skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Or you can use the nice pretty point-and-click way via Update Manager. I did that last night. Worked fine.
Actually in the video, one of the teams did something similar. They went to a highly trafficked area on campus and offered to test bike tire pressures for free, then fill the tire up for a dollar if necessary.

They had a great response from this, but soon learned that they could make even more money by asking for a "donation", instead of a dollar.
Where do ghosts come from?
Hope we get a good Nobody Revolution going on..Year of the Nobody?

Ipod download of the video: http://bit.ly/2DNgC3

More video clips slowly getting up here:
http://www.youtube.com/alexalee

@alexalee
Python for Astronomers
So many texts on complex analysis simply define e^{i \theta} = \cos \theta + i \sin \theta without ever explaining how. This provides a good introduction to the reason behind with only minimal recourse to Calculus.

Another good description is discussed in "Visual complex Analysis" by Needham.
Great link. It is really important for startups to establish solid visual identities.
Given two companies, one with above average turnover and one with below average turnover, What can we say? I think we can say very little without more investigation. The high turnover place may be terrible. On the other hand, it may be unafraid to hire really great people. It may try really really hard to keep them. It may be a tremendous victory for that company when a great person stays.

The other company may be very cautious about hiring. It may pass over great people that might leave, choosing instead to hire average to below-average people that have fewer options and little ambition.

There are other explanations, of course. I'm just pointing out that Mark and Tony might both be right, or neither might be right. It's all in the day-to-day execution of hiring people and managing them and running the business. Turnover alone is neither good nor bad in and of itself.
Ask HN: Launch without paid plans or wait until payment is integrated?
I've been working on my startup (SaaS) for 6 months or so. My original plan was to have all the payment and plans integrated and tested before launch, but I've started to lose motivation as people aren't using it.

Should I get the app to a state where I can launch without any paid plans (just a single free plan) and just launch? Or should I stick to my guns, and wait until I have the paid plans sorted?
My iPhone app, EasyPlay, a gesture-based iPod controller, is on sale for $0.99. Or, if you like natural language processing, check out iRhyme, my iPhone NLP rhyming dictionary.

EasyPlay: http://itunes.com/app/easyplay

iRhyme: http://itunes.com/app/irhyme

My main point is that for 5 minutes time spent, a revenue stream is opened up; an efficient conversion of units of work time to revenue potential. (given I've already invested several months in these apps). The only risk was having this entry be downvoted for self-promoting on HN, since the rank is now at -4 points.

I'll report how successful this experiment was tomorrow.
If you're not thinking of watching the video, think again. Even if you watch just the last two minutes. There's a good twist in the tail in the way the most successful team made the most money :-)
Ask HN: What's your "setup?"
Everyone has different needs out of their computers. Recently, my old Ubuntu laptop's hard drive died, and I've been doing 100% of my gaming, developing and Photoshopping on the shiny Windows XP desktop that I built a little over a year ago. (I SSH into my Linux VPSes for development, using Windows as nothing more than a dumb terminal into my screen sessions.) For code & contact emergencies on the go, I've been using my new smartphone for IM and SSH.

Unfortunately, this leaves me without a clean, organized, subversion-managed home directory, and without a crontab to schedule backups to an external or remote hard drive. I saw the laptop's HD death coming, so I had everything backed up; if I lost the HD in my Windows box, I'd be royally hosed. I'm also wondering if I really need a laptop at all. As I consider the evolution of my computer ecosystem, I would love to hear how everyone else does it. What's your computer/server "setup?" What are your needs?
A/C is a luxury not a necessity

This strikes me as a false dichotomy, or, perhaps, an overly narrow definition of necessity.

The excluded middle is a range of technologies whose utility may easily outweigh any luxurious indulgence value on one end (hot water, flushing toilets, shoes) to items whose extravagance outweighs utility (mercury-filled and/or gold-plated audio cables, "The shoouhz"[1]).

The question being begged is whether AC has a significant effect on ones productivity or overall quality of life, and I posit that those asking "What about AC?" obviously believe that it is. I certainly do.

Disclaimer: I was raised to encourage the formation of brown adipose tissue during my early years, as a hedge against Russian continental climate winters. The rest of my life has been in Sunny California.

[1] The IT Crowd http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0609850/
Adobe opens up
Judgment becomes better with age. That is a pretty big advantage. Also, as you get older you can get assets that later on work for you.
The List Of jQuery Plugins
Github down (http://github.com/)
Google Wave's 'Fail Whale'
Yeah the 2 hours plus their "skills and creativity." One of the examples she liked the best was a team that sold their class presentation slot to a company that wanted to pitch to business students.
Spooky tech tales to make your computer crawl
One point the article doesn't stress is that charging money removes a whole slew of problems, chief among them spam and ghost accounts. This frees up a lot of development time, since you don't have to make the system resilient to waves of signups by people you'll never see again, or spend a lot of time on abuse prevention.

That's the good part. The bad part is, you then use all that spare development time on getting your payment system working smoothly. Since you are taking someone's money at the very outset, making a decent first impression becomes especially important. I suggest setting up payments so if something goes wrong, the account gets activated anyway, and you settle up later by personal contact with the customer.
Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss
Jim... I just wrote a post about this very issue: http://squeejee.com/blog/2009/10/29/charging-from-day-1-geni...

Are you writing all your own payment code? If so, why? I would recommend using something like Spreedly or Chargify (we use spreedly with TweetSaver). Getting payment integrated using Spreedly went very quickly for us. You should be able to get it up and running within a day or two.

I always vote in favor of launch early and iterate... but with tools like spreedly it's only an extra couple days at most to get payment plans in there.
Having read that blog post, I can completely and emphatically rule out using D at all for anything, unless and until I hear it's no longer a pitiable train-wreck (and I won't hold my breath).
I'd release free accounts now, and put the paid accounts on hold until you've had chance to see how your site runs under normal usage. If you get people using it now, then

* They will uncover bugs that have been missed

* They will show you where usability is poor in your app

* You will build an audience of people that actually use your app, giving you an crowd to sell to

* You'll get the opportunity to see how the app performs under working conditions

If you wait until your app has the paid stuff in, then the first paying customers may have to put up with problems that could have been ironed out during the free-only period.
"Frames per second" is not that relevant
you do both. don't ever bet on a quick exit. if it happens, and you get an offer you can't refuse, great. but you have to have your own course of action: turn it into an iphone app, sell the data via an API for others to embed in their app, etc. the big companies will take notice.

every business looks like a feature in the first few months. MS-DOS probably looked like a feature of IBM PCs at the time. when a feature becomes really useful, it turns into a product. when a product becomes really useful, it turns into a business. when a business becomes successful, it creates an industry...
With Tarsnap, I got the basic functionality working and started inviting people into private beta testing while I wrote the money side of things. Once I had the money side of things written, I told my beta testers that it was time to start paying (I had warned them from the start that at some point the free beta would turn into a paid beta), and about a month after that I opened up the beta to anyone who wanted to sign up.

This worked pretty well for me; I can't say if it will work for anyone else, of course.
Buy a box of Cokes, sell them individually outside the movie theatre, repeat. Run when the management finds out.

I used to do this with Blow-Pops in middle school. You could buy a huge bag for about $1.50, and sell each one for 25¢. Great profit margin.
Superfreakonomics: elementary climate change errors illustrated
Funnily enough, I was just in the middle of reading your post.

I'm probably going to go down the Spreedly route. While I agree that it probably won't take me long to integrate, I need to make sure everything is solid. Also, I'm currently working a 9-5 job as well as working on my startup, so it might take a while.
My only computer's the laptop, a 17" Macbook Pro. It's probably a bit too big—next computer I get I'll drop down to 15"—but it's not a computer I anticipate getting rid of any time soon. It's a bit grungy, but it works beautifully.

OS X for the main operating system. Nothing on the menubar but battery life, Dropbox, FuzzyClock, and Alarm Clock.app. Dock's hidden by default and has nothing on it but the programs I open myself. No stacks.

I constantly run SterCleanDesk, which moves anything I put on the desktop to a storage folder, Google Quick Search Box, which is my launcher, and Fresh, which has two compartments, one for recently modified applications and one for storage. In storage I also keep my most-used folders, so when I need to navigate I just open up Fresh. I use the basic Apple programs for most things (iTunes, Safari, TextEdit, Mail), iWork for making pretty documents, Scrivener for screenplays, Coda for programming, Transmission for torrents, Skype for chatting, and iSquint and Max for file conversion.)

It's a pretty dream set-up. It stays completely out of my way and it does everything I want with minimal interference. I've tried adding to-do lists to my routine—I have a hard-on for Things—but I find that I really don't have a reason to prod myself into productivity. Now I go by my own routine and it works perfectly.
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Interestingly, "smart" is only equated with memorization in artificial situations (like academics and trivia shows). Case in point: if you ask people who's presently the smartest person in America, they might say the jeopardy guy (I actually suspect a lot of them would say Hawking). If you ask who's the smartest person in American history, the overwhelming response will probably be Einstein (except a few who will say Hawking, or -- very rarely -- Tesla). Einstein was a notorious problem-solver. Certainly, if you asked someone if they'd prefer their child to grow up to be like Einstein or like the Jeopardy guy, they'd probably pick Einstein.

Likewise, I don't think the author was implying any sort of conspiracy. I probably used the wrong word. I should have said that there's no real effort on anyone's part to promote memorization over problem-solving. Memorization is more prominent in these artificial situations because it's easier to train and test, rather than because people think it's superior.
Google Introduces ‘Comparison Ads’ Aimed At Mortgage Market
ICANN approves non-Latin domain names
Google PageRank Update Underway | TechJaws.com
yes it was awesome!, I bet the students felt used by the winning team :), but in a very good way. It was a great idea.
Right, but I thought you said "it would be better if he had simply said...", when he did, in fact, say just that. Never mind; I think we're actually in violent agreement.
MongoDB Webinar - learn about this NoSQL database
I'd be surprised if you could thoroughly do one in three hours.
WMA? That's a disappointment.
I have known it as the celebrities formula, because if you write it this way:
e^(pi i) + 1 = 0

It contains all the "celebrities" of the math world.

It's quite cool actually.
See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=858219

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=904143

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=905268

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=911720

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=911878

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=912051
" ... or a string of self-centered tweets,"

Isn't that sort of the essence of Twitter?
Here is a link to the original Stanford podcast where this video is from: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2219

I really recommend the whole series also, they have had some excellent guests. http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html

Edit: Grammar
Just a few options off the top of my head:

1. Email everyone I've done work for in the past 5 years, promising all of my time on Mondays for the next year to the highest bidder by 2:00 p.m.

2. Same as #1, but instead of the highest bid, the first $10,000.

3. Same as #2, but $1,000. I will accept all checks received in the next 2 hours. What they will get: free use of my next web service for life.

4. Tell my employer that unless he cuts me a bonus check for $10,000 in the next 2 hours, I quit.

5. Write a one page book, "How I Lost 50 Pounds in 9 Months." Make as many photocopies as possible. Put on a pair of pants twice my size and sell the one page books for a buck a piece in front of McDonald's or the food court at lunch time. (I weigh 150 pounds.)

In all 5 cases, I leverage assets (goodwill & good health) I've already earned in much more than 2 hours.

The $5? For the lunch I eat while my "assets" (hopefully) earn.
Teacher: "And the TEAM that made the absolute most MONEY challenged absolutely every assumption and managed to make $5000 in the two hours."

Student: "How?"

Teacher: "Prostitution."

Student: "Who was in second place?"

Teacher: "The team that robbed a convince store."
"We've always been big on the young: They're the ones with the most future, and it's all about the future!"

We've been big on the young since they became the largest demographic. As that shifts, so does the attention. I see far more products and services offered for the AARP crowd than I ever have.
That's a great explanation. Is this how they explain it in math classes? Because if not, then it should be. At least at a superficial level.
Wow. I've often wished programming blogs were more polite, but God how it makes them boring.

"Some people like to wake up really early and use ternary operators. But some people much prefer to sleep in..." versus

"Get up at 5:00, drink your damned coffee and ask people interview questions about pointers or else you're stupid and lazy and you just don't care about your craft."

And then somebody comes along and says "wtf!?! you're the stupid lazy guy who doesn't even program anymore and obviously coffee brewed before 9:00 isn't fresh because the water in the pipes has been sitting there all night."

Now someone has to smash me down saying "Fool! Politeness and boringness are utterly orthogonal" ....

Edit: the code examples were great! by themselves, on a black background, they would have shocked and awed me.
Tell HN: How to do research on a new idea/target industry using Twitter
No, no, no, ... a thousand times no.

As applicable to climate change as to ethics:
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Pagina iniziale di Ubuntu
Now all we need is a reference implementation for the web front-end...
Not just the one she liked the best, the one that made the most money. Company paid $650 to give a 3 minute pitch to the students.
The peculiar thing about these brilliant hacks is that they challenge our assumptions about what's allowed to such an extent that they feel dishonest.

That isn't because there is anything amoral about them. Social interactions are a kind of delicate dance, they thrive on a certain basic level of predictability. So people are unnerved when that is taken away from them.
Rule the Web with Four Firefox Add-ons
Checking the malloc return value doesn't always guarantee that you'll be OK.

From the malloc man page (under BUGS):

"By default, Linux follows an optimistic memory allocation strategy. This means that when malloc() returns non-NULL there is no guarantee that the memory really is available."

It goes on to describe how this behavior can be turned off.
Thanks. You convinced me to watch it, and it was worth the time.
One Truth About Technology Architecture: Loose Coupling - Continuations
Lobbying is very different than corruption. Lobbyists, in theory, are supposed to present the case and frame issues so that politicians can make informed decisions.
What do you mean, me? Or human psychology?
I agree completely. When I say "you need counseling", I'm not trying to be flip. Seriously: If you're having a crisis, you need counseling. You don't need to look all over the world for some sort of grand, sweeping, half-baked objective theory for your unhappiness ("information technology is making my life miserable"). Instead you need to look much closer. You need to talk to friends, loved ones, psychologists, career counselors, priests... whatever. Unhappiness is not an easy problem to solve, logic won't solve it for you, and the answer is as likely to be something trivial and personal as it is something grand and sweeping.

My writing appears to be a total failure today, not surprisingly. [1] I'm not trying to offer up objective reasons for why one should be happy because I expect them to convince anyone to be happy. Of course that won't work! Happiness doesn't work that way. I'm offering them up as a counterexample to the idea, implicit in the original essay, that one's unhappiness at age 50 is necessarily related to some large-scale objective trend. It isn't. Because, I'd argue, large-scale objective trends suggest that a healthy middle-class American 50-year-old should be on top of the world. And yet many of them are unhappy anyway. I'm sorry about that, but I see no reason to believe it's Google's fault.

---

[1] I should note, for the record, that I'm fighting the swine flu, and I'd have a 102-degree fever right now if it weren't for the awesome power of modern drugs. ;)
No scarcity, great. I'd like Zappos.com then please for $2.99 ...
Coke's product is less sweet than Pepsi. What that means is that if you're drinking a lot of soda, Coke takes much longer to start tasting repulsive than Pepsi does, even though at first sip Pepsi might taste more delicious for some.

That was what led to the New Coke disaster. In taste tests, five out of seven people tested preferred the New Coke taste, because it was sweeter. But when rolled out, people found it got old fast. And while now New Coke is seen as a branding disaster, the truth is if it had been a more appealing product, the brand would have caught on and it might have led to a rout of Pepsi. While most of a brand is perception, the product does matter somewhat.
Foods to Avoid For Diabetics - Tips For Diabetics
@kadavy: Housewives have given away cookies and tea for free, and sold gazillions in tupperware and MLM products to their "friends".
Ah, USA. Probably the only country in the world where this kind of vehicle would make sense. Americans, cherish your opportunities!
http://twitter.com/Goodbyebuddy is as simple as following a user, then you get DMs
When you are talking about an early startup I think it is a reasonable assumption to say that loss of anyone on the core team is going to kill the startup. It might not die as quickly as a shop run by a solo founder, but it is on deaths door and knocking loudly. The only real benefit I perceive in a team over a sole founder is psychological; with co-founders you have people to challenge you (challenging both your assumptions/decisions and challenging you to constantly perform at a high level of productivity.) The biggest killer of solo startups is not accidents but rather frustration and fatigue, with a team you can have someone to pick up the slack if a founder starts getting burned out and you have someone to vent with when frustration levels start to rise.
Thats neat. Only thing is that (to me anyway) this takes the idea of the complex plane as being very fundamental as opposed to just something convenient. I'm not sure how to convince someone that 1 + i is the same as the coordinate (1, 1) without saying "thats just how we define it because things work out."
Agread @chrisb -- This just sounds nuts. Let's poke some more holes in the ozone and create droughts to cool the earth? hmmm
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(if (produces-irony? (should-upvote? post))
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nil)))
I think this is much better than the first article.
I've always thought about how someone always has it worse, but never heard the addition "but feels hopeful". That added a nice twist to it.
http://betterexplained.com/articles/a-visual-intuitive-guide...

http://betterexplained.com/articles/intuitive-arithmetic-wit...

The first link was posted here a while ago, I think.
Having recently got this job I have a Mac Mini with 4Gb and a 24 inch monitor. Editing with Textmate and the rest is just the usual command line tools (I'm a rails developer)

The machine is probably overpowered CPU wise (2Ghz, Intel Core 2 Duo) but the ram is a godsend when running the database and the applications together. I could probably work from a laptop but I would be unhappy if I lost the monitors.

The guy working with me has a Mac laptop with the same monitor setup.
It's more accounting for users' expectations due to years of designers obsessed with the fold.
Thanks! No, I worked it out for myself while I was thinking about what the exponential of a linear operator is. The explanation at my school was the one with Taylor Series.

By the time I got to university it was just taken as a given, so nobody explained it at all.

My explanation seems to have attracted a lot of positive votes in a few minutes. I've written a more detailed version here if anyone doesn't get it:

http://johnlawrenceaspden.blogspot.com/2009/10/ei-pi-1.html

If it gets much attention I might draw the diagrams that go with it.

I'm always bewildered how many scientific types (and even some mathematicians) find complex numbers mystical. They were originally discovered by mystic methods, but Argand showed us what was really going on, and they're no more weird than 2-dimensional vectors.

Actually a lot less weird than the Reals, which really are magical and mysterious, but which everyone seems to be quite happy with!
I recall Victor Frankl discussing this phenomenon in "Man's Search for Meaning." Your problems -- no matter how trivial in an objective sense -- tend to expand to fill your psychological space.
As a current facebook employee, who is in no way empowered to officially speak for the company, I would not be in too big a hurry to extrapolate Mark's observations out to infinity. Facebook is putting together one of the very best software teams in the industry, and trust me, we care about keeping the band together. From my perspective in the trenches, facebook is doing a better-than-fine job of it.
It was a bit dishonest - they sold other peoples time without any guarantee they could deliver it. The students could all have got up and left saying they weren't going to be exploited, or have done a non-violent protest, etc..

Very clever though.