skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
true, but the key to any site is content. It doesn't matter if you have some cool new technology, users don't care about that. And I call it a launch, since noone knows about SO, let alone SE, except for a few thousand tech geeks. So the idea of "oh it's just another wordpress blog" didn't come up in the decision to cover it.

And hey, I had a phone interview with Venture Beat...when I launched my "non-startup"...which is more than some "startups" can say.

Techcrunch is just a wordpress blog and it gets 7.5 million uniques. WikiHow is just a mediawiki instance and it gets 20 million uniques. You can't focus too much on a platform. You think those guys couldn't build their own product from scratch? Sure they could, but then they'd have wasted 1-2 years in development time, when they didn't have to, and that's just stupid.

I'm sure there are plenty of other examples of turn key solutions being used to make a business. Meanwhile your cool new startup with 3 years of coding, 100,000 lines of code, gets 50 hits a day.

Sure I could have went out and coded up my own Q&A site, but why do that when I can just use a turn key solution?

Plus there are already >4,000 lines of customization code in the site, which is probably more than some people have in their "unique" web apps, who you'd label as a startup.

Being a startup is a state of mind, you can be a "startup" with a hello world application, as long as you feel you are. It doesn't matter how you get there, all that matters, is that at the end of the day you are working towards building something positive.

And we are getting plenty of traffic to justify that we are doing something people need. Hence the startup label.
What about getting part of the song stuck in your head? I've got the "Bravestarr" theme running circles up there, but since I don't know the lyrics, it's just "Bravestarr... Bravestarr..." over and over.

I wonder if this is more or less common with songs designed to appeal to small children? "Bravestarr," for instance, is one of those late-80s toy commercial programs a la "Transformers." In my experience, the other easily stuck songs are mostly pop or classic rock, and almost never classical. Perhaps Knuth's "The Complexity of Songs" ought to be recommended reading for these researchers.

Edit: of course, if one of you has Rachmaninoff or Bach stuck right now, my point isn't so valid.
Natural Language Toolkit for Python: http://www.nltk.org/Home

It wouldn't be hard to use that to come up with a quick "fingerprint" of a page, consisting of word frequencies. The chances of two different pages having the same fingerprint would be exceedingly small.
They install the various crap on machines because it

1) gives them revenue
2) allows them to differentiate

They probably will not stop doing this, as it's not like Microsoft is forcing them to.
All excellent points. I would add one more:

In the case of drugs, the patent can be chemically specific. It's easy to tell whether another drug infringes.

Software patents are sufficiently vague that it's hard to tell what they cover. Which has a chilling effect on people making software. How do you know whether you'll be sued?
Or as Paul McDougall at InformationWeek proudly proclaims:

Microsoft Word Gets Facelift

http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/microsoft_news/s...

But you don't need to read the article. There is nothing in there about cosmetic improvements.
CherryTree 0.8.1 su Ubuntu
Generating Thousands of PDFs on EC2 with Ruby
Activation barriers. Cutting ties to where you currently are may be sufficiently painful that moving isn't worth it, even if the end result is an increased standard of living.
I have to agree that destroying one bridge also makes the problem solvable, but I was aiming for a more constructive approach.
Lessons Learned: Why vanity metrics are dangerous
Any time two different teams (or even people) are writing code that talk to common JSON, it's probably a good idea to define it in a schema. Think of it as a class of unit tests - except the relative effort required is miniscule, and the benefits exactly the same.
I didn't know that. I would hope that by the time the title gets changed the potential contributor would have seen the earlier contribution.

Mind you, the evidence is against me there ...

Still, perhaps most sites have an unchanging title, so perhaps it will still work enough.
In driver's ed, they teach a 2-second following distance from the car in front of you (4 seconds, perhaps, if possible; in traffic, however, 4 seconds is a hole to be filled by a greedy-algorithm-piloted car). The arguments in favor of this are that it's easy, and it scales linearly with velocity, so that you'll be further behind when moving faster, and have more time to react.

At first blush, this article seems to contradict that: since stopping time is O(n^2), we should need a quadratic stopping distance formula. However, upon further consideration, it seems to me that the 2-second rule ought to be just fine. That allows for reaction time (assumed to be 1.5sec in the article), and the quadratic part is taken care of by the fact that the other car can't just stop dead in front of us, but has to take the same quadratic stopping time that we do.
P.S. Article in Wired this morning
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006656
And what to you do when the parents have social problems themself that prevent them from being good parents?
This is very true. However, just because college does exist doesn't mean something better can't show up. It seems to me college is the best place to get all of these things in the same place quickly.
Oh boy... Overpromising is the easiest way to ensure underdelivery.

All those who believe this design is feasible before 2017 for the price mentioned raise your hands.

I love the ideals behind the OLPC and I deeply respect those involved in the making and support of the XO, but this is just not realistic.
Saying you don't have a "talent" for something is another way of saying you don't enjoy doing it. If you don't enjoy it, you won't practice it, and if you won't practice it you won't be good at it.

I've known CS-theory people - who I know are very bright - say similar things about systems research.
I'm surprised he didn't question how the link between the characters and the avatars worked. Everything else seemed plausible enough, but I struggled to find an explanation for this. Any thoughts?
Actually here: http://current.com/16ega4c
I for one welcome our humorless down-voting obverlords.
My advice: don't rush it. Work on a small project together first to make sure you're compatible.
More retailers embracing food stamps
His definition of a religion is meaninglessly vague. By his definition, shopping at stores after looking at ads is a religion, as is my job, and school.
Swiss Army Knife of Unix Debugging: lsof
That's a great idea! Forced relocations always work out well, just ask the Native Americans. We really appreciated being moved across the country and forced to live in reservations.

We should definitely use that as the solution to climate change.
TextMate is currently set to Inconsolata at 15pt. Comparing screenshots of that vs. Monaco 13, it looks like the anti-aliasing adds a lot of bulk to the characters in Monaco -- Inconsolata's characters seem a little clearer to me.

But thanks for the link, seegate -- maybe I'll try a proportional font for a few days and see what I think. (=
mathoverflow would be completely inappropriate for this person; it's aimed at professional mathematicians.
After Dry Year, Start-Ups Are Poised to Get Cash
Are dups that big of a problem?
I think there has to be some filtering out of irrelevant words, though. Rather than a unique fingerprint, there would have to be a measure on similarity.

But I'll have a look at the NLTK, thanks for the link!
The Church of Warren Buffett
I'm older than 16, but clearly not old enough to get this joke
Apple to demo tablet in January, asks some developers to get apps ready
...except that TextMate seems not to support proportionally-spaced fonts. Never mind...
The Secret Life of Machines: Overview of the Internal Combustion Engine
John Resig on measuring JavaScript performance and others
Google and Open Systems
I'm missing the one thing that's actually interesting (read hard)
How did they collect the generated files?
Did they take any precautions in case a worker died while creating a pdf? (Does AMPQ have some sort of transactional semantics? If so, how would one apply them)
The Unseen History
Hmm, well, I currently have Dave Brubeck's jazz tune "Mr. Fats" running through my head. That might be a little more complex than most pop, but maybe not quite Rachmaninoff.
Steps for Getting a Patent – Part 1
It took me a second too... I think she verbally said "12 in" not realizing that her bosses memo meant 12 inch? It would be pretty funny/silly in person.

Or, maybe the fact no one ever really identified them by inches, rather as "a 33" or "a 45"?
But most big projects start as successful small projects (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc.). So you can't really set out to start something small just to test the waters. You'll either drown or you won't.
I've found that the best compromise is to use verbose "n00b-style" commenting in header files (or wherever your interfaces are defined), and sparse commenting in the implementation. Interfaces are like contracts, so you want to make sure everything (including how corner-cases are handled) are explicitly described. With well-designed and fully-documented interfaces, the implementation code can usually be quickly understood even if it lacks comments and is written in a more "advanced" style.
So it's no longer "not as bad as the great depression?" Now we are going back to the dark ages?
API Design Tips
They certainly occur a lot, and I personally find them annoying:

http://searchyc.com/Dup?sort=by_date

The system already culls many dups, it would be interesting to know how many, by comparing the URL of a new submission with those of earlier. If you try to resubmit something then it counts as an upvote for the original.

Try it. Pick something already submitted, then try to submit the exact same URL. I don't know how often it gets invoked, though, but the simplistic logic misses many dups.

Of course, just because it happens a lot (for some value of "a lot") that doesn't automatically make it a problem.
Totally agree with the above. Everyone can remember when success is achieved but no one seems to care about the thousands who fail trying to do the same thing. That is why medicine, my field, is no longer practiced anecdotally but based on evidence.
Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity
That may be, but a lot of folks didn't think that it was acceptable then. If they think that it's different when white males are involved, I'd like to hear why.
I like to think that their 'network' of knowledge helped them realize they don't need technology and the chaos that comes from it. Or perhaps they have already been where we are and have moved past it realizing there's a better way to live.

Edit - Hmm a downvote for an on topic opinion? Would it have been better had I said "Who cares about the details its a freaking movie and you nerds need to get over yourselves?" :)
Marc Andreessen said something around 2000 that really stuck with me with regards to spending on marketing/advertising. His take was basically you create something that has underlying value, and is useful to customers, and _then_ you advertise. If you try and do it the other way around, build excitement around a brand prior to the value existing, you are just flushing your dollars away. The brand becomes an extension of the underlying value - marketing is just one mechanism to communicate that value in building a brand. I do think the software/online applications are a different type of industry with regards to branding than apparel - the value is immediately more apparent (Taking nothing away from Calvin Klein and friends).

More on Naming:

In 1999 our company was supposed to "run the cloud", and in fact, be the biggest/loudest company to do so:

ergo: LoudCloud

In 2002, after the crash, we sold the infrastructure portions, and needed to come up with a name for a company that would provide the Software for Operations.

ergo: Opsware
Yes, if you were to drive as if every car in front of you could run into a magically appearing brick wall, then you would really need such large distances. Luckily, that's not the case.

However, if you want to drive in compliance with the "Basic Speed Law", which states "No person shall drive a vehicle upon a highway at a speed greater than is reasonable or prudent having due regard for weather, visibility, the traffic on, and the surface and width of, the highway, and in no event at a speed which endangers the safety of persons or property", ie. taking into account that you can run into stationary things, then you really have to conclude that your visibility must scale as v^2. So if you are going around a corner and need to be able to stop in case the road is blocked (ie CA 17) then this is the distance you care about.

As an aside, I think it's quite an interesting question as to what the optimal distance is if you take into account the fact that people will cut into your cushion space and make it <50% of what it was. It seems it will be the largest distance that other drivers still think is too small to merge into.
As I understand it, embryonic stem cells (the ones that were banned) are acquired by basically destroying a human embryo. I don't think it is "very bad mixing up of religion and politics" to ban destroying what can be considered a life. You might disagree whether the life is worth saving, but the embryo is undeniably living. You might disagree as to whether a human embryo is human enough that killing it constitutes killing a person. But if one's religious ethics are that killing an embryo == killing a person, I think it is reasonable politics to ban embryonic stem cells.

EDIT: clarity
InfoQ: OOPSLA Keynote: The Power Of Abstraction [video]
InfoQ: Community Performance Optimization [video]
Don't forget that you can use lsof to undelete files (provided that at least one process still has the file open): http://www.linux.com/archive/articles/58142
Maybe borrow a feature from Stack Overflow, which presents similar-sounding stories before posting? Some client-side JS which pulls the page, heuristically picks some "interesting" words, and runs them through search.yc?
This is an excellent article and well worth reading. I would have a couple of nit picks with his nitpicks though, particularly:
Since the Na’vi have had the ability to download information and share
it in a massive network for long periods of time (evolutionary
timescales), they should be way ahead of us in terms of technological
development.

If the movie ever mentions how long the Na'vi have been around as sentient creatures, I missed it entirely. Even if they would leave the "noble savage" stage much faster than humans did, they certainly would have passed through it and if that happens to be when this movie takes place it is hardly surprising.

Also, the type of information that they could pass around in this fashion is never clearly delineated. The Tree of Souls can clearly move everything there is from one mind to another, but it is never shown that this can be done routinely or without price, so it may be less valuable in terms of developing technology than it would seem at first glance.
You could start working together and agree that both of you can split up after two or three months, both of you retaining the right to keep working on the idea.

If you do split up, it probably means your ex-partner wasn't that great, so he won't pose any real competition for you.
Merry Music: MusicBrainz's Latest Summit and 10th Anniversary
It might also depend on the musical experiences of the person. (Edit: I finally got the article to load, and this is essentially what it's saying, I guess.) I can easily get fugues by Bach or Shostakovich fugues stuck in my head, or Steve Morse (Dixie Dregs), but I've been a student of music. For example, I had this stuck in my head, and I can - in my mind - hear this all the way through:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgre8dqZYa8

But what always gets me the most, it seems, are doomsday-calibre earworms like We Built This City or It's a Small World Afterall.
fitness : a daily session of deep-breathing-and-sweat-inducing muscle-paining excercise for 30 minutes is my recommendation
It is true that the bacteria must emit some sort of gas or waste product. I wonder if the bags were put into special chambers that could capture the gas and turn it into some kind of usable fuel.
Hands on the Google Nexus One phone
"Come Sail Away." But it only lasts for 37 seconds.

On a more serious note, it would be interesting to find out how many "earworms" (read the blog entry) are viral (almost all, most, few,...). Sing a bit and get it stuck in someone else's head.
Treat every job as if it were your own startup.

This statement is dangerous, especially for those just starting their careers. Clearly, employees are bound to perform their duties as defined in their employment contracts.

That's all.

Employees should not have the mentality that they need to work plus sixty hours a week because you have to "treat every job as if it were your own startup."

At my first programming job, I, along with many others, fell into this fallacy. Briefly, we were constantly fed this bull -- the more your worked, the more you were valued. (But it didn't matter if you had the skills to actually complete your tasks as long as you billed as much as possible.)

This type of propaganda is great for employers, but not so much for employees.
Given that so many sites use some form of active content I should think that, unless designed very, very carefully, two separate loads of the same page could easily produce different "fingerprints." I've considered that and rejected it as too hard for a five minute trial, whereas the test against the title seems to work very well.
Climategate: How to follow the money
58 Noteworthy Resolutions For The New Year
I think this is some of the most realistic advice about co-founders that I have read.

I need a co-founder for the company I'm starting right now; but how the hell can I expect to find what I want: "the best", as a newbie to the startup world? For me at this point it is going to be luck of the draw.
>But even then the odds against evolution
producing such similar animals on different planets is astronomical.

Convergent evolution? Birds, bats, and flying squirrels; sharks, dolphins and penguins; snakes, worms and legless lizards; and so on.
That is a good list. Also check out http://doc.trolltech.com/qq/qq13-apis.html
Cheap SEO
There was a similar program for the old Palm Pilots, where you used the IR capabilities to 'shoot' other devices. Unfortunately the other devices had to be pointed at you for it to work. I'm glad to see how far virtual gun battles have come in the 21st century.
There have been some pictures of the google-branded manuals included in the box.
Nice placement!

http://imgur.com/cgQSP
The deployment may be cross platform, but to develop with Cocotron you need a Mac. I didn't see the reasoning behind them choosing Cocotron explained on the project page, but it seems like if they really wanted it to be cross platform they should have used GNUstep. It would also be nice to have a comparison between this and GNUstepWeb.
I prefer my computers to be as Microsoft-free as possible, but mostly on the software side. Their keyboards and mice are outstanding.

As for software, there is no need to chose between Windows and FreeDOS. You know, OpenSolaris, BSD and Linux are all fine options (and I regard them as much better choices than Windows)
Slightly off-topic, but I find it confusing to display only the second-level domain for links in cases like this. "google.com" makes me expect something different than "sites.google.com".

On a more related note, I enjoyed the yacoset site when it was posted here before and have read through it all. While sometimes a little fluffy, it's for the most part interesting and insightful.
I think you have a point. My knowledge of evolution is very basic, but it does not seem too intuitively surprising that a relatively similar planets produce fairly similar life.
This idea could go so many places: extra points for headshots, fleshwounds not counting, additional modes like a Counter-Strike-like Terrorists vs. Counter-Terrorists team battle of capture the flag.

Also, imagine a massively multiplayer version of this at a web conference.
It's a Small World Afterall

Argh, no! I suddenly find myself transported back to 1986 watching the Disney Channel for the first time.

Which is another interesting phenomenon in itself, that hearing a piece of music can bring back a surprisingly wide range of in-depth memories related to previous times hearing the music. I've often wondered if this could somehow be harnassed on purpose, to help people, say, prepare for exams.
The whole 'credit ratings' thing is uniquely North American anyway.

It's only because you let it happen, in most other countries a bureau that keeps that kind of privacy sensitive information on individuals would be against the law.
My proudest moments as a programmer are those where I manage to develop some functionality in a week or two that took another team of programmers months or years to do by using a novel approach or stitching together preexisting code. Every line of code I write is another I will have to maintain. Sooner or later it will be a burden. For this reason, I strive to write as few as possible. The programmers I respect most seem to follow the same pattern.
Really it comes down to the simple fact that for the most part programmers happily sign a contract saying they will work X hours for Y money. If they are 'productive' they then can move up in the company and be a manager, but still for X and Y++. Sales guys are paid in a completely different way, same with the stock holders (founders etc). It doesn't matter how productive you are, even if you complete the task in 1 hour and have the rest of the week to do nothing, you agreed to work 40 so your boss will give you something new to do.
Thoughts on Setting Goals
As I understand it those embryos were going to be destroyed anyway. The difference being that now they might be used to further research. It's not like the embryos were created to be destroyed for research, they're a by-product of fertility enhancing procedures.
Show me how to measure productivity and I'll find a way for the 10x more productive programmer to earn 10x the compensation.

I agree with the OP that the problem here is that it is not easy to measure productivity.

http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-02-1...
> The most productive programmers orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers

This is often repeated, never meaningfully demonstrated. I doubt it is true if we are excluding unqualified programmers.
Neither articles linked in this thread actually say /what/ the patent was. Obviously XML namespaces aren't patented, so what was the patent infringed upon?
I think this article was point on. I wish more people in our industry (software developers) understood and tried to fix these problems.
High-Quality Free Fonts
They've been working on a website for 2 months, but they can't wait 1 day for pdfs? That sounds silly.
Plus, you've got a lot of similar selective pressures -- O2 atmosphere, around Earth gravity, etc. The only thing that I found odd was that nearly every species except the Pandora primates had two sets of eyes, and everything except for the Na'vi had six legs. But it's passable as a plot device, because a mainstream audience probably wouldn't buy into the story if the Na'vi weren't "human enough"