skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did you have to interview again in October, or did they just reactivate your previous offer?
Worded that way, I'd have to say no. But clearly the subtext is Citizens United, which I think is a lot trickier. A lot of important 20th-century free-speech precedents depend on applying the First Amendment to corporations--- corporations like record labels, newspaper/magazine/book publishers, film production and distribution companies, even adult film theatres. It's possible that a narrow First-Amendment exception can be carved out for direct electioneering on the part of corporations, but I think the proposal that the First Amendment doesn't apply to corporations at all is a cure much worse than the disease.
Agreed. Note that most of this eye candy can be put in a screen message line (I don't do that, but if I did that's where it would go). Most of it (except for the cwd) isn't really relevant to a specific command anyway.
That seems like a net win to me; you get a lot of time to think when you're out running (which is to say it's not wasted time).
Slightly annoyed. seems wrong to me--or at least, needs an explanation, i.e. in what sense does he find it annoying. The JK Rowling analogy doesn't make it clear either.

See also: http://twitter.com/msuster/status/8502845427
The merits of this decision are a legitimete topic for debate. I'm still not 100% sure how I feel about it.

The point that I feel like those who are against it completely miss (and that anti-business people generally miss) is that corporations are just groups of people. It's people/turtles all the way down.

A quote that I found interesting, even though I do not agree 100%: "Until today, we had the right to free speech, and the right to assembly, but not the right to free speech when we were assembled. The Supreme Court has thankfully corrected that absurdity." http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2010/01/good-news-for-...
The main difference I can think of between a marathon and shorter distances is the glycogen 'wall' - something that won't happen on a run of less than 20 miles. There's also the whole fact that four hours of stress and strain on your joints and muscles and feet is somewhat worse for your body than ten minutes.

(Having said that, I don't see the point in twisting statistics to lambast marathons either. I plan to run my first one next year regardless!)
Mapcity
It's not actually that bad >.> I was pleasantly surprised by the number of other people around at 8.30am!
What's wrong with Blogger? It does its' job well.

What's the point from Blogging? -> Getting the word to the others. and it does it well, so it's not crap.
'Maybe that's a good startup idea right there; build a site where businesses can post their problems, procedures, workflows, painpoints, etc, and professionals can comment on them, offer suggestions, either using existing solutions (technical or not), or try to make business connections ("we can build that for you").'

I think it's a good idea but don't you think most businesses would be reluctant to show their problems to the web world?
Read the comments first, then the article. The comments are in stark contrast to the article itself.
Yes and no. (As it happens, my current book du jour is "The Collected What If".)

The Greek, Roman, Islamic, and Frankish empires all became huge due to the need for exploration and conquest, usually from a relatively small number of people. Their massive growth led to greater wealth and cultural exchanges, which enriched the empires, sometimes at the cost of conquered territories and peoples. That, in turn, usually led to stability.

The great exception to this is of course the Mongol Empire. They were the largest empire in history, led by just a few people, and they were incredibly destructive. They had a certain distaste for cities and everything that they represented (education, culture, liberalism), so they became an unstoppable destructive force. The "What If" book claims that some regions of the world are still feeling of the effects of this. But, the empire only lasted for around a hundred years.

I'd say that a civilization's thirst for exploration and adventure is one of the traits which would tend to lead to longevity, but others include a respect for education, intellectualism, and liberalism.
Precisely. Adobe has two very important footholds on the web: Flash and Acrobat. The web authoring tool landscape is only aimed at developers, a relatively minuscule market. Why would they eat their own tail?
Obama axes NASA moon plan in new budget
I wound up in a very different position from what I'd applied for, so they did a phone interview with my potential manager to decide whether I needed to come in for another on site interview.
This is actually one of the ways people write C modules for python. It is a Python -> C translator tool (which the linked article doesn't make very clear).

I myself prefer sip or weave, but this is also just another way to write C that is tied into python.
I thought he was saying that he thought it should be higher than half.
Ameritech Construction 
Ameritech Construction invites you to discover what makes our products and services the best in the Virginia-Maryland-Washington, D.C. area. Ameritech understands that deciding to improve your home is a big decision.
While I generally agree with the article and disagree with the SCOTUS ruling, I do have to take exception to this statement:

> However, corporations do not exist outside of government

If you take the "corporations are most certainly not people" position (and I do), then a corporation is an agreement between a group of people with a mutual economic interest. That's not a government creation, that's a naturally arising phenomenon. You don't need any sort of government to create a corporation, although contract law would help. But I don't think it's possible to have contracts without corporations arising naturally and organically.

Am I missing something? Obviously, the US has passed a lot of laws giving corporations particular rights, responsibilities, liabilities, privileges, etc. But that doesn't mean that corporations are government creations, in the same way that citizen's rights are natural right that are recognized rather than granted.
I previously pointed out that people did object to Bush's deficits.

Now I'll show that Obama's deficits are significantly larger.

Bush's worst deficit, less than $500 B was in 08, and that includes the bailout. From 04 to 07 Bush's deficits, including the war, were decreasing.

Obama predicts a 2010 deficit of 1.6T. He claims that it will drop to 1.3T in 2011, but that relies on economic recovery that he's consistently overestimated.

Here's a report on Obama's recent predictions - http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60U1PZ20100201 .

Here's the historical data (on debt, not deficit). http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histd...

And here's an graph which compares Obama's plans and CBO predictions to Bush's "accomplishments". This graph is outdated and actually understates what we've learned since about the Obama deficits.

http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/files/2009/04/obamadebt....
So, what? In 90s hotmail.com worked on FreeBSD for years.
Are you arguing that the First Amendment doesn't apply to corporations at all then? So was the Pentagon Papers case, which ruled that the New York Times Company had a First-Amendment right to publish the Pentagon Papers free from government censorship, wrong? Maybe some individual author had the right to publish them, but the New York Times Company didn't? What about the free-speech precedents involving corporations like adult-film producers?
What I find ironic is that we experience a fair amount of cognitive disequilibrium when we discuss the legal rights of corporations in comparison with the legal rights of individuals, but we aren't bothered by the difference between the legal rights of humans and the legal rights of animals. IMO, the basic rights of human individuals are more similar to the rights of advanced animals (like pigs) than they are to the rights of corporations.
At the end of the day, if a Sales person can bring in 100-120% of their salary, then they're worth every penny.

Sadly when I joined my current company there were two sales staff who seemed to run the place. Within about a month they were both gone. Probably because they weren't making any leads.

Furthermore, one of them couldn't do sales over the phone unless they were at home. At the time I was the only one to spot this as being a major flaw for a sales person but was shot down immediately.
Derek Sivers: Weird, or just different? (Video)
There's a more general solution for putting VCS information in your zsh prompt called vcs_info. I don't know if it covers all the features of these hg and git prompts, but it does support svn and cvs (among others), which I still have to use for some projects.

http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/User-Contributions.ht...
Hi there. I was a Noogler in 2005 or so, but it sounds like things haven't changed much, at least on that side.

Regarding the stuff you're not supposed to talk about, there are three stages:

1. Amazement at how it all works; wanting to go run and tell all your friends.

2. Fear that talking about Google's advantages would undermine the company (or your position in it)

3. Recognition that nobody would believe you anyway.

By the time you've reached (3) you've come to believe that Google is years ahead of anyone else; you've transferred all loyalties to the company; you accept the idea that you're in an elite of humanity.

The reality is that while Googlers are very smart, and sometimes not even narrow, a lot of their intellectual qualities are not innate. Mostly it's due to a very severe work ethic and having had the leisure and wealth to pursue a field with single-minded focus since they were in their early teens. And much of this is mere bravado, or habitual oneupmanship learned from Ivy-league American schools. Don't be intimidated, and try not to abandon all your own intellectual standards in favor of Google's.
There is a huge power asymmetry between a corporation and a natural person.

If the former is able to voice their political opinion without constraint (e.g. Enron spends, say $1 billion dollars in an election), they can effectively manipulate our democracy, drowning out citizens' political will. This is what just happened when the (conservative) Supreme Court overturned the limits on corporate spending in political campaigns.

Moreover, it now enables foreign corporations to manipulate election outcomes.
The $27,000 suitcase
Lockheed Martin is hiring Python people, last time I checked.

If you're targeting a skill set for your next jump, that seems a bit silly. What is it that you want to do? :)
If you are in the sf bay area, Yelp (in SF FiDi/SoMa) is looking for a bunch of python programmers.

www.yelp.com/jobs
It is worth noting the real damage that cells such as these have caused in labs all over the world. Given the way they have contaminated lab testing materials, and the they have thrown off results, one has to realize that hardy cells are capable of undermining large categories of tests. Hela cells are now well documented, but how many other such cases are there?
I want to read a Jquery book... I didn't succeed yet, I'm building a $20K project with that thing called Jquery, but it seems that I need to read something like 500 pages before being able to parse the DOM with ease.

I need to read it quickly, the project need to be complete within 1 month... or I'LL DIE :'( :'(
There are a couple assertions in here that I fundamentally disagree with:

1. Magic is something you don't understand.

I disagree. I get recursion. It is pretty simple. Yet it is elegent and subtle. I think of it as having a deep underlying magic due to the power it provides via simplicity. It gives the impression that there is more going on than there is, that using a recursive algo is touching on a fundamental rule of existence.

2. Magic is just a leaky abstraction that breaks down at some point. (it doesn't scale linearly)

Everything is leaky abstractions. Seriously, everything. I'm learning about electronics right now. Capacitors in real life are very different than the ones I learned about in physics E&M. Of course if I assume that I will be operating w/in sane limits of the components I choose, the leaky physics abstraction is just fine. This example was specifically chosen because on top of it is built a pile of leaky abstractions as well, one path of which can end in data structure (oh no! leaky abstractions).

Just because an abstraction is leaky (magic) doesn't mean it is not useful in certain places.
Dailybooth would be a great company to ask about traction.
Because no one wants to get sued by their breakfast sausage.
We use Python extensively at Mixpanel (web analytics) and we're hiring. We're based in Mountain View, CA.

jobs@mixpanel.com
You're thinking about partnerships, which are the associations of people others are talking about (created, as you point out, via contract law).

Corporation are special entities created by governments to shield the executives from persoanl responsibility for their actions as executives. In THAT capacity, I argue that the corporation does not inherit human rights because of the shield that protects the underlying individuals for responsibility for their actions.
Well, what do you expect? At the moment, we're a country of conservatives in the midst of a depression. Everyone's interested in markets and commerce, while great swaths of our population regard climate scientists "skeptically", as though they are purposefully deceiving us to some end; regard evolutionary scientists as liars; regard science and scientists in general as untrustworthy because they're too far removed from "blue collar Joe".

The decisions of our government are the result of our culture, not the other way 'round.

I might've hated the decisions to wage war in the Middle East on a number of grounds, but I had to admit that those decisions had massive popular support.

This is just a continuation of that same culture in action, and any historian could tell you what's likely coming next.
Rackspace cloud is looking for python programmers. http://www.rackspacecareers.com/
Google believes in data only. Designers are not used to justifying their ideas with data.

While no one comes out and says it, the implication is that most of what constitutes the design profession is mere flimflammery. You don't need a designer to tell you what shade of blue to pick when you can just A/B test a few hundred shades.

That's why a lot of designers quit.
http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=677
Question for the peanut gallery: how do you handle user uploaded files that are not in version control if you swap out the whole site?

Create post-update, pre-swap symlinks from inside the new docroot to directories outside of the swapped docroot?
That talk was on Sept 30, 2009, at Stanford's EE380, Computer Systems Colloquium. http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/

It's open to all. Almost all talks are webcast and most of the ones that are webcast are available online "forever".

FWIW, I introduce Dr. Ungar.
What's the equivalent of Twitter's 140 char limit for non-Latin charsets?
The answer is that I'm engaging in satisficing behavior, not optimizing behavior.

When I wanted to start a blog it was there and free. I've seen lots of other people use it. And so far it has been good enough for my needs.

If I was a serious blogger I'd likely find things I didn't like about it and look for something better. But until some obvious shortcoming irritates me, it isn't worth the effort for me to find something better.
Open format
A corporation is established in terms of a Companies Act or the like in terms of Corporate Law (particulars depend on the jurisdiction).

A corporation is a legal person, but not a natural person.
A corporation is not an agreement between a group of people. People can agree to form a corporation, but the corporation itself is not an agreement (merely the end result). For example, a corporation can act against the interests of the people who founded it.
Tesla Files IPO Papers, Ending Production of Electric Roadster in 2011
As long as you don't have a system where they get compensated for selling stuff that actually loses money in the long term (easy enough ... IF you're honest and transparent), absolutely.

In the early '90s I worked for a company with a greedy nepotistic CEO who didn't keep faith with his salesmen (or anyone else for that matter), which regularly brought the company to near death and after I'd left killed it. Everyone I knew (including programmers) walked away from the company before then with 4-5 figures in bonuses or commissions in arrears.
"Adobe ignored reader problem for 2 years, now ignoring solution"
It's especially baffling given that YC claims its real value is not the financial investment (which is just a stipend to keep people fed and housed), but rather the chance to rub shoulders with titans of entrepreneurship, receive sage advice from avuncular mentors, and get shopped around to VC.

None of these stated benefits are things you can just copy, so it's not clear what the griping is about.
Full Screen Coming to HTML5 (Ajaxian)
Apple has established itself as a premium brand. I would hate to go head to head with them at a comparable price... People are going to think that the Apple is a Lexus and you are a Chevrolet unless you have a couple of billion dollars and a decade to invest in advertising your brand.

That being said, I will say I like the idea of a 16:9 tablet. I owned a Toshiba Portegé TabletPC and loved web browsing on it. It never crossed my mind to try to watch a movie on it. But I now have almost all of my DVDs legally ripped and do watch things from time to time in bed or on a plane.
Funny that all these super intelligent people at Google don't understand the need for 'privacy'. Even their boss' public statements about this issue seem to be pretty dumb.
The figure that I thought was low is that only about 50% of Google applications started as 20% projects.

I have no issue with only 20% of your time being officially set aside for side projects.
Dear B-Schools Who Want To Prepare Entrepreneurs
I like blogger.com. Just yesterday I fired up a blog for my wife's retail clothing store. Now she can do all that stuff herself instead of relying on her custom-programmer husband. :)
They will secretly build their ship in full view in orbit, surprising everyone when they attach boosters at the last minute and rocket out toward Jupiter. They will name their ship after Chinese rocket scientist Qian Xuesen, and it will run into trouble in the vicinity of Europa.
Some of the rights corporations have are actually 'more' than individuals.

A corporation for instance is immortal.

There is a movie out called 'The Corporation', depending on your political views you'll probably see it as attack piece or a documentary.

But whichever way you perceive it the facts in the movie are real and because of that alone it is worth seeing.

http://www.thecorporation.com/

edit: why is it that polls with quite a few votes for the poll itself always have very few votes for the article?

You'd think that if it was worth voting in the poll that it would be worth voting for the article too.
Appropriate given the recent discussion of "Adobe is lazy" and "Adobe doesn't fix flash bugs".

From the link (a tl;dr, if you will):

"""Adobe Reader comes with Adobe's PDF preview handler but the installer has a mistake which means the preview handler does not work on 64-bit systems. People have been complaining about this for over two years with no official response. It turns out the problem can be fixed via a simple registry change.

(Update: Months have passed since I discovered the fix and Adobe still haven't corrected their installer. Having ignored the problem for over two years Adobe seem intent on ignoring the solution as well. That's despite me doing the research for them, giving away the fix for free and having hundreds of grateful people confirm that it works. What a useless company.)

I wish I could bill Adobe for my time fixing their mess. The ridiculous thing is that whenever we've tried to officially inform Adobe of bugs in their code (like blindly calling through a null pointer after a failed QueryInterface), bugs which we've found and worked around for ourselves but which may cause problems for other people, they've asked us to pay them for a support contract. WTF? Who is supporting whom here, exactly?"""
Liquid glass: the spray-on scientific revelation
All The Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed the Weekend
Freedom of speech is necessary for an effective democracy.

Corporations are not citizens.
Cardinal Richelieu observed the folly of such laws centuries ago, when he said (liberally translated) "Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, and I will find something in them with which to hang him."

Personally, I like the soundbite I first saw a couple of years ago: if I have nothing to hide, why do you need to watch me?
Much of the gloomy commentary on this announcement, Cringely's included, is uninformed. (And statements like "NASA has had zero success in relying on outsourced systems" are just bizarre.) Canceling the Constellation program is a positive step, and an essential one---it makes possible the very dream, bold human spaceflight, that Cringely seems to be mourning. At the very least, read the Augustine Commission's summary report; it's only 12 pages. Note their statement of the goal of space exploration: "human expansion into the solar system". That's cause for excitement, not mourning.
I think it's symptomatic that the author does not mention building the part where people PAY YOU MONEY.

Payment integration is a big pain and is something you should get into the product early, because grafting it on later will hurt. The same goes for ad management, if that is your business model.
I stopped reading when he used the "cute" sexual slur against the Tea Party types, but I'd pose his question differently: "Is Blue State America going to hell?"

While some of his examples were nationwide, many if not most were limited to the Blue State model of high taxes and low benefits (unless you are a part of the government). Add to that the fact that population density seems to limit useful personal rail travel to the Blue States (NE Corridor and California) ... well, enough said.
> I would argue that if you really want to start a company, but don’t feel like you are ready,
an MBA should be your fallback position.

This was pretty much why I went to business school. Except I didn't think about it as my fallback position. I kind of thought of it as a way to ease myself between a cushy paycheck and the wild.

Overall, my conclusion is that business school is pretty useless for starting a business. Very few people start companies straight out of top business schools (too much money in taking job), and most of what you "learn" about entrepreneurship isn't actually all that useful. Sure I learned how to write a business plan, but I never actually needed that business plan once we got started (and we completely changed the idea within a month).
Making your site a frequently used one is not solving the password problem; it's sidestepping it.
Never-before-seen pictures of Intel-Micron facility
One of the most interesting (for me) facts is that
the scientists put this organism into separate family,
and in fact, the cells themselves behave more like amoeba, but genetically way different from them,
Making XMPP chat bots with ejabberd and a ReSTful web interface
The iPad does not fill the e-reader niche. The screen is not as friendly to the eyes as E-Ink. It is still a standard backlit LCD as far as I'm aware. It's also too heavy for pure e-reader use. An e-reader should be comfortable to hold in one hand while lying on one's back.
Finally, I may be wrong but I'm pretty sure you can't transfer PDFs from your desk top computer onto the iPad to read. That kills any chance of it being qualified as a good e-reader.