skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
firebug and webmaster tools for development, a few tools to help with SEO, a few tools to see site statistics at my fingertips etc.

I mean sure Chrome starts up faster, but I never close firefox, so it's not that big of a deal for me

as far as user experience, it's just that nothing is where I am used to things being. There is no file > edit > view navigation, in fact all the navigation is on the right side, when everywhere else it's on the left side. And it's all condensed to two 2 menus(images), which are stuck somewhere off to the side. + there is the lack of coherent tabs...if you have multiple tabs open, with firefox, you can read everything, since it allows scrolling, with Chrome you just have 40 unnamed tabs on top.
Thanks for this!

I'm planning replace most of MySQL on a web app with redis requests/responses for a faster experience. And this made my day (http://ozmm.org/posts/sort_in_redis.html). Tks!
That pricing model doesn't scale
This excludes founders interested in learning what aspects of their startup pique the interest of normal people. Even if the other person changes the subject, you've learned something.
This story seems too perfect to be true.
This is why when asked I just tell people I'm a hobo. Usually shuts down any followup questions.
... and if the power goes out?
RIM demos new WebKit-based BlackBerry browser
Two things that have helped me answer this question:

1. Smile. It's amazing how many people have a half or full frown when they answer this question. Keeping a positive expression on your face helps send the message that 1) you're interested in your work, 2) you don't begrudge the asker for her question. The result will be less pressure on both you and the asker, because you eliminate the assumption that an inconvenient conversation is about to happen.

2. Be direct. If you're smiling, it comes across as charming. I might ask, "How much time have you got?" or "How much would you like to know?" Neither question is a masterstroke (and some of you might even be thinking the questions are lame), but with the right attitude, you'll be entering a warm conversation where neither party is unprepared. I usually begin my explanation with a brief summary of my product's most interesting user story.

One additional note: If you work at a company with a good deal of access/transparency, ask your CEO or Founder how they answer when people ask them what their company is about. They get asked this question more than anyone, and they'll have several good options to share with you. It will help you model your own response.
Ha ha.. No offence meant, but you basically proved parent posters point. Opera is all powerful but is not simple. Look at the preferences tab of opera and firefox for example. With firefox the advantage is that if i want, I can pick and choose extensions. Also I can confidently recommend firefox and chrome to a non-techie and be sure that they will be able t pick it up but opera can be confusing
You need to tell us in the first paragraph what this is. Calling it a social experiment doesn't tell me anything. Describe exactly what you are trying to achieve and give me a reason to want to request a code.
I get what Jordan is trying to say. It's similar to when someone asks a band "what's your music like." The description is often far from adequate. I've found that it works really well if you give them a "demo" or say "ever see XYZ? It's similar to that." People just need to find a connection to something they are already familiar with. You can solidify your presence within their mind that way.
we’re faced with this choice of the elevator pitch which tends to draw a bunch of shoulder shrugs and “sounds cool(s).” Or a half an hour explanation of the supply chain in our market and where we fit into it.

BS. If you can make an elevator pitch for investors, you can make one for friends and family. If you can't explain to mortals what you do in 30 seconds, I'd say that's a bit of a red flag.

"I run/work for a small company. We're developing software that helps people in business XX do YY smarter. It's a really exciting project, next month we're going to unveil a new feature we think is going to change the way people in business XX think about their work."

.. there is no brand equity attached to our companies. (...) all you have to say is “I work at Goldman Sachs” and you have satisfied this human desire to be perceived as successful ...

I've met someone who works at Goldman Sachs. I know that to be a sign of successfulness, but I have no idea what he does there. He told me, and I still don't know. If his goal is to be an interesting conversation partner, he'd need as much of a pitch as the guy working for "Blippy".

Sometimes at the end of a long day, the last thing we want to do in our “socializing time” is run through another pitch.

Bleh. Socializing is about who you are. If you spend 10 hours a day working on a start-up, that work is part of who you are. Otherwise, you're just a guy with a 10-hours black hole in his day.
US to build two new nuclear power stations
Imma Be Rocking That Body Black Eyed Peas
see the music video.
15 Questions That Prove You Don't Know Squat About Silicon Valley
Problem is that, unlike in that movie, our computers aren't slick or fast. Gains in speed are quickly lost by the added load of new features.
I wouldn't trade tabs-on-top for anything. The single most common mouse action in a browser (or my browser, I should say) is to switch between tabs. In addition to the Fitts' Law benefit of having tabs on the edge, there's the ability to move the pointer smoothly from left to right on the tab bar without having to ever readjust up/down to hit the target tab.
Avoid stock options like you'd avoid a psycho doberman with rabies(speaking from experience). One way to charge would be splitting the amount into 3 parts, taking 1 part after the Spec is made. another part when 70% - 75% of the work is done and the remaining amount after completion.

The split can be 30-30-40, 25-25-50 or what ever the client is comfortable with at whatever milestones they are comfortable with.

If however, the spec is evolving and fluid opt for a weekly/monthly payment schedule for the hours you put in.
> It's extremely important to realise that the register is essentially on the side of climate change denial. It isn't shy about it and will only ever present articles that reinforce it's argument. It isn't balanced or reasonable reporting.

The "fact" that the register will only report on papers that support a particular view point does not tell us that those papers are wrong, or that they're correct.

However, your assertion that it does tells us how you evaluate evidence.
Ask HN: What do you look for in a startup job?
I've been working on an alpha version of my product for a few months, and I'm planning on hiring my first developer in the next month or two. With that in mind, I'm curious to find out what you look for in a startup job. How much of a concern is a pre-funding company? Does the specific technology platform make a big difference? What do you look for in terms of culture and personality fit? What kind of tradeoffs do you look for between cash comp and more equity? What are red flags for a wanker whose "work for equity" means "work for free for my doomed company?" Other stuff that's top of mind?
These are really useful. I've been telling anyone who will listen that Redis is a very different beast from the other NOSQL / Document stores out there - it scales down to small applications beautifully and makes a whole class of large-scale write problems (like real-time statistics) approachable for smaller projects.
The Data Liberation Front
Gates Favorite statistics is Childhood Deaths... Guess all that thrash metal never leaves the blood. (http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/bill_gates_unplugged.html)
sometimes i go with "magician". same thing sorta.
So now Nokia is supposed to maintain 3 different smartphone OSes (Symbian, Maemo and MeeGo) and brand all of them as "the best mobile OS ever"? Nice strategy to fight Apple, Google and MS indeed...
TVs don't burn out as a matter of course, and nobody's banning LCD or plasma.
The list I pointed to is simply the first thing I came across that could be used to estimate the total indebtedness of Greece. You are right that it is not a direct measurement of total debt. You are also right that total debt is not a direct measurement of government debt risks.

However one thing that total debt is good for is seeing how much total weight the economy as a whole is carrying from accumulated debt. From the point of view of the economy it doesn't matter that much who holds the debt. After all money lost to interest is lost just as much whether it is an individual paying direct interest payments or the government raising taxes to pay its interest payments. And besides, debt can quickly change categories. For instance in a credit crisis private debt can suddenly become public debt instead. (In a recent PIMCO article Bill Gross pointed out that in credit crises over the last 300 years that public debt tends to approximately double.)

By any comparison with history or other countries, a 400% debt to GNP ratio is very high. It might not spell automatic disaster, but it suggests some rocky times ahead.
Very interesting story. Thanks.
Great site! I typically use Last.fm for background music while working, but I think I like this at least just as much.

I agree w/ dogas that a next button would be nice though.
TSA detains a student for having Arabic flash cards
I've been using Redis for data storage in a couple facebook apps. It's worked pretty well, and the speed is remarkable.
It's like with data structures. Unsuccessful search takes more effort than any successful search.
Tim O'Reilly on The Convergence of Mobile Advertising and E-commerce
Coding a CSS3 & HTML5 One-Page Website Template
I think the land grab is for Q&A that doesn't suck. Yahoo Answers is a punchline and Experts Exchange sucks and has already been eclipsed by Stack Overflow (that was SO's raison d'être).
Cool article but it's ALL techcrunch users. These users are probably... do I dare say it? Tech savy & are most likely at the vanguard of technological change.

Lets see some stats for bing, google, & yahoo :)
This astonishing number can also be linked to a trend that many individuals have 2 cellphones: a work cellphone and a personal cellphone. I highly doubt that all but a bit under 2 billion people on this planet have a cellphone.

"People in developing countries are increasingly using their cell phones for mobile banking, even those who have no bank accounts." - Is that a joke or am I missing something?
does anyone in their right mind use safari on windows? I hope not, hell IE runs faster.
If you think an argument is wrong, present the logic and/or evidence to support your side.

Meta-discussion doesn't go very far and specifically, ad hominem arguments like discrediting the messenger doesn't do anything to address the veracity of a story -- at least not from the perspective of rhetoric and formal logic.

By way of example (and not to say that "two wrongs make a right"), an argument always used by climate-change believers (is there a better term? I don't want to say "supporters") is that they must be considered in the right because a preponderance of scientists agree with them. Yet recently, we've seen that those books were cooked, and that fewer scientists than they claimed were in agreement. Now, does the fact that we now know they were acting unethically mean that we should simply discard everything they've said? I think not; it simply means that we must apply a greater degree of skepticism.
The breakdown of browsers HN readers use (according to referral traffic)
No blog yet. After I get the first round of revisions done on pitchforked I'll get something up that details the process. I've been taking notes throughout the whole thing, just haven't gotten around to it yet! I'll post again once that's ready.
I'm not sure I quite agree with that. As I see it, the term "luck" is regularly applied to two categories of events. As you've said, there are the chance events (such as winning the lottery or rolling a 6 on a die), and in that I quite agree with you.

The other case, which is what I thought the article was about, is more of an "opportunity" type of luck. For example, if you happened to find a £10 note while walking home. That would be called "lucky" but it is not simply the result of chance: it is the result of you being more observant than everyone who didn't notice the money before you. And in that sense, people can easily be "luckier" than others, as the article describes.
Looks great.

I heard in an interview once that Gates would like to win a Nobel prize. This looks like the vice president's route.
After being clued in by Assaf (who wrote Vanity) I have been testing it out for adoption on my site.

A/B testing is practically tailor made for a NoSQL solution: you're storing lots of disconnected bits about individual user/test pairs but never querying over a set of them. The load is potentially very write heavy, very spiky, etc -- these sort of things spell trouble for scaling relational databases. However, key/value stores just slurp them up and ask for more. (Additionally, "eventually ACID" works totally fine for this problem: if one of your Redis machines suddenly dies, you might lose a minute's worth of A/B test assignments for a fraction of your userbase. That's just rounding error on your tests, though, and moreover it is evenly distributed rounding error, so you can just handwave it away.)

This is why I went with key/value stores for A/Bingo. (Granted, my site only has about 20,000 writes a week for A/B tests so I could have gotten away with doing it in MySQL/ActiveRecord -- heck, I could probably have gotten away doing it with opening a new flat file for every user -- but some of the larger deployments would probably never have happened if I did it that way. It would have had unacceptable performance implications for key pages on their sites.)
I'll take a look at that! Nothing is packaged yet. Is there an easy way to get this into the deployment process so that my dev site isn't packaged and everything on the production side is? Thanks!
I love Chrome.

Firefox has become FF: forever to load, forever to close.
There's an option to use the window manager's title bar and controls. At least, there is on Linux.
Relying on Fake Relationships
Haha. I'm sure she doesn't remember that now!

I'll shoot you an email shortly.
Appreciated ; )
It would seem to me plausible that while your metric may hold when considering society as a whole, zooming in on a subset, especially a self-selected subset, will invalidate your thesis. Every society will have people who love simple humor, if for no other reason than there is a chunk of people who are below-average intelligence.

I'm not saying below average intelligence -> liking LOLcats, nor liking LOLcats -> below average intelligence; I like them too. It's just that you can not enjoy humor you can not comprehend, which leaves them with the simpler stuff. It's a selection effect, one I would think would dominate the thesis.
A pun is likely to fall above the speaker's "conversational value threshold" (i.e., is it worth saying?) and below the listener's (was it worth him saying?) because (1) the comedic value is low, but (2) the speaker alone gets the added benefits of inflicting the pun and/or thinking they appear clever.
Certainly not, but lots of Mac users run Firefox. I think Apple won a lot of people back with Safari 4.0
His presentation asthetic reminds me of the Bing.com interface which in turn reminds me of Corbis - which Gates privately owns.

He's always had a passion for imaging, interesting to see it just appearing in his presentations and in modern Microsoft products . . .
I used to work in a place where exact same reason was given for not upgrading developer PCs - "devs will goof around anyway, they might as well do it while build is in progress". No joke.
"On one hand, every single one of my ancestors going back billions of years has managed to figure it out. On the other hand, that's the mother of all sampling biases." -- http://xkcd.com/674/ (hover text)
"Dans les champs de l'observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés."
- Pasteur

(Various versions of this are available in English at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur )
A startup in her 60s? That is impressive. Best of luck to your mum!
There are only so many personal chefs, drivers massage therapists one person needs.
it scales down to small applications beautifully

This is worth highlighting. In Rails, for example, the integration for Redis is seven lines of code (they're in my last blog post), and then the Rails cache you know and love is suddenly magic. It requires no significant amount of developer resources to integrate, minimal sysadmin skills to get running, and coexists beautiful with whatever you use for data persistence right now. In all of these respects it is a lot like memcached. (Or like memcachedb except without the periodic disk flush that gives your users 5 second response times.)
Here's a use case of my own. I'm running a script that does sentence tokenization. Since the algorithm is using machine learning, I have a large dictionary of fragments corresponding to their probabilities. Instead of loading that dictionary off disk, as I had been, the script now accesses them out of Redis.
3 billion is the number:

http://www.wholesaleappcommunity.com/
If you are mainly worried about your guitars then you should have a look at acoustics with laminated necks. Martin makes a series of low-cost guitars with laminated necks that are actually quite good!

The fact that the neck is laminated makes it less prone to warping as the different pieces of wood will absorb moisture in different ways and help stop each other moving, making the neck more stable over all... They use the same concept on rifle stocks.

I can't say I blame you for not wanting to take your Les Paul on a boat!

* I used to work for Gibson in Australia
Obama to announce financing for two nuclear reactors
Avoid Doing Mental Math
Ask HN: Are you Lucky?
I thought http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128764 was quite interesting and think it'd be interesting to find out if HNers think of themselves as lucky or not. So

Throughout your life, have you been:
Consistently lucky
Consistently unlucky
Street Fighter IV heading to iPhone
Ask HN: Review our startup: MovieListr
I actually don't mind a well thought-out pun. However, I choose to act as if I don't like them, for two basic reasons: Most puns are just lazy, lazy puns, but worse, it always turns into a freaking pun war. The horse is ridden, beaten, killed, beaten some more, buried, then the grave is beaten. They also tend to squeeze out all other forms of humor.

Why puns are uniquely vulnerable to this, I don't know, but it's pretty constant. Get two punsters in one place and it just becomes a humor wasteland until the mental thesaurus for the topic of the day is totally, utterly exhausted.

Choosing to act as if I don't like them causes a net improvement of the local ambient humor.
Or make a GreeseMonkey script.

I've mean meaning to write one that highlights people I respect and rewrites the comment tree according to my own ideas.
I'm not the down-voter, but I've found your remark and your edit completely pointless and incomprehensible. Perhaps they mean something to you, perhaps they mean something to some others, but to me, and possibly to the majority of readers here, they're cryptic, content-free, and add nothing to the value of HN.

Your profile gives hints as to what the "context" might be, but perhaps if you gave complete, clear and coherent comments you would be more effective at putting your point, regardless of whether you care about karma.
The description of the unlucky person sounds more like me than the the lucky description. I try to avoid using intuition as much as possible and I always make the rational choice as best as I can judge it. Yet, I feel neither lucky nor unlucky.

Partly, of course, that's because I don't believe in a person being "lucky". And, to the extent that concept is meaningful, I've always believed in "making your own luck", which I seem to do just fine.

You don't need to be a superstitious person to gain all the benefits of "luck".
Take the poll. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1129321

I think it'd be interesting to see whether HNers consider themselves lucky or unlucky overall. I have a guess, but don't want to reveal it for fear of prejudicing the answers.
Google, users "doing it wrong" is a signal to get it right
Little background: A friend and I have always been huge movie fans, and our movie libraries have been growing steadily for years now, so we thought it'd be really cool to have a place online where you can catalog your movie library, while also mapping it to actual places where you have stored the movies.

For example, you can add a movie to your library and tag locations to it. Lets say you own 12 Monkeys in your Black hard disk, etc.

Anyway, we're looking for feedback. Registration is free and fast. Thanks a bunch.
Already posted some time ago but still a beautiful story that I enjoyed (re)reading : )
"Here are a few depressing facts:

"The more diverse a school is, the less likely it is that kids will form cross-race friendships."

That ought to prompt some reconsideration of social policy. The studies would refer mostly to compulsory attendance public schools, and maybe the first thing to do is to change school financing mechanisms so that more schools are open to all comers on a voluntary enrollment basis. This works for my son's online "school," which is both racially diverse and full of students who have friends from other races. (But it sets my teeth on edge to refer to people as belonging to one race or another, as my own family is multiracial, so every one of us surely has various friends of a "different" race whoever our friends are.)

Link to FAQs and discussion about how race plays out as an admission factor in United States colleges:

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/85867...
Why everything is fair game for virtualization
I charge by hour. Most of the time I write, fix or break software.

When I have a new customer, I tell her that I will send an invoice after a few (10-20) hours of work.
She will learn very early what results I can produce in those few hours and whether she likes working with me.
I learn very early about her the willingness to pay.
I then do my invoicing based on the results of that first test.

Usually I invoice my customers once per month. Some only, if they 'used' 50+ hours. It is all about trust. One customer wants an detailed explanation for every hour in the invoice, so I invoice often. Makes it way more easy for me to get my money. Another customer is very relaxed and just pays what I tell him. I invoice him twice a year.

About stock options: No clue about how common this is. I got the offer to buy after some month of work with a client. Another gave me shares as a present after 8 years happy hacking.. but I never asked for any stock options. Although I guess I should have done so.
I would never work for shares only. I have currently one project where they pay me less than usual but I got many shares. But this project is more about fun than about money.
It got... mixed reactions.

To an outsider, it does look like another case of American exceptionalism.
That's right, he does not. But you can live in a smaller apartment or live in an apartment of the same size with more empty space which arguably is better if you ever plan to do anything creative there. Or just spend better quality time relaxing. In other words, I claim that having a room with lots of empty space in it is a value in itself. And save money on the original purchase still.
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