benefit of $4 and please consider giving us the benefit of the doubt and dealing with us again in future".
I once spent around ten weeks writing a C program to numerically integrate the Schrödinger equation for an electron in a particular magnetic field. When I started looking at results, they looked eerily like trig functions. A little digging revealed that the problem was stated and solved (exactly) in one of the exercises to Quantum Mechanics by Landau and Lifshitz.

I sheepishly told my advisor at the time what had happened, worried he would think me an idiot, but he was thrilled: "You solved the problem! That's what's important."
Base64 will inflate a list of bytes by 33%. For every three bytes that go in, 4 bytes are returned. Wikipedia has a very good explanation of why this is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64

While we're on the subject, Ascii85 is kind of a cool alternative. By increasing the number of characters used for the encoded string and breaking a 32 bit integer apart in an interesting way, it is able to reduce the expansion down to 25%. For every 4 characters in, 5 come out. Again, more info is available on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii85
User management, SCM visualization, and forking is all easier compared to gitosis + gitweb et al....which we live without, but would be nice to have.

Our real aim is to eliminate all in-house hardware. Sysadmin is definitely not our core competency, as they say.
it's hard to get a team together if you don't share your ideas. what's more likely, that another rock solid team takes your idea and implements without you, or that someone else with a similar idea decides to join forces?

i don't know the answer to that, but i live as though it's the latter. we each of us set the example for everyone else and fulfill our own prophesies.
The Holy Grail to Investing.

The ultimate business solution. The ability to cut the cost of any business expense, or just plain invest.

Developed multiple arbitrages for the financial markets. Arbitrages that produce just a few percent a year, to arbitrages that produce over 30 percent a year.

In 2001 i started developing, as of now, a dozen arbitrages. I lock in an X percentage, and Y time later, i close out the arbitrage. Over 30%/yr.

Risk-Free Investing is not only possible, but in abundance. Just that people are told and taught that it is impossible. No risk has been in front of all, but not seen.

The market is unlimited.

Partnership?

Thomas Adair
352-283-3326
HolyGrailToInvesting@hotmail.com
If I recall correctly, pg made an addition that if a submission has over X points, it won't be auto-killed by flagging.
Right -- they have a line out the door because that's how their artisanal revenue model works -- producing their specialty in great quantity.

The many Krispy Kreme franchises in In-N-Out's territory had those kinds of lines out the door once too, but went bust when the lines got short.

Kogi BBQ is the epitome of this model -- they have unfathomably long lines and few locations, but spread their resources around by being mobile.
That doesn't really make sense. The only reason Britains involvement in Iraq was possible is because there were a bunch of servicemen ready to go out and murder for the man.

What exactly are you thanking the serviceman for if not for carrying out acts you oppose? And how are we ever going to stop politicians from starting some pretty horrendous wars if we can only thank the armies who's job is to carry out their orders, no matter how awful.
Further Inspiration and Submission Sites for Creatives
If they're drawing Carbon with respect to its orbitals then they are completely wrong.

Carbon has both S and P orbitals whereas water has hybridized orbitals. This would mean both their carbon and water are drawn incorrectly.
In all seriousness, see if I can find a use for Wolfram|Alpha.
'Flatspace' – A 2D Space Trading RPG (Review) | Touch Arcade
Is overconsumption genetic?
Since it sounds like the problem is comments rather than posts, and posts are commonly flagged and killed, why not encourage users to flag comments that are inconsistent with the character of the site?

I only realized a couple of days ago that one can flag comments by following the comment's permalink -- why not make this more obvious and promote its wider use as an experiment?
Went looking on elance for some help on a project.

2 years later we're founding a company together.
Rock Music Quality vs. US Oil Production
Hoss Gifford: Get More Of What You Want. Negotiation and BATNA
I think it certainly is. That's probably why there are startup hubs. My argument was more that connectedness to other entrepreneurs probably isn't one of the three most defining characters of succesful entrepreneurs.
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/21/arts/tv-reviews-top-gun-an...
Building new life forms at the iGEM Jamboree
An even worse variant happened to me at Defcon. They put me in the wrong room. I was giving the talk that became "Inequality and Risk" and I noticed people kept getting up and leaving. After about 10 minutes, I stopped and asked what was going on, and someone said "Isn't this the talk on lockpicking?"
So the model for people within organizations is that Success = Ability * Motivation * Opportunity.

For entrepreneurs, I would argue that Success = Ability * Motivation * Opportunity * 'Normal'

What do I mean?

'Normal' is the most powerful human emotion. We just don't notice it because it's usually invisible. Let me give you an example. I only like being in romantic relationships where both people have equal power. If I have more power than the other person then it's cognitively draining because I always have to plan everything and make sure I'm not accidentally taking advantage of the other person or something, whereas if I have less power then I hate being dicked around. The reason I have this preference is probably because that's how my parents are, so that's what feels 'normal' to me. Any deviation from this and it's extremely uncomfortable, so the relationship quickly falls apart. For people who come from families with an abusive parent, they often prefer relationships where one person has vastly more power than the other, because that's what 'normal' is to them.

What feels normal to someone is an extremely important predictor of success, because any time we deviate from normal in any area of life we get very uncomfortable very quickly.

Examples of situations where there's a 'normal': balance of power in any relationship (business, mentoring, romantic), how you spend your day, how many people are in your network, your body language, how many books you read, etc.

To be an entrepreneur your level of 'normal' has to be just right for dozens of different variables, but most people come from families and backgrounds where their needle is just in the wrong place in at least some areas. And the problem is that it's extremely difficult to move someone's needle. Even for someone who comes from a great background, it can still take going through a program like YC or even one much more intensive in order to get a person's needles set in the positions they need to be in to achieve greatness. And for someone from a less good background, it can take literally years.

So the thing is, you can be really great at school just by memorizing stuff in books. But to get to that next level there is usually at some additional inner work that needs to be done, which most people don't even realize. Just look at how Steve Jobs spent his youth. That's kind of an extreme example, but after talking with a lot of entrepreneurs I've noticed this general pattern running across a lot of the success stories.
The politicians only exist because of the troops. The republican party isn't going to launch an attack against you themselves just because you didn't follow the rules.
Lots of people have pointed this out. I was aware of this when I wrote it, however the entire point of the site is to stress basic grammar to the kind of people who would never use either in its alternative context. Most commonly (i.e., almost always) effect is a noun and affect is a verb. I'm certainly taking this under advisement, but I'll probably just add a clarification along the lines of "Effect is almost always a noun; affect is almost always a verb."
I have seen how much time Facebook eats, so between Reddit and hacker news I don't have more to waste.

Granted I could properly just ignore it most days, but then people would be annoyed that I haven't friended them yet, send me messages that I would have to respond to, etc.

As for the "login using facebook", you can do the same with openid (heck facebook is an openid provider) - but without pissing of the part of your users that don't have an account or don't want to let you know it.
I think story submission is a really important way to add to the HN community. New users who can contribute what the community thinks are interesting articles are valuable users. Plus, if new users cannot vote until receiving a certain karma threshold, stories would only be upvoted by users with some familiarity with HN culture.
> Every phone manufacturer except Apple and Palm has this "problem".

Even Apple faced a version of this problem back when they only made Macs. For a few years, just before Jobs' return, the marketing for Mac models was atrocious. Dozens of Power Macs and Performas, and 3 different lines of laptops, each with a weird 3-4 digit number to denote one model from another. One of Jobs' first "fixes" was paring down Apple's product line down to the four square product matrix that's been a staple of his keynotes since then.
How NPR's new website stores html markup separated from content in the database.
This has happened to me, and I did something similar. Since then I've learned - always check the program for your name, title and abstract. Doing so is part of a professional approach, not doing so is understandable, but leaves you open to this kind of problem.

It happens more often than you might think. Sometimes the program is right, and then a last minute change leaves everyone confused.

Usually a good speaker is worth listening to regardless, but it does look bad. The comment is right - listen to your audience, work with them to find a suitable compromise, promise what's necessary, do what you can.
Well, my upgrade went fine too. But the amount of auto-removable packages was astounding afterwards. Most of them were libsomething.deb :) Which means that for whatever reason the original libraries (or packages) were no longer good enough. Now, how many dependencies need to be checked (and/or get broken subtly) any time a library is rolled into a new package? What about when a library is re-written?

I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason for these changes. But they do make life a pain for us users. And the stuff that keeps breaking/changing is the interfaces and packaging. Which means configs have to be tweaked with every major upgrade.

All my recent troubles have been caused by the switch to HAL. First it was X.org (broke my keyboard layout). Now it's Bluetooth. I like the modular design of HAL, but I just can't help but think it's just going to be ripped out and replaced again in a year or two because someone decides they hate XML, or something like that :)
This was mostly posted in hopes of feedback. Posting at 5 was probably a dumb move.
I empathize with the guy who created the Go! language, wrote a book and now has his work marginalized because Google just plopped down and took the name apparently, ironically, without Googling it first.

There's a "we're google, we can name it whatever the hell we want" attitude at the core of this that just bugs the heck out of me
It's not completely accurate to say source code is useless. While I agree that it's not particularly useful to steal code with the aim of replicating functionality, security is another thing. All it takes is a few lines of rogue code slipped into your repo to, say, log everyone's personal info and send it to Estonia. (no offense to any Estonians on the board)
Then come up with simple rules (no more than 8 words total) for when to use one or the other.

English has the most moddy grammar of all languages, with so many exceptions and shit - this is one of the things I hope disappear as the world embraces English.
This sounds like an accurate assessment from someone who doesn't own the code. You get paid to write the code, so it means nothing to you if a competitor steals the code and starts a similar business. Or what if a competitor steals the code and can more easily implement some of your features or find flaws in the product an exploit them.

As an owner of code, I would never put the code in the cloud. I don't even put binaries in the cloud without obfuscating them. Every little bit helps.

And I also disagree that the code is worthless. Imagine the value of your company if all the code suddenly disappears! Not only do you have to rewrite everything from scratch, but you can't support your existing customers while you are doing it.

Final point, doing what is easy for everyone else is exactly the kind of thing that limits your competitive advantage. If all your competitors are using Github and github loses all their data, you win!
The obvious trick of course is to cook your own (healthy) meal and package it with one of those.

Did that for boxes of Cheerios when we were out of the "approved" brand and it worked wonders.
No. I obfuscate it all before I upload it. Call me paranoid. Not only is it a risk to have the code compromised, but if sufficient steps aren't taken to control access to trade secrets, then they can't be called trade secrets. IP has value.
I have 8 siblings, and several years ago, I took it upon myself to organize the our gift exchange. Every since then, it's been my responsibility to come up with the list of who buys for who.

At first I just randomly generated the list of buyers and recipients using a python script, but last year I got creative and made a puzzle website for my siblings to solve:

http://markpneyer.com/christmas08/

I had fun working on it, and [some of them] had fun solving the puzzle, so I'm doing it again this year. Oh, the possibilities.
My mom brought her home from the hospital when I was 3.
As if the cost of carrying out the wrong call isn't too high either?

The worst case isn't that soldiers' time is squandered or that they risk their lives over nothing worthy, it's that they kill and destroy needlessly, but I guess we don't really tend to come to terms with that fact as well as the people we're fighting.
It was a flip phone and the buttons were on the side. no way to lock them. I checked the manual and that combination was the way to activate voice mode...

Before I got my iPhone, I considered Nokias to be the best. In Europe the situation is different. You guys get way better phones than we do. I lived in France for a while and when I came back to the US, all the phones I could buy here looked 5 years old.

Our contracts aren't tied to a specific phone (except for the iPhone), so if you lose your phone you can replace it with just about anything that would work with that carrier. I have a friend who loses his phone every few months and he usually buys a cheap replacement on eBay.
I tried Chipotle once: I'd rather eat a piece of rug.

But maybe if they get everyone to try it _once_ as I did, that will define success?
Owner of recently failed bar talks openly about why the buisiness failed
Yes; github is a great service and I have now been using it personally & professionally for quite a long time (june 2008) and never had any security issues.

There are the occasional downtimes, but as its dvcs thats not really a problem, just push using ssh to your sites instead (wait 5 minutes, make a cup of tea, etc)

Like other posters in the thread I agree the real value is the people writing the code, not the code itself.

I would say if you're that paranoid about code leaks setup a gitorious server (http://gitorious.org/gitorious) on your network and save the monthly fee (and the worry).

You will, however, miss out on the other useful things github has to offer. Every repo now gets its own wiki & issue tracker, so no need for trac.

My current favourite feature is gh-pages (http://pages.github.com). You can make a named branch on your repo and it will be hosted as a website. If you have an API that can be your public documentation branch; you can also use it for simple sites (my blog is a github page). All pages are hosted free of charge on their shiny new rackspace servers. These days they also support cnames mapping.

Edited for typos...
Startup conference event. But we met 2-3 times in different conferences, recognized each other every time, updated our progress about what we did from last conference, and eventually decided to meet for coffee.

After 3-4 coffee meetings, we decided to join the hands.

And I'm very happy with the results. Its been 2-3 weeks only we started working together, but I already started seeing huge benefits.
I doubt we will ever have lolz cats on here. They would be flagged immediately.
Video / audio is at http://www.defcon.org/html/links/dc-archives/dc-13-archive.h... for those interested. Jump to 3:40 [video] if impatient.
I don't know, that sounds like a Monarchy to me.

If you wanted to go that way why not make a user's 'voting power' be based on their own karma / time on the site. This rewards users who have been around longer and have been 'peer reviewed' through their karma.
I've often wondered about this...I know several parents of small children, and all of them have trouble getting their kids to eat. After a while, the parents get tired of the fight and they let the kid eat what they want--often pasta or such--instead of what the parent wants to serve them.

When I was a kid, this just wasn't an issue. Food went on my plate, and I ate it. Sure, I would whine a bit about eating broccoli or whatever, but I never won any of those debates. So, I wonder:

1) Am I having selective memory?

2) Did I have an unusually tough set of parents / was I an unusually compliant child?

3) Has the level of marketing that kids are exposed to gone up so much in the last few decades?

4) Something else?

What do the rest of you think? Do you remember setting the rules with your parents about what you would eat?
At some point we know that we’ll have to get an office space. You usually reach that point when you need to hire outside your personal network or grow beyond a certain size, the exact size depending on your situation. When it’s time to move it out of your house or the coffee shop, you will know. It’s time to move out only when the the answer to the question “Is getting an office space going to help grow my business?” is a firm, “Yes.”

To me, that reads as an assumption that, at some point, you'll have to get an office. But what I want to know is: can you build a virtual Fortune 500 company?
how about "remote desktop software" that became popular after the attacks from trojans like back orifice?
I was once at a Microsoft conference when a speaker didn't show. We waited 15 minutes when finally a sweaty, scruffy dude comes running into the room panting all apologetic-like. Apparently he had been in his boxers relaxing in his hotel room about a mile away and 15 minutes prior when he got a call from the organizers. His presentation wasn't in 2 hours like he'd expected. It was right then and there. I felt really bad for him.
In university. We worked together on paired work and group work, and I rented a room in his house.
That wouldn't necessarily work because the next person below PG would be likely to be more willing to upvote someone who wasn't as focused. They in turn would be willing to upvote someone else who was worse and so on.

I think it makes more sense for voting power to be associated with karma level.
Periodic hit on it when they said "the service men and women will be there fighting regardless of whether it was right or wrong because the cost of missing the right call is too high."

I believe those who hold that logic, myself included, have different expectations of the responsibilities of the soldier and the henchman. The soldier is in a strict hierarchical organization that demands its members follow orders for the organization to continue operating. Members lower in the organization are expected to begin working before they understand why, so they aren't held responsible for everything they do. The henchman may also be a part of an organization like that, but he is just another citizen, working for his organization and own betterment, and is expected to be responsible for his actions. Also, he can hardly say that his organization is working on behalf of his entire nation, as the soldier can.

edit: I should add, that this perspective does eventually reach a breaking point as time passes servicemen begin to see what the goals of their leaders are, and if they disagree with them then they may be obligated, morally or otherwise, to excuse themselves or switch sides.

Looking back at your comment I see that you're speaking of henchman and mob bosses only, but as a proxy for state leaders and the military. But my point is that people don't see them the same.
i think chipotle is delicious. it is the mcdonald's of mexicali
Chicago actually has a very large Mexican population.

"The 2000 census counted more than 530,000 Mexicans in the city of Chicago, with more than 1.1 million in the metropolitan area."

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/824.html

There are hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurants everywhere in Chicago.
I met mine via a previous job. We worked well together and decided to go create our own startup.
That sounds more complicated that Google's page ranking system. That said, it sounds like fun to program.
In-N-Out is older than most of the HNers
I know it comes up in every thread, but your name is really, really terrible.
The startups that are still alive are the ones who remained in touch.

Causation runs both ways on this one. It's a lot more fun to hang out with other entrepreneurs when your own startup is kicking ass---and a lot less fun when it's dying. When your startup is struggling, hearing other entrepreneurs talk about how great things are going is like being in a dead-end marriage and hearing other couples talk about how madly in love they are.
> There's a "we're google, we can name it whatever the hell we want" attitude at the core of this that just bugs the heck out of me

Did you infer this from a comment that Google made? I think it is unwise to make assumptions about the intentions of people. Remember that this was a 20% project, and the person who started it may have called it "Go" with the intent that it was an internal company project only. Although I completely agree that people should do due diligence before naming things, I can also see a possibility that this was an honest mistake by Google. In the absence of knowing what really happened, I think it's wise not to assume malice.