skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hate to tell you this, but it has NOTHING to do with technology or even individual agents. The closed MLS has everything to do with politics. Period.

The biggest brokers in an area will monopolize 60%+ of all the data in a single MLS. When they have control over the listings, they have control over the MLS. If they threaten to leave an MLS, the MLS is worthless, and one company wins.

So, the MLS compromises. It does the bidding of the biggest listing offices and everyone else suffers.

I speak from first hand experience as a vendor in multiple markets. An open mls would be mind blowing and wonderful, bit it's not a matter of setting up a nice website, it's a matter of beating through the bureaucracy.
Create Your Own Flash Adventure Game - Messaging
> Engineering respect is an inverse log scale

What is the inverse log scale? 1/log(x) or exp(x)?
I can think of a half-dozen reasons off the top of my head as to why the records might have had to been adjusted, starting with "equipment calibration" and moving widely on from there. I think the media's been a little too eager to jump on the climate change denial bandwagon...
Paras, If you get stuck on the mathematics just shoot me an email :-) There aren't much foundational text for "our purposes", so you need to skim stuff from other disciplines and try to make sense of it all.

If you want more approrpiate materials, search for "web mining", the WEBKDD conference published a lot of interesting papers, and if you skim the TOC of their preceedings, you can find the papers online :-)

Live long and prosper!
Siri – your virtual personal assistant
It would depend on how Math.random() is implemented. It could be "return new Random().nextDouble();"

I say that because if memory serves, Integer.parseInt(string s) is just "return new Integer(s).intValue();"
Rather than Ikea inspired, it's more like they have the type of furniture that Ikea cheaply copies.

Those stools pictured cost $550. Which I guess isn't bad when you compare it to a new Aeron for $999, but you can probably get Ikea's nicest stool for $100.
If you're the first technical person in a company, you're either a founder/co-founder or an chump. I simply not only refuse to answer emails from "business guys" who "came up with the next great idea and are looking for an engineer to build it", but I also will not even consider funded start-ups that don't have technical co-founders: it's safe to say, that they will lack true technical leadership and their engineer team will be composed not of people who wish to work in a start-up, but of people who have nowhere else to go.

More often than not, if you look at successful technology companies even the "business guys" (the CTO and even the CFO) often have an EE/CS/Math/Physics degrees and have, at one point, have held technical roles. Engineering/math/natural sciences act as "brain gymnastics" which come in handy in any role which requires fast, analytical thinking.

That being said, in enterprise software having a strong sales team is often more important than having a strong product. Ideally, you'd want to have a founder who had worked in roles such as field sales/application engineer/sales engineer/consultant and has a Computer Science background: this way they will understand both the technology involved and the acute pain the target customers experience.

For consumer Internet, however, "sales guys" are only needed when you have something to sell (e.g. a critical amount of impressions in an advertising-supported site). The canonical examples (Craigslist, eBay, Google AdWords/Overture) are brilliant in that they're self serve: you don't need a large sales force to sell them.
> The bigger problem with posts like this is that they fail to appreciate a very simple truth: Either humans are affecting the climate or they don't

These are tautologies:

* Human have affected the climate or they have not.
* Humans either do affect the climate or they don't.

But this is not:

* Either humans are affecting the climate or they don't

You may have meant something different, but it is common flaw in reasoning about climate. Just because the smaller increases in CO2 levels so far have had a small impact on the climate so far, does not mean that future larger increases in CO2 will have no effect forever.
Thanks for taking the time to revise my marketing copy! It is definitely something to consider. I feel that I will need to a/b test a more basic explanatory version with are more content-rich to-the-point advanced version that you've whipped up.

As for the "comming soon" features, haha, yes, I got ahead of myself there, its not available in the mvp but at its core much of the "benefits" of the review system would be through the ability to email and communicate with the reviewers. So things like promoting new products, and enabling word-of-mouth would be mostly through email marketing campaigns. Things like twitter/facebook integration would start out as a simple fb connect feature or submission via a dedicated twitter handle.

As for pricing, as much as possible of course, but I'd like to believe around ~$20/month =P

Thanks again, And I will seriously probably be a/b testing your concise marketing copy!

p.s. The 2 lines of code is just a div wrapper with a unique id, and a script tag that loads all the assets. It appends a link tag to the main css, fetches the html as a js object, and then injects the raw review data via jsonp.
There is a very fine, often moveable, always unpredictable line between what's considered "in plain view on the network" and what's considered "intrusion". People have been convicted of felonies for crossing that line with no malicious intent.

It's also one of the great slippery slope arguments in my field. As anyone who's ever played with Metasploit on a big network knows, what's in "plain view" depends entirely on how good your optics are.
Woah, you took the time to learn how to code??? I wouldn't expect that of a lot of marketing guys. Congratulations.

I like the really simple, minimalist design of your site. You may want to use a higher resolution image for the background though.
This would require a compatibility layer for the MRI C API, which would be difficult but probably doable.

It would only solve part of the problem, though: many of the C extensions exist as bindings to existing C libraries. This wouldn't solve that unless the entire library were compiled this way.
Global Warming Frequently Asked Questions
and it seems he worked for 4 years to write POP in 6502 assembler (non-fulltime - via http://jordanmechner.com/page/4/).

with all the usual HN talk about release early, release often, that's a pre-release timeframe i have problems even imagining.

wish jordan was a HN reader!
Ask HN: Statistics on startups
Hello everyone

As part of my research, I am trying to gather information of the life cycle of a web-startup:

Things like:
* Average time to seed, to VC money, to profitability.
* State (users/revenue) when raising money.
* Average amounts raised
* Success rates and investor returns.

Can anyone recommend additional sources of information ?

Will post back here once its all compiled.
I wouldn't start an enterprise software company w/o a technical person either. A non-technical sales person from an enterprise company won't be aware of the acute pains the customer's IT/engineering departments have. They'll be able to make sales pitch, but given an equal sales pitch by Oracle/IBM/SAP and a start-up-you-never-heard-of, which one (as a non-technical manager) would you choose?

As I've said earlier, the best person to start an enterprise software company would be an applications engineer/field sales engineer/professional services consultant from either a large or fast growing enterprise software company.

Not only will they know how to sell, they will also understand the technology, be able to program well enough to create a prototype, be interview developers, know how to support the customer, deal with the end-users and know most importantly what the end-users want (best enterprise software is the enterprise software employees are begging to install).
Good lord. The second in the list is a plan by the U.S. to invade Canada, Australia, India and the UK! And the Canadians in turn had plans to invade the U.S.

Boy am I glad we found non-anglo foreigners to make enemies of.

I can't believe 1920s America would even have those big imperial ambitions. We had our skirmishes in North Africa, the Carribean and the Pacific, but never the gully to go to war with the English crown since independence.

FWIW, I met an Australian military officer and we discussed the security of Australia. He said Japan is neutered and only Indonesia and China represent eminent danger. Then he added, "if there was ever a front with Indonesia or China, 10 million redneck Americans will be flown in to help us." And I really agreed with him. Our relationship is so good, it's devastating to know we had Australia (and Canada) on our TODO list :-(
Let's just face the fact that 'climate change' has become a political topic more than it's a rational and/or scientific one.

"Climate change denial" has become secret code for, "I'm a neo-conservative and I really want it stick it to Those Damn Liberals(tm) because not only do they want to take away my Hummer and my hamburgers, they want to take away my guns too!"

There are plenty of journalists and talk-show pundits on the conservative side of the spectrum that see this as some sort of vindication that they were, "right all along," or just as a chance to get all sorts of coverage/attention/viewership/advertising money.
Firefox Getting GPU Acceleration, Maybe Before IE9
Have a look at this. They "shift" the data so it is all on the same scale and create one graph. This is horrible science. They should be treating each temperature probe as a separate entity.

I am also dubious about the use of airports for temperature readings (Note this is a recent development). Airports can introduce a mini-UHI effect producing an artificially higher temperature.

http://www.niwa.co.nz/news-and-publications/news/all/niwa-co...
State of the Climate Global Analysis Annual 2008
There are valid reasons and there are invalid reasons. That's why being open about the raw data is important.

[Edit] I should have also mentioned that it's also important to be open about how the data is adjusted. Explaining your reason for adjusting the data is not enough.

Which reminds me. Someone commented that scientists don't share code. That's not quite true. In many areas, it suffices to share data because the analysis routines are already shared.
Plexusworld - More Innovation
I fully agree! But both sides are guilty of subjective analysis. As to which side is most guilty... well, choosing either/or gives away your position on the issue.
Similarly, AGW has become secret code for, well, you can fill in the blanks.

However, there are some differences. For example, the skeptics haven't been suggesting that their opponents be thrown into jail for their beliefs. And, they aren't proposing restrictions or taxes.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2008/ann/globa...
I dislike these sorts of posts. While the likes of 37signals are very quick to point out that there are lots of benefits you can have as a founder of a small company that never "exits", they forget about the employees.

Sure, if I am founder I can sell back some of my stock to the VCs/take some money out as a "bonus"/dividends, but what about the employees who have (often) taken serious risks and worked long hours for sub-market pay?
Yes; I think the simplest and most likely explanation here is going to involve specific facets of the data or analysis which people won't be familiar with unless they've been studying it for several years.

That doesn't mean it isn't sloppy though, and while I can sympathize with scientists' decisions not to release their data or their methodologies -- they aren't well-enough funded to spend their time answering the various challenges of laypeople that aren't educated enough to understand the field -- it's still a really poor choice in the longer term that's going to result in a lot of suspicion regarding their work.

Or, alternatively: we're seeing some confirmation bias at work.
What is so funny about this thread, is that it seems that every other post is repeating what the previous guy just said, which all say "just build it already, even if it exists". Seems that you guys took that one step too far and applied it to comments too ;) ---btw...I liked the article...not hating, just observing =)
Would have been better without all the juvenile comments. Could have made it seem like a Feynmann story, but no.
The Marshmallow Test – They Got It All Wrong
Thanks very much for this. I just bought a monochrome B&W laser printer from Newegg, and have a case of blank paper and really didn't want to have order anything new. This download made my night. Wish I could upvote you twice :)
The MLS pains are a symptom of the broader question, "do we still need human realtors?"

Sadly, Foxtons US is dead (http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN27422652200709...) and ZipRealty has been around for 7+ years without revolutionizing the industry. There must be a deeper explanation than "Realtors make 6% a sale for accessing a database."

My hypothesis is "rational, well-informed market decisions" would ensure few purchases and sales ever close. With so much on the line (life savings, huge debt, negotiation anxieties, moving uncertainties), normal people simply can't handle the stress without some hand-holding.

As a licensed agent, I've personally had plenty of cases where I knew I found the clients a steal, but I had to spend enormous amounts of energy and time convincing them take action (and before someone else beats them to it).
Thanks for motivation.

I will definitely fix that design. Actually the background will give place to something different.
This is going to really make my post-Thanksgiving-meal-downtime more interesting :)
It's not horrible science. It's very simple analysis and maths.

Graphs are used to answer a question: "what is the relationship between these objects" or "how are these things changing" or "what is the trend in their rates of change".

In this case, we're less concerned with the actual temperatures at the individual stations than we are with how they're changing over time. So, there's nothing wrong with adjusting and merging them together like that.

Think of it this way: what if we were to remove the temperatures from the left side of the graph, and instead plot the temperatures as a series of differences? i.e., temperature station 1 has +5 at one point, -1 at another point, and so on.

You could plot the changes in temperature for a number of stations that way, all on the same graph, and it would make perfect sense.

That's really all they're doing.

As for measuring temperature at airports: if there is such an effect, then it will produce uniformly higher temperatures, but it will not affect the rate of temperature changes -- so, again, as long as the question is, "how is the temperature changing", taking measurements at airports is acceptable.
In that case, a confounding factor is that the people in the club may be able to tell the difference between the outfits. So it isn't just the second man's confidence, it's that the people there know he's willing to blow a lot of money on looks. That may conceivably affect their reactions regardless of the man's confidence.
? how?
Promos and coupons: printrunner.com coupons
No problem..I actually felt really guilty after writing that for having nothing but negative things to say :(

Wish you all the best with it!
I think it would be copyright infringement regardless of whether or not you attribute the source.
Http://sites.google.com/site/boracaycondotelsite/
>Come on. It's Sweden. It's IKEA. I think most Swedes have heard of IKEA by now

Basic rule of advertising, repetition means reinforcement. Also even if they of course knew about the brand, now they saw products they might not have seen before.
Media Temple Hacked
Note, this is from 2006.
For those who mentioned there are many good reasons for the data to be adjusted:

- the fact that data is adjusted predominantly toward a worming trend and the fact that we do not have an official reason for this is suspicious

- we need "the other guy's version" to make an informed opinion

- you cannot talk about good science without some degree of openness. No matter what the data shows you need all of it to be verifiable and reproducible, otherwise something is very wrong.
Ants That Count
there goes my weekend
Thanks to everyone, some very good comments. I'm doing a revision before posting it :-)
Nonconstructive criticism is just as bad about meetings as it is during meetings. The value of a meeting is entirely dependent upon what the people involved in the meeting bring to it. Bad meetings are caused by people being unprepared and not knowing what they want to get out of the meeting. If all you bring to the table is fatalism, the meeting will suck for you.
Tattoodle
http://rondam.blogspot.com/2009/11/life-imitates-art-i-hope....
And that's not the only case.

For instance you may want "a" to be mutable, but you also want to use its value when the closure gets executed.

I don't think I've ever used a framework in Java that relies on event-handlers / callbacks where I didn't had to box local variables.
NZ Charities » NZ Charities Community House
I just get a white box on the page and it spins forever spewing out JS errors. The status bar says "completed 4 out of 5 items"

Web inspector in safari 4 shows:

Unsafe JavaScript attempt to access frame with URL http://doxela.com/view/1214130930.php from frame with URL https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=writely.... Domains, protocols and ports must match.

You are trying to do XSS?

This brings up another tip that every developer should know: Make it easy for users to report bugs.
Can the downvoter let me know why this is down voted when it's a valid/decent point?
Perhaps this app will be configurable enough to play an MP3 when I'm in REM?

... so you can listen to REM while in REM?
For fictional quirks, I usually find the tvtropes wiki more informative: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicalNegro
I'm not familiar with the hamburger political controversy. Do enlighten me.
I recently heard about the business of teaching people how to form syndicates to buy "short sale" homes and then flip those homes for a profit. (Short sale == sell house for less than the loan value.) If you pay $$ to a guru you can get standardized contracts, hand holding, etc. Example blog post from someone in this area:
http://cawholesaledeals.com/blog/tag/short-sale-syndication/

Leaving aside the morality of these gurus...

Wonder if this would be a thin edge of the wedge area to start with aggregating data on house sales? People are already meeting in person and swapping information about where are the sales, which ones do they want to syndicate, so you have less of a bootstrapping problem. You could also provide ways for people to signal interest in a particular home deal, or provide a commission to people who bring in data on a home that is later successfully syndicated/sold even if the reporter isn't in on the deal. Maybe there are other approaches. Then grow from that segment to more real estate data if the model proves out.
Okay, here's the thing. If you're publishing scientific stuff on a blog or in a newspaper, instead of in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, then you're playing politics, not science.

This topic has been politicised enough. Stop doing that. If you're critical of some peer-reviewed paper, publish it in a peer-reviewed journal. Those dudes know if what you're saying is truthful and valuable, the general public (including me) does not.
There's more on this at http://www.climatescience.org.nz/images/PDFs/global_warming_... [PDF], including some more detailed graphs at the end.

Full disclosure: I'm coming at this from the initial point of view that the global warming folks are probably right, primarily because all of my experience with scientists in other fields (mostly physics and biology) has taught me that the scientific "establishment" is generally far more interested in seeking the actual truth than pandering to convenient politics.

However, without explanation for why the slopes of the graphs were shifted during the adjustments, I'd say there's some definite cause for concern here. At the very least, these adjustments should be explained in detail so the rationale can be examined.

Back on the other hand, I'm very suspicious of a blanket statement that there's no reason to apply any adjustments here, especially coming from someone that opportunistically publishes this right on the heels of a very negative PR blitz against AGW. So I think we should reserve judgment until the people that made these adjustments explain in detail how they calculated them; it's very possible that they had excellent reasons to adjust things the way they did, but they really ought to provide the supplemental data sets that are required to compute these adjustments if they want to save face here.

And I absolutely agree that the fact that this information is missing in the first place is unacceptable in a scientific field; future AGW researchers need to learn a lesson from all of this, that even if they are right, they need to tread carefully because of the intense scrutiny they are under. And by "tread carefully" I mean treat your data as rigorously and make it available as easily as if this was any other scientific pursuit. Evolutionary biologists are under a lot of fire, too, from a lot of the same asshats that are funding anti-AGW work, but you don't see them witholding data or stonewalling people asking questions, at least until they become obnoxious or take the argument past science.

You only get to shout people down once they already have access to all the data they need in order to see (if only they weren't so dense) that you are right!

Edit: it's worth noting that the only references I've seen on any of this come straight from the blog post, not from NIWA itself. So I don't know if we can trust those pictures at all, or if perhaps the alterations are, in fact, explained somewhere.
Wired had a long but interesting article about Xanadu back in 1995: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive//3.06/xanadu.html?person=...
In many ways the story of Xanadu is sad and depressing.

Of course, Xanadu is (or would be) a digital remake of Vannevar Bush's memex: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush
Frankly, I'm not sure Ted Nelson has added much to the original concept with Xanadu.

You can download Xanadu(R) Space(TM), a user interface demo, from here: http://xanarama.net/ Windows only, but I got it to work in WINE. Ted Nelson really likes his trademarks, probably because it's as tangible as Xanadu has become after 40 years.
That analogy is wrong. If you read what the other ones said, you will see that the 'linux is just a kernel' vs 'freebsd is a entire Operating System' is more correct. BSD provides the userland tools and thus supports the entire OS experience. Linux just makes the hardware available to the user.
This also depends on how one defines the word Operating System. I remember linus was stating in the documentary 'OS Revolution' that "your never supposed to see a operating system - no one never uses a operating system, people use programs, the operating system makes it easy for the programs to access the computers resources"

reference interview at 2,20 min.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7707585592627775409&...