skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Additionally a lot of the VC figures for Boston count in biotech numbers (as they should) but this often makes it look like we are floating in cash here- which isn't the case. YC also skipped town, which was unfortunate. Thankfully we've got TechStars now handling similar here.

What I think makes Boston special is that we've got some of the brightest students in a very geographically dense area, a great tech community (betahouse, WebInnovators, Sprout Labs), some decent local tech publications (Xconomy, Mass High Tech), coffee shops willing to deal with hordes of laptop users, etc.

Plus while it is expensive here- it isn't so ungodly expensive like having an office in Manhattan. I'm guessing New Work City's (coworking spot in NYC) rent is probably 2-4x that of betahouse in Cambridge. Stuff like that makes startups a bit easier here.
That would be highly unusable, but fortunately that's not the way Android works. Roughly what happens is that when an app (actually an Activity.. but we won't get into the difference right now) is no longer visible to the user, the OS automatically saves most of the apps state, and calls the apps onStop method to signal the app to save any app specific state. If the app is later killed, the next time it's started one of the items passed to the app by the OS is a reference to the previously saved state.

The effect for the user is much like you describe it for the iPhone. It's as though your apps never die. Whenever you restart them, whether it's 5 minutes from now or 5 days, everything is exactly as you last left it. Except that, unlike on a PC, those "background apps" don't take up any resources. Obviously there is room for poorly written apps to flub up, or for apps to override the normal behavior for specific reasons.
Cons:
Cost is huge, quality of FM radio sound is poor, it produces 50/60HZ noise also, so I cannot place it near to my bed.

Pros:
It works. I often wake up at first light or even slightly before that. :-/
Not really feature-level, but first impression is it looks like an auto-generated spam site. Also it's not really self-explanatory where the links go.
Learn How to Test Your Code
Great, 12 more ways for your phone to dial emergency numbers in your pocket with the keys locked.

I thought auto-dailing 911 with locked keys was bad enough.
I had lunch with John Koza many years ago and bent his ear a bit with an idea for speeding up the creation of pre-trained recurrent neural networks (ended up being the last example in my 2nd C++ book). He explained why my idea was both interesting and not practical. Years later I also took a tutorial from him at AAAI which was lots of fun.
Sure you can.

Also, Buffet advocates higher taxes that the won't pay and that he benefits from.

Consider the estate tax. He pushes it, but his estate will never be taxed. He also makes quite a bit of money selling insurance to help people pay estate taxes.

Yes, he benefits directly from estate taxes.
Can you use neo4j to store weighted graphs? Looking at their api it doesn't seem like there's any way to specify edge weights (or any other metadata about edges).
Sure there are professional skeptics in any camp, but that doesn't make us all fall into the category. I was a climate skeptic long before a market existed for it.

Ah nothing like a breakfast on fallacies :-)

Let's see:
Argumentum ad populum
Association fallacy
Appeal to authority
Appeal to consequences

This list was selected from the red herring section of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

I'm sure I missed some, but I'm short on time this morning...
yawn This place is slowly degenerating into a Apple fan forum. Seriously, a 4 year old joke video on the #3 spot?

But hey, let me see if I can fit in here...

Hey look this super-fresh news item! http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257...

He thinks the iPod is lame. Can you believe how stooopid he is? Can you believe how great Apple is?!
Trains and Birds
"We've also fixed a number of issues since the previous alpha, most importantly one that caused all files to be deleted after six hours."
Prices: http://neotechnology.com/price-list

Who uses it: http://neotechnology.com/customers
It depends on if you use the American or British pronunciation of "pasta."
That's exactly what I meant! Thanks for saying it so well.
There are lots of benefits from assuming you can do automated testing on code you write,

Testing makes you think about the specification, what it is you are actually writing and what makes it working.

It makes you thing about writing testable code, which means you worry about things like side effects, isolation and api's

and some times, it helps you end up with automated tests :)

testing doesnt just apply to mathematical notation, lots of real world applications suddenly become easily testable when you look at them with the eyes of a tester
What aspect of it do you think is contributing to that first impression? (Don't know would be an acceptable answer).

Would showing app icons for each result change that first impression, do you think? (for you). I'm just asking myself what value an icon would add to a search result.
What you're missing: That many people do "deliberate practice" and yet there are large differences in skill.

Of course flailing around isn't practice. The notion that "perfect practice makes perfect" or "practices doesn't make perfect, it makes permanent" has been around forever, no need for special studies to explain that.

But everyone at the Olympics, for example, has done extreme, deliberate practice, and yet most of the competitors are so bad they don't even televise it.

Finally, the point of the article IS NOT about HOW to become an expert, it's questioning the notion that becoming an expert is necessarily the goal.

Or, saying that you become successful at [anything] as a by-product of your work, not because you become "an expert" and THEN do interesting work.

And further, that people (like Penelope) shouldn't get hung up on being "an expert" by some arbitrary definition when she's in fact quite successful and could be just focussed on what to do next.
>I'll go even further: all economic systems are based on greed, of which corruption is a manifestation, and fear.

Lots of things are manifested as greed, many good.

You also forgot envy.

I'm being greedy when I'm worrying about what I've got.

I'm being envious when I'm worrying about what you've got.

I claim that envy causes far more problems than greed.
Have biometric passports been compromised?
Ask HN: Why youtube explicitly doesn't allow downloading videos?
Why does youtube does not have any "download" button for it's videos. After all these videos are free to see as many times as someone wants. It can be downloaded through other indirect means then why not provide it explicitly?

Is the issue here is legal or more related to revenues?

I think legal issue can be solved by providing an option to the uploader to make the video downloadable if he wants to.
Depends on the event, but there's always food. Startup school has bagels and coffee. Demo Day has sandwiches. Tuesday dinners have homemade stuff like chili or stew over rice or pasta.
Completely agree with XMarks, use it on Chrome and FireFox. As for other extensions (unfortunately its bugged on Chrome),

I have vowed to keep Chrome free of extensions. I use FireFox for work and Chrome for play, I want Chrome to remain super super fast.
5 Plugins Or Gems You Could Not Live Without
Neuroscientists find brain system behind general intelligence
You can set properties (including weights, though not sure if you can define said weights in a tightly integrated manner - they're just an additional property) on nodes and edges ("relationships"). It's right there in the getting started guide's "Create a small graph" section:

http://wiki.neo4j.org/content/Getting_Started_Guide#Create_a...

Weights are treated like any other metadata.
Summary: The nexus one will dial the local emergency number when a call is placed to 911, 112, 999, 000, 08, 118, 111, 120, 122, 110, 119, 995, or 0800 after a January firmware update.

The problem is 0800 is the prefix for toll-free dailing (1-800 in the US) and 111 will forward you to your voicemail for "O2's GiffGaff brand". This has resulted in a number of accidental emergency calls.

The UK emergency number is 999 and 112 (EU) and 911 (US) forward to that.
> I'm not that confident that I could spend that much money upfront without a guaranteed return (not to mention I don't have that much money).

Very few things come with meaningful guarantees, and none of them have decent return. Patents aren't exceptions to that rule.
Good to see the company moving to fix. Though I find their attempt to spin this as "theft-recovery vigilantism" pretty weak.

If my kids were attending that school (and assuming I didn't take them out over this), I would not let them keep the laptop. No second chances when it comes to spying.

Way to destroy trust in your school guys.
Warrants are derivatives.
Shahid's 'Secret' Invite To Deepika For Birthday Bash
> * "Try it Now" button sometimes drops below the "Learn More" button in FireFox

Use JavaScript or Selenium for that Test case. Get coordinates of buttons (getBoundingClientRect()) and compare them. Execute this test case on tons of different configurations.

> * Capitalization inconsistent in top nav

Easy to test. Also add spell checking along the way.

> Popup blockers occasionally stop the App window from opening properly

Selenium?

> Wierd timeout errors clumped around 1:00 am every few nights

You always can shift clock automatically (on Linux).

> Accounting needs to be able to call up weekly income reports

If it is missing feature, then no test case is need until you will start work on it.

PS.
If you want to automate your manual testing, you will look for ways to do that. If not, you will look for problems, which are prevents you from doing that.

I wrote example how to execute HTMLUnit tests at build stage because I want that. Almost everybody else says that this is not possible. ( http://vlisivka.pp.ua/en/integration_testing_with_maven_test... )
Don't screw around. Carpal tunnel surgery seriously sucks. I got both of my wrists fixed a couple of days before my 21st birthday.

Things that have helped me... Make yourself aware of your posture and wrist location. Don't type with your wrist bent at funny angles. Run something like workrave or xwrits and force yourself to take breaks. Exercise. I switched from emacs to vim because I couldn't train myself to use opposite hands for the ctrl key and the letter key. Stretch. Try out different keyboards. Try out different keyboard heights.
This was the beginning of a similar episode with 37signals (of which tptacek was a vocal contributor): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803899
Microsoft has a website?
If I was Apple PR, I would be pretty pissed some school said the blinking light was a "glitch" in the macbook.
I found this presentation from Emil (Jan 19, 2010) much more informative than the podcast linked to from the release:

http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/342947902/presentation-graph...

Edit:

What's really intriguing is what they're going to roll out with v2.0 - instead of basic, customer-written sharding algos, they're going to supply automatic sharding based on graph clustering algos.
Actually, anyone who has been in this industry for more than a few years knows that Apache has always had event-based 'competition'.

When I was at Linuxcare, I had the static assets moved over to a different server with Boa, since the main Apache server had a massive mod_perl memory footprint. It speeded things up and freed up a lot of memory. And this was 10 years ago...

The Apache advantage has always been that it did (a lot) more than just spit out static files quickly. Perhaps nginx or something else will take its place, but it certainly won't be merely a question of event-based servers being faster with static files. We've known that for many years.
I had the same problem. I bought a wrist brace ($17 @ target), and I have a larger desk that my arms can rest on. Once I fixed my wrist issues with the wrist brace, my shoulder started hurting from keeping my arm/wrist in the same spot hovered over my keyboard all the time. The two together have largely gotten rid of any pain.
Simplicity is hard. Let’s go shopping
Unlearn Your MBA: David Heinemeier Hansson
I have looked into it but it typically strikes me as totally insane in conversion math perspective. Have you seen the rate cards for teaching magazines, the NYT educational supplement, etc? Egads. And then I have to get them to read it AND get them to the website AND get them into the trial AND make the sale... and then I get $30.

I'll stick with my 5 cent CPC ads, thanks.
I stopped reading at "Cyber ethics? Hello! Most hackers I know think those two words are an oxymoron."

Most hackers I know are very concerned about ethics. Almost fanatical. They don't necessarily agree with eachother on what is ethical, but they care.
The industry used apache a lot and it deserves kudos, but it was a poorly architected from software from the start. Aolserver was a much better server as is erlang yaws.
I used to experience "weird vision", which was diagnosed as ocular migraines. I was prescribed reading glasses but was skeptical - my vision has always been perfect. I bought a cheap $20 pair of glasses to disprove that theory, and have been wearing them for over a year now with none of the symptoms I used to have.

The optometrist's theory was the same as stated in this interview - that I had a bit of trouble focusing at book/monitor distance, which was magnified by the amount of time I spent working. The reading glasses take the strain off of my eyes = no more migraines. It's been awesome.
I got Point #2 from your blog, by the way. So thanks!
It is kinda interesting in all of Adobe's push into the mobile space, they seem to ignore all the problems that current flash content is going to have.
I just don't think it's a useful state of affairs once a site has tens, even hundreds of millions of pages indexed by google.

Why wouldn't you go to Yahoo answers and do a search there?

I'm just not too into the business model of "We know about everything", lets get listed for every single search on google.

For stackoverflow, personally I don't usually find the content useful, so it's just irritating to have to specify I don't want stackoverflow results. It'd be good if Google could better judge quality of pages, as in "Is this just user generated / scraped content, or is it verified reliable fact".
PR and marketing is an important part of the discovery process. Unless you get your discovery in the market and build a business around it their is no discovery. Tesla made great discoveries but he was not a good marketer.
Big Banks Are More Expensive
They are not voting against their interests. If you can even say that voting in a 2 party system allows one to vote for their "interests", in general it's voting for the lesser of 2 evils.

Income disparity is not in and of itself a bad thing. Corporatism and Statism is philosophy both major parties, so unless you vote 3rd party (libertarian for me) then you're voting for corporatism.

"I often hear lower middle class people suggesting it is more important for the mega corporate monopoly they work for to get big tax breaks, etc., than for they themselves!" Perhaps they're taking a principled stand that:

1. Corporations and small business pay too much in taxes.
2. Rich people pay more than their fair share in taxes.
3. They recognize that having a low tax environment encourages long term prosperity and are thinking the long term instead of the short term to see how much they can get.

The philosophy you are espousing is that middle class voters (the majority) should vote for themselves to not pay taxes and for the rich to pay all taxes since that would be their best interests.

An astonishing 43.4 percent of Americans now pay zero or negative federal income taxes. The number of single or jointly-filing "taxpayers" - the word must be applied sparingly - who pay no taxes or receive government handouts has reached 65.6 million, out of a total of 151 million.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/04/15/politics/otherpeop...
I don't know anything about Gunnar, but last week I was at my yearly eye exam and asked about computer monitors and eye strain (I only ever wear contacts). The optometrist told me that any pair of glasses with anti-reflective coating will reduce eye strain caused by looking at a monitor all day.
Showcase Of Web Design In Israel
Ugh...The smug arrogance of the professional "security" community is sickening. This is a great article showcasing it.
There's no question that Goldman had to pay off those dividends with some kind of shenanigans. IIRC, they were up to their eyeballs in default swaps and CDOs, both of which were beyond toxic at the time. That 10% payout was going to have to come from somewhere.

However, my understanding was that from Berkshire's perspective, it was a straight equity investment for preferred stock. They didn't really care where the dividend cash came from, so long as they got paid. So, if it was a derivative play, it was an indirect one. Berkshire never had those default swaps on its books.

That's how I remember it going down, at least. It's entirely possible that I got some of this wrong.
Yes, bugs still need to be reported, and not all of them yield to automated tests. Nevertheless I do concur with the spirit of the article. I write very demanding test cases, often before anything goes wrong but certainly after it does, even for non-deterministic code (e.g. I'll fork a thousand processes in an automated test and invoke random busy loops here and there to encourage contention.)

I don't do a lot of GUI though, other than HTML interfaces, which are fairly amenable to some automated testing. One time I broke a sign-up form due to a misnamed field, so now I have an automated test for that.

For things like "Capitalization inconsistent in top nav", that's a prime example of why you still need to keep track of bugs. Even if you're working alone, just keep a "TODO" list. You can keep the TODOs in a note-taking program such as Tomboy, but better yet, put them right in the code. Then don't release until "grep -r TODO" comes up clean. (If you want to postpone a TODO change it to LATER.)

It might be difficult to create a regression test for that one, and it probably wouldn't be cost effective, but I suppose could have a snippet of code that iterated over the list of navigation items and tested the case. Again, probably not worth it. Better just to stomp that TODO and move on.

I can't say I have the silver bullet for the examples you list, but the important thing is to keep manufacturing better bullets with higher silver content. I figure I gotta try at least.
Betfair Bots and the Opportunity Out There
Site That Lets You Trade Startup Stock Takes Big Investment
Ask HN: Can I crash on your couch? (Seattle YC meetup edition)
I'll be coming into town for the meetup on Thursday, and I'm looking for a couch to crash/surf. I'll be in town Wednesday night through Sunday night, but any single day of letting me stay on your couch would be super helpful.

Things I like: hiking, kayaking, poker, microbrews, Django, CSS, design, personal hygiene, not smoking, startups.

I have an eye for design, I'm great at giving user-oriented feedback, and I love talking about new projects. Need feedback on yours? I'd be happy to supply it.

I don't know if anyone else is coming into Seattle for this, but if you are, please feel free to use this topic too.
How would he be capable of making that distinction? For us, people who work in the field, it is often simple to say, but would you be qualified to make such judgments on patents about chemistry?

Of course, in the perfect world, the patent office would pay enough to employ an expert on everything. But even still, if a world-class researcher on semiconductors, doing experiments nobody in the world has ever done before, walks into the patent office with this piece of germanium that has a few electrodes stuck into it, and explains how introducing voltage between these two modulates the voltage between the these two, would the examiner understand it? Or would he say: "Oh, this is just the same thing that crystal radios use, on a different material. It's a neat idea, but it's not /that/ revolutionary."

What I am trying to say is that not only would your idea not help, but it could actively hurt, for the same reason giving policemen that are ineffective at catching criminals more power does. If someone is unable to judge on the validity of something, giving him more power to do so can only hurt.

Also, from your post one can read that you think the patent office made the 1-click patent as powerful as the patent on transistors. This is just not true -- the patent office does not give strength to patents, the justice system does. Just because you have a patent on the wheel (like a guy in Australia does) doesn't mean you get to charge everyone biking -- for your patent to be used, it must be brought in front of a judge first. There, the patent can be judged much better than it ever could be in a patent office, because it is always adversarial, and the venue is as clean as we can make it.
The iPad and the Financial Web…To Infinity and Beyond
SEO advice is bullshit, I mean really it basically comes down to a) make a site that has internal links b) figure out a way to get links to your site from other sites c) modify your internal links so only the pages you want are getting link juice.

Oh and D don't do anything stupid like Keyword stuffing, scraping, fake content or anything else that can get you banned...well unless you are Mahalo...then you are off the hook.

Personally I don't think YC startups actually need SEO link building. The mere fact that they are a YC startup, means that they'll get on the front page of Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat and dozens of other huge blogs with a ton of PR when they launch. A single post on Techcrunch is worth more link wise, than a million PR1-3 blogs posting about your latest link bait strategy.
We can’t circumvent our way around Internet censorship
Aolserver had a lot of good things going for it, including its use of Tcl, but it was open sourced too late, in 1999, when Apache already had a lot more traction and uptake.

Yaws is neat, but it's kind of difficult to compare to Apache because it doesn't do as much in terms of some of the handy tools that Apache ships with, and at the same time it does more because you can write dynamic applications with it directly. Also, once again, I think it was released when Apache already was quite popular and widely used. Furthermore, the pool of people capable of hacking on C is orders of magnitude larger than that of Erlang hackers.

And when it comes down to it, Apache's way of doing things isn't that bad when you consider that it potentially has a lot of things loaded into it: those can fail occasionally without taking down the whole thing. And it's not as if Apache forks a new process for every request it receives.
Open Source Undercover Boss
It's common to set systems up so that any emergency numbers dialed go to the local emergency number. Our dialing plan directed at least 112, 911 and 999 that way, I'm not sure about the others.

A combination of trying to do the right thing and liability issues means that you tend to be over caution when trying to work out if something should be an emergency call. Even though it's really expensive for the carrier it's better to do that than fail to connect a real call.

There's also the issue of testing, and putting the same emergency rules on every handset means that you remove one failure point from the chain (making sure the right software version is shipped to the right country).
Automating Betfair - a blog about Gambling and Technology