skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's interesting how the copies are (inevitably) always deeply inferior to the originals. Except for the chair, which appears to be identical.

Copying an existing design and then changing it to try to make it look like you didn't might be pretty close to the worst design methodology you could come up with.
- the vc's themselves will have large person networks if they're working at a top tier VC. more often than not, if you need a deal done with company X they'll have a personal connection to someone there. this isn't a vc-specific value-add

- top tier vc's don't hold just young startup investments. they'll have mature companies, who have likely done deals with some of the big companies you're looking to do deals with. again leveraging their network.

- if a top tier vc has invested in you, most big company execs will assume you're not going out of business anytime soon (right or wrong that's their mindset - it's amazing how corporate types grab for blue chip names/brands at every opportunity) making them more comfortable doing business with you and not big company Y
Off-topic perhaps, but that is an atrocious use of blogging for affiliate marketing dollars.

Maybe it's time to hunt down an ad blocking extension for Chrome.
Yeah, more Buffet, less Goldman-Sachs.
Original link: http://www.iconeye.com/index.php?option=com_content&view...

Server appears to be getting bogged down, hence the cached link.
I'm curious: why link to the print version of an article about design? Deliberate irony?

Here's the design-included link: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/141/a-modern-mess.html

If nothing else, I learned a new word today ('ethonomics'), by tracking back to the main page.
If the product was so important to you and how you work, why didn't you pay for it?
> or using some of your data to model your prior

I think that kinda missing the point.
MATLAB ? It is extremely useful for machine learning hacking.
This is a really neat hack. Thanks for sharing this.
The great Twitter Ruby vs Scala war debate
I thought the consensus was that OpenDNS is evil, censorship and all.
Oh come on, this has been on here several times, and less than a month ago!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=927714
The mystery of Zomia: A case against civilization
I agree to what you say :). Had pretty much the same line of thinking myself.

Coming from biology: I know our brains are complex machines, and highly skilled and skewed pattern recognizers, and that therefore many things can be explained in terms of subconsciously picking up signals, or just plain coincidence.

Still, some of my experiences (knowing where someone's attention is at, or feeling flow of energy between bodies) seem to suggest that we can experience more than just the input of our five physical sensory organs. And rather than ignoring these more esoteric senses, I try to use them in a practical sense - as a source of information. Maybe I'm making stuff up ;), but so far my life is more fun allowing for the possibility of these esoteric senses to exist, than going for a purely material world.
How about a list of all the app ideas on there? It'd be fun to scrape and crunch that data if this takes off.

Ideas have little value, but it'd be interesting to profile them.
Good graces will take you far in life. from the utilitarian perspective, the emotional valence of the message ("sugar coating") does not impact the veracity of the semantic content. While this is true, humans are not rational fact-processing machines. We are primarily emotional and irrational creatures with a fleeting capacity for logic and reason. For many technologists, this is something we lament. However, our emotions are not that complicated... they are just governed more by expectations than by facts. If you learn to guide someone gently from one expectation to another, then you will learn to avoid triggering their defense mechanisms and have a much easier time being effective at communication and achieving your goals. Especially if this is difficult for you, I suggest that you take some time to study meat computers.
More non-tech on HN: No, for the same reasons others have said. That's what I'm here for. In fact, since I'm not planning to found a company, I'm more interested in the technical articles than the business stories (though I read both).

More interests with age: true.

Tech starts to look the same: sometimes, but there is more groundbreaking stuff going on than ever before.

Bookstores: yes, but is that because of my interests changing, because the books available are getting more superficial? Would you believe that in the early 1980s, the bookstore at the mall stocked comp sci texts? I bought one volume of Knuth there.

Consciousness: If I'm interested it's because it looks like we're on the verge of being able to program it.

Tolerance of others' theories: only if they're genuinely new.

Life experience: absolutely not. In fact, the one thing I've learned from joining Facebook this year is that most people spend their time doing stuff that would bore me to death.

My age: 50, and gratified to see so many others of my generation speaking up here. (I can't call us old, because we're not.)
If only they had interviewed at Google and joined the team they wanted to be on a year ago.

These transactions trade on the goodwill of early adopters. And they make it harder for other startups as potential early adopters start to assume that it's better to wait for what Google releases instead of investing time in a product that will be scrapped either if the company fails or is successful and acquired.
What's more interesting is the bands missing from the map.
Do the missing bands (NIN, for example) form an isolated "island" in the last.fm similarity graph?
That's definitely an interesting space. I think the highly principled side of the Bayesian boat would state that meta-hypotheses are tied into your prior on model building information (Pr(I), etc) and that it needs to be updated alongside everything else. So now if your hypothesis' posterior becomes something like Pr(H, theta, I) the whole business needs to be updated and will include all the meta level intellectual rigor. At this point I feel like I might be walking into the space of Structural Causal Modeling and I'm not too well versed there at all.

In the informal setting though you're only ever likely to be trying to "update" one belief at a time, so, yeah, it definitely requires intellectual care to make sure to follow dependencies. Worse though, is that it should be possible to two have codependent estimations and if you aren't aware of that codependency you won't ever be able to get along.

I think that's all interesting, but I'm not sure it applies to informal situations as well as one might hope. Frequently, Bayesian techniques are only used informally in conjunction with strong rationalist heuristics which help to build these reductionist hierarchies of effects and then allow for clear(er) methodology to find an accurate answer.

Few people thinking carefully and rationally would be willing to bet on their beliefs so long as they know that thy have an outstanding miscalibration. That's why scientists, good scientists anyway, will so often preclude things with disclaimers. They want you to be aware of whatever biases they can before you start to judge their opinions.
If you expect a comment of yours to be downvoted, perhaps you should consider whether or not the comment in question is actually contributing to the discussion. I imagine that your original comment was downvoted because it expressed your feeling that this was not worthy of submission without including any reasons supporting your opinion. You seem to be surprised, in general, when people disagree with you. Try convincing them, or considering things from their points of view.
CrunchPad partner plans media event
I think, roughly, the blame goes out to Fisher and anyone else who promoted the "Recipe for Understanding the World" style statistics. It's not that people are being blocked by their understanding of complex frequentist methods but instead the idea that they don't need to understand anything more because statistics is just a black box you use for verification.

Insert results, get a green or red "significance" light, move on.
It looks like an odd choice, but it works well for some applications. I've done several apps that take advantage of both local control and the ease of web UI. Imagine having a web app with perfect security, zero latency and infinite bandwidth.
http://i47.tinypic.com/ncjwup.jpg
(Just Letters)
Is It Possible To Make Money From Twitter?
This should be added to the Tao of programming.
Casinos are an actuarial business. The relevant number is the weighted sum over all possible outcomes -- or similarly, the sum over all customers offered the same terms.

So the casino is definitely "out the money" in your situation, because at some other table, they offered the eaxct same deal, aad there, the other customer won $1800, paid back the $1000, and walked out with $800. If the casino can't collect from the person who lost, their loan couldn't have been offered in the first place.
This is the first piece I edited after being criticized on HN for being too political with my small house story. I wanted this to be less political and more personal.
>It's interesting how the copies are (inevitably) always deeply inferior to the originals.

Some are dangerously so. DWR doesn't carry a knockoff, however there are a fair number of Isamu Noguchi coffee table knockoffs out there, with dealers selling them for only $200 less. Saving $200 becomes irrelevant when you discover that the knockoff isn't counterweighted by design, and you hear of a story of someone who had to clean up a huge mess of plate glass.

-----

DWR's saving grace will probably be their absurdly helpful and friendly staff. The "ready-to-ship" is still valuable as well, as there's plenty of manufacturers out there where the realistic lead-time for delivery is 16 weeks, and still far too many that only deal with interior designers.

I'm a male. If I go into a regular (non-chain, family owned) furniture store I'm promptly ignored by ALL the staff members because there isn't a gal on my arm. On one occasion I tried to order a different size of a giclee than the one on display (because I couldn't see it working on something other than a 14 - 18 foot high wall). No one could be bothered to help me.

Contrast that to DWR where when I went shopping for a lounge chair I could feel confident about for 50 years, they had no problem with me sitting in very high-end chairs for hours on end. When I mentioned I was looking for a credenza they had no issue helping me find what I was looking for... even though they didn't carry it. Yes, they gladly helped me find something to buy that they didn't carry.

By the by though, it is true that American culture does tend to look more towards "now" than the long tail and cheaper is better. In some cases it's hard to argue -- I'd like Florence Knoll's four-position credenza, but there are cars that you can buy for that much money. Honestly I still feel a bit dirty with what I paid for my Eames lounge.
Because I didn't need to? The free version suited me just fine.
Download Java for Windows Firefox from Sun Microsystems
I'm curious who works in Go on a daily basis at current stage of its development? For what kind of projects it is preferable to any other language at the moment?
I don't know where they should go on this type of map, but I do know that there's not much in common between The Blues Brothers and Frank Sinatra, or The Blues Brothers and The Beatles. Just listening to the music suggests there's not much in common. Any algorithm that suggests there is is, to my mind, suspect.

I don't know much, indeed, anything, about most of the bands/artists on this map, so I'm not going to suggest any rearrangement, but I'd be interested to see this concept of "similarity".

Actually, I probably wouldn't be interested, but I hereby announce my position as a skeptic.
Agreed. We have so much bandwidth and computing power that most of will see either copy at the same time. Besides, I like seeing the design of the site and article photographs, they set a tone.
Humans and Aliens Might Share DNA Roots
SysV IPC has message queues? I didn't know that, that looks useful.
The ease with which you can replace "Google" with "God" in that sentence is disconcerting.
Wow, this is great! They haven't announced anything new (still officially is read only) but it looks like they are preparing to reverse their stance!
Take a look at their product; the experience is hardly like that of a desktop app. It's just an inaccurate title.
4013 3825 3468 1688
Namebench - An Open-source DNS Benchmark Utility
Assuming there is an "out there" is unwarranted. As Nietzsche famously stated, "God is dead". He didn't mean the Christian god: he meant every objectivist philosophy. There is just the world with us immersed in it. It is not even wrong to attempt to describe the world in objective terms, separate from ourselves.
Actually, I do agree that this number is kinda arbitrary and it of course depends on the field you want to become master in.
But that doesn't matter, the important point is that you perform deliberate practice.
If you look at any expert/master/virtuoso in a given field, you will notice that they did just that, the more complicated the field the more hours they put into it to master.

You seem to tend to believe that virtuosos aren't made but born, ie nature vs. nurture. I think that practice plays a much more important role. That is, a natural disposition maybe be a necessary but not the sufficient condition.

Really, read that book "Talent Code" I think it's better suited to get that point across. :)
Gambling is a such giant part of the Nevada economy, it's not even necessary to "buy" legislators in any backroom way -- voters and legislators can internalize casino preferences because they all prosper together.
-4 is the limit.
The government doesn't use food or fuel to track inflation prices anymore. They were thrown out for being "volatile," price-wise - to make it all look rosy when it definitely was not. (One would, logically, think that if food and fuel prices are volatile, that would indicate that something is sour in the fridge, so to speak)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_inflation
I suggest adding one more guideline - before submitting a post, check to see if it has already been submitted.
I'm writing a compiler for OpenMP style parallelism on the Cell. My compiler produces C code.
If there's no truth to the matter of what's out there or how the world is, then I invite you to leave your 10th floor apartment via the window some time. After all, there's nothing out there that makes this dangerous.
-4 is the current system-imposed limit. When a comment reaches -4, it's a reasonable inference that there may be many more than five participants willing to downvote it.
OT, Is there any start-up that tried free (as in speech) model for SaaS product? It will be selling point, because you don't have to worry about company going out of business or that they decided to move on to something else.

We need a license that will a) protect the developer from competition as long as they're in business and b) protect users from the company killing the product. When devs are not in game anymore, it must be possible for users to run the software themselves and allow others to enter the market (fork the company, not just free software). id Software's approach by frequently releasing old versions of code in Affero GPL might work.
The guys on the Go team probably do.
in my case, replacing the critical loop in matlab code with something faster (first c on the cpu, then c/opencl on the gpu).
Pascal/Delphi
Actionscript
This is pretty good. But it's important to understand just how much has changed over time, and to add appropriate grains of salt.

For instance, the signals reference is showing its age. On Mac OS X (and probably other systems), the current signal mechanism does not uninstall the handling function after a signal fires. Also, you could have an entire discussion on the proper use of signals within multithreaded applications, and there is no mention of threads in this tutorial (because it's dated 1997).
Not to mention matrix calculations, which I actually do on a daily basis (for solving PDEs).
Entrepreneurs Who Are Saving the World
"This has positive & negative implications: communication in Israel, translated literally to English, would seem blunt and sometimes plain rude to Americans."

That is quite interesting! Especially so when one takes into account that Americans i) tend to lack manners and ii) take pride in being direct.
That's funny you ask - I did think for a second about which link to provide. I went with the print version because the article is six pages long and I prefer not to have my reading interrupted. But that's me.

Maybe ask Jason Fried: http://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/6373239390
Also for engineering works like Vibrations and Control Systems
I can see in your case where you are really just beginning so nearly anyone you talk to is going to have a approximately correct answer to your question but once you reach a certain point where you know the basics I'd argue that it will be much harder to answer your questions by simply asking those around you. You are also perhaps not asking Google the right questions. because I just did a search for "optimize MySQL Database" and the first heading of the first result that popped up was titled "normalize" so I stand by my claim that I prefer searching over asking by default.
Microcontroller stuff. Just made a mod to my Bluetooth temperature monitor side project.
It definitely is an improvement and it is beautiful, however, I see two problems already with this:

1. moving parts - this would make the plug a lot more liable to break;
2. I assume this plug doesn't have the fuse.

All in all, wouldn't there be more advantage just to switch to the EU plug instead of another design for the UK plug?
Or the software can just ignore people that vote both up or both down. The more interesting and 'telling' votes are those who agree but vote down, or disagree but vote up. Of course, it would behoove pg not to tell the secret, otherwise people would simply game the voting.
Building products that function within an adaptable system seems to be the gist of this parable. People don't really buy systems; they buy products. When the seamlessness between product and system becomes transparent enough, the product is essentially a system of interchangeable parts.
Not a daily basis, but most of my coding lately is in C++ for game design society at uni. In theory I also do php, as webmaster, but I tend to put that to one side more than I ought.
Simple to use, yet powerful is always a great combination. Quite possibly the coolest AIR project that I have seen.
Do you prefer MATLAB to Python + numpy + libsvm (for ML) ?
I don't know if it has anything to do with age, but I am more interested in the business aspect of HN than the tech stuff. Meaningful changes to technology are slow and I can find that information all over the net.But people talking about startups, their problems and the solutions are fascinating. That stuff is much harder to find elsewhere.
I can only assume that the 12 points you currently have are from people who agree with you. If so, that's very ironic.
Why not? For the average citizen prices at the local store are the thing that immediately effects their daily lives and will in turn cause them to change their spending habits accordingly subsequently effecting other parts of the economy beyond basic needs.
No, those were just wrongly categorized to begin with.

"The physics-defying spooky fact of X" belongs to parapsych (and I'd casually bet my life on the null hypothesis under good enough testing).

"Experience of X" belongs to neuropsych (and it reflects poorly on them if they dump it over the fence on the parapsychologists because it just sounds so spooky and unprofessional. Bah humbug.)
Very helpful to understand their motivation, thanks. Unfortunately their rationale still amounts to: others are doing something sleazy, so we have to do something sleazy, too, to defend ourselves.

I don't own a Dell or run with any toolbars. I would find the "Browser Address Error Redirector" and remove it if I faced that warped experience.

So for me, this unrequested proxying isn't help, it's collateral damage from two competing typosquatters/querysquatters each trying to one-up the other.

A harder, but classier, way for OpenDNS to escalate their
battle with Google would have been to offer a different set of DNS server IP addresses for customers who may want OpenDNS to trump Google/Dell.
Again, the Fed uses a Fisher index on personal expenditures (the PCEPI), not any basket of goods. Their inflation numbers track everything that people buy for themselves.

Core inflation and CPI are different beasts, not used by the Fed.
Last I checked, identical URLs are automatically prevented. But the duplication becomes a problem when people decide to submit blog posts, etc. instead of original articles. There is (usually) only one "best" URL for a story.
TV-B-Gone for the Arduino
Fortran and D, but no Cobol or Ada...
An ongoing dispute isn't always (or perhaps even often) a sign that something is broken. E.g. evolution. If I could think of a better approach I'd implement it, of course, but I doubt there is one.
I don't think this is a hack. it's documented api behavior:
http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/documentation/#ClientLocati...
Summary: Introverts make great problem-solvers because they listen more than they talk. When introverts are able to vocalize or communicate their efficient problem-solving techniques, they become leaders. A frequent problem that many introverts have is that all the talkers/extroverts in the room never give them a chance to properly vocalize their thoughts. The Internet changed the dynamics a little bit, because introverts are now able to "speak" without waiting for humdrum lulls in conversation.

... the most powerful person in the room is often the most quiet

Another problem is that extroverts sometimes take credit for the "thoughts" of introverts (those that have been written before spoken).
It may help to understand the difference between lastfm and pandora. It is the latter that deals in musical similarity. The former is based on social network, as in people who listen to X are likely to listen to Y. This could explain nearness of disimilar artists.
Is there a good test for being introvert or extrovert? I have always imagined that an extrovert just has a better ability and finds it easier to express his/her emotions.

However, the Wikipedia definition sounds more like a description of egoist/altruist:

Introversion is "the state of or tendency toward being wholly or predominantly concerned with and interested in one's own mental life".

Extraversion is "the act, state, or habit of being predominantly concerned with and obtaining gratification from what is outside the self"
Python’s Moratorium – Let’s think about this.
This question could be posed "Does a x's brand matter?" All else being equal, yes. However, in the case of an example like Sequoia, their brand isn't some magical thing achieved through advertising. The brand recognition is a result of having kicked ass early on. If you end up investing in the next Apple, Google, or Youtube, you will also end up having a good "brand."

I find this distinction important. If you're looking for investment, follow the same strategy. Kick ass first, then find a good VC. If you're a musician, play good music, then get a record deal (or skip them altogether).
Then you're not entitled to anything. That is, I think it's unfair to expect them to extend good will to you, when you weren't willing to pay for a product that you depended on.