skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the problem is that you sold an idea that can easily be copied rather than a product. Perhaps an NDA might be the legislative path to take - but sometimes there is another approach:

There is a story, which may be an urban legend, but it exemplifies this story nicely: An Optimizations Research (OR) company tries to sell a product that can do crew scheduling for a airlines company. To show its power, they presented an optimized schedule where several million dollars could be saved, compared to their current models. The OR company was declined, but the airline took the data and implemented it.

What they did not know, was that the data presented were poisoned. Normally, when optimizing, you also account for the robustness of the model, so emergencies does not bring the whole system down. Being smart, the OR company had removed the robustness constraints, which severely hit the airline.

So the bottom line is: Try to poison the sales pitch. Know that you keep out something which is crucial to the solution, but does not impede the impressiveness. Make it into a game: If you choose us, you get to see the rest of the hand, what you don't know is if it is a royal flush or 4 of a kind :)
and a superior one at that

Slime is indeed a superior lisp interaction mode.
This isn't odd; it's standard. Covering normal pregnancy and birth is a pricey add-on if it's available at all, but by law the new child must be covered.
Do the math. He created a trust that pays 5% of 22 million and avoids ~5 million in taxes. That's 1.1 million a year in income and a 5 million tax break at the cost his capital after he dies. It's less liquid right now, but 1.1 million a year is well past FU money and getting a loan with that sort of income stream is easy. If his annual payout was less than 5% then it would have been a sacrifice, but 5% + inflation means he might be extracting more money in real terms than he is generating. This means over a long enough time scale he basically skims most of his money back, and he leaves the tax break some of it's interest to charity. Granted if he generates significantly more than 5% + inflation he does lose some money but he does get 5% of an ever larger pool so it's not all that much of a loss.

PS: Which is not to say it’s a bad thing, rather it’s more of a tax loophole than you might think. Afterall his other option was to live off of ~4.5% of 17 million. (Assuming he did not want to run out of money if he lived to be 90.)
Android Sales Figures After Placing 3rd in the Android Developer Challenge 2
Yeah, Slime is great. I’m just not an Emacs fan.

I'm not an emacs fan either but I grudgingly use it everyday for R and Octave development. Vim is my preferred text editor but it can't compare to the power of emacs when working with interactive languages. Emacs viper mode is excellent though and gives access to the vi keys anywhere. I'd also recommend those that really hate emacs to try the console mode -- its much snappier and brings the monster closer to a vim-like experience.
I suspect it is the very rare average HN reader who has spent any time this morning idly wondering whether a computer built out of matchboxes to play Go would be bigger or smaller than the Crab Nebula.
What? HTC was the largest manufacturer of Windows Mobile phones as early as 2006, when it was #3 in BusinessWeek's IT 100 (and #11 in 2005): http://www.businessweek.com/it100/2006/3.htm

The company's sales and market cap grew explosively in the years just before the iPhone launch in 2007. Since the iPhone launch, its stock is down 40%: http://www.google.com/finance?q=TPE:2498
You used to be able to buy something like this at Pearl or other craft centers. It comes in sheets you heat in water in the microwave and shape to fit. My mom had a set of screwdrivers with custom grips. I think it was called thermal decorative plastic.

edit:

http://www.craft-products.com/polyform-plastic.asp

http://www.wisdomking.com/product/aquaplast-t-18

seems to be called "moldable craft plastic" or similar
"The business is data mining and advertising."

I often wonder if the business of online advertising really works well. Targeted advertising certainly has better results that blanket campaigns, but don't most users ignore advertisements by now? I know that I hardly even notice them anymore (even the good ones).
"This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God's beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing."

I have long thought that one of the major downside of any religion is that it radicalizes people. No mater how much peace and tolerance it preaches, dogma always takes over.
Florida. No problem to get coverage for me; we can get coverage for the boys but with riders on my youngest sons; we can't get coverage for my wife at all. We're 27 and 29.

We're "lucky" in that we had COBRA coverage from a Maryland job before we moved here. Now that COBRA is expired, our MD insurer is required by MD law to offer us a group policy. It's decent coverage, but at almost $1000/month it only covers my wife and the kids. It would be another ~$600/month to add me.
Maybe because more??? people draw bold conclusions from insufficient data sources (one expert interview + own reasoning) just to get that damn (blog) article published?
Gboard: A Keyboard Just for Gmail Users
+1, but, if a person is a subscriber, how can they tell the difference between an open and closed article?
What i think would rock would be reinteract like development environment inside Vim.
A third reason Garner didn’t mention is the increasing commercialization of science and medicine, which has spawned an army of researchers on the take from health product companies.

Science is a method of discovering truth about the natural world despite human imperfections, misperceptions, and (more rarely) malevolence and fraud. It's a process-- a system, if you will-- and one that few human cultures have been able to implement.

Science requires a certain outcome-indifference. This is why it's hard-to-impossible to study questions such as life after death (a universal concern where everyone cares deeply about the answer) or whether there's a God. On the other hand, one can scientifically study the mechanics of how the body dies, because for most people, having the correct answer is more important than what the answer (e.g. the precise biological processes through which it happens) is.

The problem is that science, as a system, is under attack from commercial pressures as well as the rapid pace of technological society. Technology and industry continue to advance, but the regulation and verification of knowledge (e.g. science) is being backlogged a bit, which allows a lot of fraud to get through. Tack on the pressures on the individual to remain employed or get tenure, and you get scientific fraud.
Actually, I already know about that. What I wanted you to tell me (because I was too lazy to find it out for myself) was that I can change the search engine used via the Command+Up/Down keys.

Still, those arrow keys are all the way down there and I can type "define:" pretty fast...
He is here ;)

Alas, Google doesn't allow that - their satellite imagery are for displaying purposes only... I guess it can be argued that storing the imagery, processing it, and discarding after processing is not a violation of TOS, but it is likely that retaining the coordinates of the found objects is a "derivative work", which is prohibited, yadayada.

So I just get public domain imagery from USGS. It is slow, but public domain.
Is anyone doing the DARPA Network Challenge?
Let's form a YC group.

Email to yeehaa@gmail.com if interested and have ideas.
I love the Textmate bundle. I actually extended it a bit so that you could filter for file types, which might be handy to some folks: http://github.com/adamsanderson/ack-tmbundle
I'm always skeptic if there is only one actively maintained implementation of a language in use. In this respect, this is per se a good thing.
The biggest problem is that I don't think Google would allow me to do that - from what I understood from their Maps TOS, the imagery is strictly for displaying to the visitor.
I’m certainly in favor of building for larger timescales, but I have enough trouble believing the Long Now Foundation’s projects will last beyond a dozen generations (though I’d certainly like them to). Building something that could last a million years is something I can’t really comprehend.
This looks similar to the define: results, but juiced up on steroids. Maybe at some point this will be what you get when you do a define: search?
About the Open Angel Forum - 1st event LA Jan 14th
I think I commented on that post when it was first posted in 2007, but here it is again: sure, I don't like what Dell/Google did on the new Dell machines. Meh. But that post is filled with so many absurd inaccuracies that I have to simply disregard it. Most prominently:

At the top of the page, he shows the exact text that appears on the "horrible" search results page. That text explains exactly how to remove that functionality:

"This program can be uninstalled from the Control Panel "Add/Remove Programs" in Windows XP or "Control Panel > Program > Programs and Features" in Windows Vista. Look for the application named "Browser Address Error Redirector". Older versions may be called "GoogleAFE" or "URL Assistant"."

He says this statement is "ambiguous". I have no idea how it is ambiguous, but ok. He then goes on to say the software is "hard to remove", and later that "users can't get rid of it!", both of which are outright lies. Installing and uninstalling software is a normal part of owning a computer, and as you can see above, Google's message tells users exactly what to uninstall. The entire process could be completed in 30 seconds.

But I have to ask myself every time I read this article: why is this guy going to so much effort to spread inaccuracies that demonize Google for trapping search results and presenting ads?

Well, because that is exactly how OpenDNS makes money, and Google threatened their business model. The entire first portion of the post, attacks and all, is present to justify this:

"we’ve stretched a bit beyond DNS itself to work around Google’s mis-directed efforts."

By going on the offensive, he now tries to justify providing a DNS service that OpeDNS doesn't just resolve hostnames anymore...instead, OpenDNS makes moral judgments about the domains you visit, and, as they trumpet so loudly, "we have a fix which does not require more client software". What this means to me is that whatever OpenDNS is doing, I can't uninstall it, because they own it -- it's not on my machine, it's on theirs.

Listen, when I use DNS, there's a contract I expect DNS to fulfill: I give you a name, and you resolve it to an IP or tell me it can't be resolved. It is an outright violation of the contract to resolve a hostname I give you to an address other than that with which it is associated, which is exactly what OpenDNS is doing.
What is happening in Spain with the Internet
I'm hoping that this story, along with the recent "straight from the top" approval by Jobs, are indicative of a fundamental change in their policies and procedures. The app store has been out a little over a year, I'm sure a few iterations are needed to get the approval process where it needs to be.
Fred's post isn't about big companies doing talent acquisitions. It's about both why a successful startup would want to do this, and how to structure a deal correctly so both startups are pleased with the deal.

I'm not disputing anything in your link, I just don't think it's very relevant to the discussion of Fred's post.
Classic case of lowering expectations so much that even fulfilling the basic needs seems like a fantastic experience.
The main reason is that I haven't read up to that section of "Learning OpenCV" book... I guess I have some additions to my reading list ;)
String Interpolation in Clojure
Mint Explains Why The Real Unemployment Rate Is 17.2 Percent
Good point, I forgot that even simpler cases in Haskell are generic too.
He should live so long. :-D As pointed out elsewhere, this is an exponential decay so it will never go to zero.

Bashing numbers helps me visualize this...

Looking at (nearly) the worst case, if the trust earns zero interest, he will be draining it by 5% per year, so the principle will be

0.95^y * 22e6

where y is the number of years. If he lives for 40 more years...

0.95^40 * 22e6 = 2.8e6

(13% of the original sum is left).

A less drastic case would be earning 4% but paying out 5%, i.e. losing 1% per year.

0.99^40 * 22e6 = 15e6

(67% of the original sum is left).

OK, the absolute worst case is he invests the whole amount in subprime mortgages and loses it all. We won't bash those numbers, obviously he is a lot smarter than that.
You mean everything on the "social web"..
PayPal 'Admits' to Phishing Users
What's wrong with ionotify?
You just need to weigh the scope and reward of individual things. Some things are worth waiting for, others aren't. From a hype perspective a journalist can help you understand what your experience is missing for it to be considered a success to them.

For instance, before we launched a version of our software, we spent two months working on security mechanisms to make sure it couldn't be stolen or pirated or hacked. While security is important, it was a mistake for us to take it as seriously as we did, and we wound up wasting those resources in hindsight.
I'm quite interested in what the two of you have created - the reason being that I have a history in digital imaging as well. I'm not a big fan of Air (the Adobe kind), but what you've accomplished with it is impressive and I look forward to seeing what direction it will take.

My partners and I used to work for a prominent Canadian digital imaging software company based out of Victoria, British Columbia (I won't mention names - it's safer that way). Since our time there, we've moved on to other things but eventually we rejoined to form our own company that created a digital photography product called Snapact (see more here: http://www.snapact.com/).

We focus more on photo management and sharing, so I think that there may be possibilities for working together with you two - at the very least on co-marketing efforts.

Maybe we should talk? If it leads to something, great. If not, no harm done.
Wow, this really rang true with me:

"It's not that I'm altruistic. I'm sacrificing nothing. I've just learned what makes me happy. And doing it this way made me the happiest."

I often think about how this mentality equates to business. For example, we generally think about business profit growth as healthy, but what if a business is sustainable, does not grow in profits but can somehow grow "happiness" with customers, investors, employees, etc. In a sense the business is not necessarily being altruistic, it's just recognizing what makes people more dedicated to the business. When thinking about Zappos I generally wonder if this wasn't their strategy for many years.
here is my take:

apple started with a conservative policy -- if an app might be bad to let in, reject it. also a cheap policy: don't hire extra people who might not be needed.

this "conservative" policy let in over 95% of submissions with no trouble. and they had enough manpower to do that in a time frame that is reasonable in the business world (the stories about it taking months are not typical, most apps were approved in under 2 weeks). seeing that situation, how could Apple, or anyone, possibly consider that a failure? that's a very good first iteration. meanwhile, no major disasters happened.

apple is now adjusting their policy for the better. they are reforming it. and they now have the knowledge to do that without anything bad happening.

this is all as it should be. zero cause for complaint from anyone. job well done.

if Apple tried to start with the reformed version, that would not have magically made everything perfect. they would have made just as many initial mistakes implementing any other policy. the difference simply would have been the mistakes did more damage b/c the app approval policy was less cautious in edge cases.

yet people spew a bunch of hate in response to recent reforms!

> As much as I love Apple I have a hard time praising them for doing something they should have done from the start.

reforms should be praised and encouraged!
For sure. From Jethro Tull's 1971 Aqualung :

"In the beginning Man created God; and in the image of Man created he him.

"2 And Man gave unto God a multitude of names,that he might be Lord of all the earth when it was suited to Man

"3 And on the seven millionth day Man rested and did lean heavily on his God and saw that it was good. ..."
> ... research shows an increase in the incidence of data manipulation in published papers ....

This does not necessarily mean that scientific fraud is on the rise, only that a particular kind of fraud is on the rise. Is it possible that dishonest scientists are simply turning more to data manipulation than to other kinds of fraud? (And how would one tell?)
You forgot to double-highlight the bare "including", which automatically implies "including but not limited to".

Yep, unexpected. That's why I don't ever take up websites' offer to parse my address book.
How much free content do they need to tie it back to you? Remember AOL releasing some search queries, and quickly people were identified. I imagine that is not hard with facebook interactions either.
Indeed. This video is probably worth a thousand words. http://www.guba.com/watch/3000054867
IOW, he's paying Tuesday for a hamburger he is enjoying today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Wellington_Wimpy

(Posted as humor, not a cheap dig. If you down-vote me, do it for the cheap humor.)
Why do games as an entertainment medium elicit this kind of cultural shame?
$1.1 million a year tax free is alot - he could live lavish in Monaco with that!
Innovation Fuels came from the list from the Venture Beat list of YC S08 demo-day startups :

http://venturebeatprofiles.com/company/profile/innovation-fu...

There was also a newspaper source which my google-fu can't locate right now, but presumably one of the two copied the mistake from the other.
Truth be told, you loved Porky's Revenge, but you'd prefer that your five-star rating stay between you and Netflix. But those situations are rare and getting rarer.

I'm sorry? Are situations requiring privacy getting rarer? I hope you can back that up with some kind of numbers, Slate.
AuthSMTP prices are quoted yearly, so in fact AuthSMTP is $168/12 = $14 per month.
The reason why God and the afterlife are impossible to study scientifically is because they are unfalsifiable hypotheses, not because of anyone's attitude toward them.
It can increase people's commitment to compassion too. Like Lisp or Forth, it is an amplifier. Actually placebos are a better analogy. Both are imaginary social support that allows a body to commit resources that would otherwise be held in reserve.
Does debugging work in it?
I'm actually doing a similar analysis of UK universities for a non-profit I help run (http://quofoundation.org) and see the exact same issue. With universities you can get around the problem by adjusting for entry grades. I wonder if something similar would be possible in this situation.
they even include IPA transcriptions

This is very good, as it will promote learning the International Phonetic Alphabet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet
I had the same issue at first. I did get it fixed eventually but I can't remember what I did. :-( Once you get it running though it offers syntax completion send-to-repl and most of the slime functionality without the need for screen. Very worth the effort setting it up.
Friendfeed's acquisition by Facebook was widely viewed as a talent grab. It seems to be working out well enough for FB so far.

http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/08/friendfeeds-not-dead-while...
Race, Gender and the Frontier (Part 1)
From Favoring Software Patents to Nokia's Visions of Modular Innovation
I wish it were true that there were a free market that employees can participate in.

I run a small company. If I were to take the monthly premium I pay for my employees and instead give it to them as cash, they could not get health care or insurance anywhere near as good.
Also true, and more correct than my claim from a philosophy-of-science perspective. I am taking the science-as-process perspective.
> Mathematicians and scientists have no formal training in programming (at least in the UK). They're expected just to pick it up and get on with it.

That's an unreasonable generalisation.

For one thing, many university courses in science and mathematics do seem to incorporate basic programming training these days, either as part of the course, or via other facilities that the university makes available to those taking such courses. Any programming skills acquired may or may not contribute directly to the grade of degree awarded, but that is a different issue.

For another thing, I can attest that some scientists do make an effort, because I have personally been paid by PhD students to tutor them in the appropriate programming techniques to implement their models soundly.
Thanks for posting pchristensen! I'm hoping that Los Angeles goes well and that we can move on to San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Boston, New York, Austin, Europe and Asia!
Because it would be "preaching to the choir"?
And this poor code leads to temperature data sets that could be flawed - data sets that form the foundation under the climate models and the conclusions of the IPCC reports. These reports in turn are used by many countries to base policy on. Are governments basing policy on flawed science?
You are distinguishing between "legacy" and "legacy problem" and thus rendering your own opening 'thesis as moot.
Importance Of A Proactive Cyberwar Plan And CyberDefense Plan
Yup, right here...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=975575

I wonder if my response to that post triggered him making that blog for clarification. (Basically rebutting my quality complaint.)
The unveilings of the CRU materials now also caused Al Gore to cancel his talk at Copenhagen. http://www.examiner.com/x-11224-Baltimore-Weather-Examiner~y...
Having source code reviews via Newsnight is the ultimate confirmation in my mind that all of this should have been open source from the beginning. It would be trivial, and cost CRU nothing, to set up an open source project which would render scandals such as this impossible.

A subject like global warming is potentially of such high importance that it shouldn't be left to cowboy programmers to process the data. I could have said "amateur" programmers, but there are many amateurs out there who produce very high quality code.
In the comments the developer states that he's under NDA until release, but that it's a small no-name with no previous iPhone apps.
The question this should make people ask is: where are these beliefs coming from, if not from religious teaching?

Often both sides of a controversial argument are content to blame God for the position of the religious side. It's easier to simply write off your opponent as an unreasonable religious nutcase rather than making a legitimate attempt to look for the real motivation. It's almost as easy to attack religious fallacies as it is to use them for support.
Ditto on the last line. I don't use it - yet - but I have been dabbling in confirmation bias occasionally which of course isn't fair to Facebook.

A lot of the stories are merely about people who didn't know how to secure their privacy using pre-existing settings in Facebook.
Yep:

"So you can whine and cry about the process in general, but for the volume of submissions that they have, taking that little bit of time to reach out means a lot."
An inconvenient cancellation.