skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I personally think that the best computer related education you can give a child of that age is to get them to understand that in almost all cases it is safe to 'fiddle' with the software on computers. I think I owe a almost all my knowledge of computers today to my parents who allowed me to repeatedly break the software running on the family PC from DOS to early Windows until I finally got my own.

Almost everyone I know of my age who can program with any level of competancy are the people who were given 'free reign' over a computer fairly early in life. Whereas the people who are less skilled are the people who were always told that if they touched the wrong thing they'd break it.
I really enjoyed reading Jonathan's blog at Sun. I'm not sure if he was the first, but he was certainly one of the first large company CEOs to blog and blog candidly (within the constraints of his position).

There were a few posts that stuck with me. I remember this one in particular, from 2005, about reducing their customer survey to a single question: would you recommend Sun?

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/defining_quality

I'm glad he's back at it with this new blog.
It works well, and it's very cheap now that the Kindle 2 is the main product.
Facebook Will Allow Users to Share Location
Here's a photo of Steve Jobs using Concurrence when he returned to Apple, in the late 90s:
http://www.allaboutstevejobs.com/pics/life/5-1995-1999/08-pr...

Notice that even if he was at a keynote, selling to the world Mac OS 9 and new iMacs, he personally used a PC laptop running a version of NeXT/OpenStep and the software that was sold to Sun. They eventually hired the same developers to build Keynote.
Holy geez, that's an awesome set of speakers! I wish I could go to that conference.
Really? What if the client demands that your application is in "3D holograph" and won't accept anything that doesn't pop out of the monitor without any special assistance from the user? You're OK with selling that even though, no matter how much money they produce, it would take years and years of development, and may not even be possible until some other foundational technical breakthroughs occur?

Please don't take this too literally and tell me all the reasons why 3D holograph is feasible, you get the point.
Really? The back page is a real turn off for me.

"Fire workaholics", "Meetings are toxic" etc etc

It's all BS.

It's like some stupid advert for a new diet where you can eat more food and lose weight at the same time!
Ryan Tomako on GitHub's working culture
Todos Are Conversation
In the interest of raising the intellectual property debate beyond tired old arguments that HN readers has been making for the past 15 threads or so, once again, I urges everyone to read Against Intellectual Monopoly at http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi...

It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. In fact intellectual property is a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not necessary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty. -- David K. Levine and Michele Boldrin, Against Intellectual Monopoly

It will cost you exactly nothing to read the electronic version of the book, so read it!

P.S. Yes, I been making the same book recommendation for the last several threads about IP, but it doesn't seem to have an impact on the quality of discussion.
That is one way to look at it but the headline says. 'Twitter makes nothing.' So the comment is about setting the record straight, not comparing business models.
Equinix: Mobile Growth to Have 'Profound Impact' on Networks
Turing Award Winner Chuck Thacker on the Future of Mobile Interfaces
I was under the impression that an object DB is a subset of a graph/network db. [IANA DB Nerd]
Cisco Unveils Ultra-High-Capacity Internet Routing System
Long pipelines cause issues when branches get mis-predicted. The half processed instructions have to be thrown away.

What you want is a CPU with a short pipeline, a fast clock rate and if possible instruction reordering and multiple dispatch.

Large caches and good branch prediction help a lot too.
It depends. Maybe. Sometimes. Your milage may vary. Reasonable people understand these apply in most (but not all!) situations.
Huh. Anyone stops by the Venice/Padova area of Italy is welcome to a good dinner with plenty of meat: homemade ragu` (not that crappy brand of sickly tomato sauce sold in the US) with egg pasta, grilled meat, plenty of red wine.

I guess I could come up with something vegetarian under extreme duress;-)
No office for founder for $2billion hedge fund management company
That's not a problem if you know the end game, which is that only one person in the hospital will ever know about it, but if you assume more than one person in the hospital will need access, you need to provide user-level permissions to prevent patient records from falling into the wrong hands; if you just give everyone in the hospital the exact same level of access, you're exposing a lot of things to a lot of people that shouldn't know about them.
on x64 you should see shorter call stacks in optimized code because the JIT generated more tail calls (don’t worry this optimization is turned off for debug code)

I think it used to be that there was little perf difference between DEBUG and RELEASE builds, so for simplicity, with internal apps we always just build to DEBUG.

The above quote suggests that these days, they really are doing worthwhile optimizations in RELEASE builds. Does anybody know more about that?
If you had an Open cell phone before, and now have an iPhone, you have lost the freedom to tinker with your cell phone.
While this is a competent technical analysis of the situation, I wonder what will happen if California just stops paying it's debts. Just because it's happened before, doesn't mean it won't happen.
"And not just followed, but followed, tested, certified, re-certified, and double-tested."

HIPAA doesn't prescribe specific technological mechanisms or official certifications. IIRC, a username and password assigned to an individual user is sufficient. I believe there are some audit-ability (who saw/wrote what) requirements as well, but it's been a few years since I dealt with HIPAA.

As a user of a system for which inappropriate data access can get you fired, you should be concerned if it does not have strict authentication mechanisms. Sally can blame Bill for having looked at some famous person's medical record.

Such snooping is actually is a recurring real problem at major hospitals which treat famous people. The Cleveland Clinic sort of solved it by assigning people like Drew Carey (widely known to be a Clinic patient) a pseudonym. All electronic records are under that name, so most people looking wouldn't realize who the patient was. A VIP office handled billing reconciliation. It's a cute security through obscurity mechanism although it's probably well known on which dates Drew visited the Clinc and which physicians likely saw him.
Embedding Google Maps in one's own site would probably be a better solution. It also helps if you have a bunch of reference points concentrated in the UK or in some other small region (you could have one world map and one UK map). That would make things clearer.
Respect for Jonathan, the guy who successfully got Steve Jobs to shut up and back up.
I think anyone who is on this particular site who hasn't heard of you and read significant amounts of your material got really lost on the internets.
"Having watched this movie play out many times, suing a competitor typically makes them more relevant, not less. "

I don't think that's exactly true. I think suing people has largely no effect on relevance, but you tend to sue competitors whose relevance is on the upswing. Nobody is going to sue Myspace right now for IP infringement, for instance, they're going to sue Facebook.
"Error Establishing a Database Connection"

I don't know about the amazing part, but you're right, it does work without flash or java! :)
Er, DMA isn't controlled by the TLB using the usual page table for access permissions? If not, PCs are ridiculously broken.
You maybe a really boring employer,then. You should appreciate the creativity. :D
He pretty much says what he means: "I am not sure these guys are real businesspeople. They need to stop behaving like children." -- he means "old businesspeople". Ya'know "professional" people. People who fit in the clip-art image of a businessperson.
This sounds like a bad idea.

TCO is not just a perf difference. Once you add it to a language, you've changed the semantics. The same piece of code will throw a StackOverflowException in DEBUG mode, yet functional perfectly in RELEASE. Scheme's spec requires TCO for this very reason.
This. I was going to ask "You mean other than R?" It is most certainly the first thing to look at.
Well, it was probably an important employee.
How Facebook, Twitter and other big sites give back to Open Source
The actual item (link is a blog with a couple of screenshots and no content other than the title): http://mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/harmony/
Stop hitting your Invisible Wall.
Delta Technologies (UK) Precision Grinding & Wear Part Manufacture
40% can't name a single online music service [UK]
Their robots.txt:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /link/link

Disallow: /link/po

Disallow: /link/pw

Disallow: /link/rmg

Disallow: /portal/po

Disallow: /portal/pw

Disallow: /portal/rmg

Disallow: */print?

# 2007-04-12 www.royalmail.com robots.txt

so i assume anything else is fine?
If on an impulse I would fly from Finland, you'll cook for me? Who else is coming! Or if anyone wants to come here, I can offer reindeer meat with lingonberries and mashed potatos, complete with Finnish vodka.
Google Summer of Code 2010 is now accepting applications from organizations
Please comment on best ways to make this site more appealing or reach out and grab ya!...
Thanks...
"Patents encourage X; software is good at X, and would be without patents; [therefore?] patents actually harm X in software."

I can't work out whether the third paragraph is intended to follow from the second (non sequitur), or stand by itself (unsupported claim). But it's not a good argument either way.
"Meetings are toxic" was in their last book. It's a hyperbolic title, but the content is more subtle.
http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch07_Meetings_Are_Toxic.php

"Fire workaholics" was a blog post.
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/902-fire-the-workaholics

The review was defensive, because 37signals prove that many typical management techniques are not necessary for success. This is a status risk for the review author, who derives his livelihood from telling people about another right way to do things, and told me more about him than about the book.
I'll read the book and formulate my own opinion on it. Thank you.
The author suggests that 37signals shouldn't "try and make a name for [their] software company by issuing such over-heated generalisations".

Is this book is about making a name for 37signals? Is the Rework Readers -> Basecamp Buyers conversion rate expected to be high?
Yes, by the review author's logic, no one should ever write a business book, because they are too busy doing a good job.
Here's the actual author's original blog post:

http://mrdoob.com/blog/post/689
One of the points of a review is to suggest whether you should or should not spend your valuable time reading a book in the first place.
Management is an interesting concept. My personal view on it is that I don't want to work with people who need to be managed.

So don't call it management, call it leadership instead. If you're on a team of peers and you're the natural leader who helps motivate everyone and makes the idea a reality, you are essentially the manager... the PHB, but you are doing it artfully.

In lots of businesses, one is not fortunate enough to be able to hire self-motivated employees, and so management is akin to being the old lady on the school yard with a whistle.

But more broadly, management is the science of motivating people... and anyone who is a "founder" and can't do the project alone must fill those shoes to some extent.

Maybe what I'm trying to say is that there is no such thing as management, only mismanagement.
Deckeo (pronounced deck-e-oh) is a platform that enables you to simply sell ad space on your website, or go big and create your own advertising network if you wish. We are focused on targeted, quality, advertising using a cost per impression model. We think that the The Deck Network and Fusion Ads are on to something with their advertising model of having only one highly targeted, well designed ad on a page. We found that there were not any great solutions for emulating that style of ad serving for our own sites so we set out to create a platform to allow ourselves to do this.

We give you the tools and the infrastructure to create an ad network that targets a particular demographic without you needing to write any code or host any applications. For instance, you could create your own ad network to target a home and garden demographic in the same way that Fusion Ads is a network that targets a design professional demographic. We aren’t Fusion Ads or The Deck Network, rather we enable you to be the “Fusion Ads” for your particular demographic or niche.

We just put up our public facing site yesterday and I am sure there is a lot more we can do to better explain how we are positioned in the market or what makes us different. If you have any more questions or comments, we’d love to answer them.
Sure. We don't get many visitors these days, what with having a baby and not as much social life as in the past. And my wife and I both enjoy meeting people from various places a great deal (indeed, this is something that I think we would sorely miss were we to move back to the west coast of the US).
I only caught the double-entendre in the title after reading the article.
Nice design, the brush shapes are pretty.

But honestly, this is the kind of application which used to be provided as a demonstration of Turbo Pascal's graphics library in 1990... Multiplying some lines into a greyscale buffer on mouse events was perfectly feasible on a 286 + VGA.

Meanwhile in 2010, Flash Player 10 can render 300K 3D particles in software:
http://www.unitzeroone.com/labs/alchemyPushingPixels
No doubt. But what the what the OP is trying to do is weasel away from a critique of the book by saying 'Well, it's really mostly about 37 signals. If you don't like it/doesn't work for you, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man'. I imagine you wrote the book with the notion that it is broadly (not universally) applicable, just like most books in the genre. And it's perfectly sensible to review it in those terms, just like this and all other reviews I've seen so far have.
1) First, there is already a better "browser" for Kindle: http://www.instapaper.com/extras

Anything that you'd want to take time to read, bookmarklet it, and each day or week Instapaper compiles a wrapup for you, reformatted to be readable on the Kindle. (Something like "Readability", but delivered wirelessly to the Kindle for reading at leisure.)

Instapaper has a live reformatting engine you can use on the fly for more readable browsing as well. This WebMonkey link, for example: http://www.instapaper.com/m?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webmonkey.com...

Amazon should consider acquiring Instapaper, associating themselves with making things easier to read.

2) Second, Amazon should be fixing other usability issues with the Kindle, starting with organizing books and documents in something other than a flat list. At the very least, group books by author sorted by original publication date, so it's easier to read through a series of books by a prolific author. And do this intelligently, so Patterson's co-authored books still show under Patterson. For example, Patterson's Women's Murder Club series, by various authors, actually follow a narrative arc across books, so should be read in order. The titles have numbers, so this one is easy. Other series are not as easy.
Beyond torture: the future of interrogation
I'm currently reading the book, and he amusingly left out the stats supporting their conclusions or the rest of the sentence which tempers the strong advice. This is obviously intentional.

They say "Don't make plans" and end the sentence with "Before you start, you don't know anything then".

They say "learn from successes, not failures" and back it up with stats about how people who failed at a prior business endeavor are no more likely than first time starters (23% of succeeding), but people who've succeeded at prior business have a much greater chance (forgot that number).

Uneven smear job a stuckup business writer.
Ask HN: How do I get people to "fan" my facebook page?
I suck at branding to normal consumers. I have no idea what to do to engage the consumers in a way that will fan my facebook page, or they will follow my product on twitter.

Are there any techniques to get this to happen? Most of the users just don't care enough about my product to go that extra step. Short of changing the entire product, what steps could I take to somehow gain fans?
Isn't ROR free? By that standard, I'm sure the BBC is doing a good job.
Not very many sites are blocked by the firewall, and usually there is a clear reason why its blocked.
Sorry, but I just absolutely detest this sort of writing, where you make outlandish claims, then fallback to a ridiculously obvious position. It's a bait+switch, and it's used way too often. You don't get any real insight, you just read what you already know.

Meetings Are Toxic
Don't have meetings
For those times when you absolutely must have a meeting
(this should be a rare event), stick to these simple rules:

And the advice is just ridiculously obvious to anyone with a brain. "Never have a meeting without a clear agenda."

Please.

Are all the startups here having meetings every day without any vague sort of agenda? Would they blindly keep having meetings if they proved to be unproductive? no.

It's great that 37signals have worked this out, but I don't think there's many people who don't know it/can't figure it out for themselves.
Ah, right. That's what acceleration is for. It all depends on how the acceleration clause is written into the agreement, but for founders, they usually have a 100% vesting upon exit clause - while the acquirer may require them to stay on (as with Pownce/SixApart) for a period of time post-acquisition.
Ask HN: Books That Should Be Read
I realize that I was not the only one who have a favorite book that I think everybody should read.

So, what books do you think that everyone should read, or at least should know about?
No, all signs point to the conclusion that 37signals actually believes what they're saying. Quality snark, though!
Playing devil's advocate. He could be saying that they're shameless in stealing ideas from different fields, like the examples he gives: music, art, zoology, history. Copying the sleek lines of a panther's eyes for your icons is one thing, blatantly cloning a competitor's UI is another.

This may be why he can reconcile suing HTC while practicing the "great artists steal" mantra.
Do they also offer canned spam?
Jessica Roy: Dear San Francisco Employers: Please Hire Me
According to http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ox -- "Oxen is the only true survival in Mod.Eng. of the O.E. weak plural."

From what I can tell, it looks like OE nouns could have either "strong" or "weak" declensions, and this is different from the dual form. Someone on another forum claims that "brethren" is another example.
The book's target audience is obviously "business people," so I'd say he really doesn't need to know details about 37signals specifically.

The review was wonderfully British -- "What is it about Americans that they think 10 years is a long time?" -- which probably is the main reason behind the criticism. Real business people according to the author are probably those with a degree from LSE.
Well, keep in mind that this is the DailyWTF, so the story has probably been enhanced for your entertainment/outrage. It's rare that you can take a story on the site at face value.
March’s Patch Tuesday
"The book is written by people who, I think, would rather be celebrities than businesspeople."

To a large extent celebrities are businesspeople nowadays. 37s has done nothing if not figure out a brilliant way to turn being web-famous into making money. While I think I'd take their business advice with a mound of salt (mostly because it's all expressed in such absolute terms as to be inherently meaningless) you have to admire the way they've used blogging and internet celebrity to turn a nice profit out of a product you could build in 2 weeks.
I guess, technically, Android support is Linux support. Apart from the fact that any Android device is running Linux, there are ways of running Android apps under Linux, including the official SDK emulator and other environments:

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/05/canonical-de...
No way to resolve this other than to wait. I don't know. Apple sometimes does strange stuff that seems otherwise out of character.
Fair enough. If enough folks found a free online course worthwhile, then I probably am overreacting. I think I'm just becoming (overly?) sensitive to the degengration of what used to be a stronger community. My apologies.
Did anyone else pretty much guess the problem areas as they were reading? As soon as I read "users will insert the pre-roll into their own videos before uploading" my mind went "ruh-roh!"

I think it was a great learning experience and he wasn't out too much money, but this is why I think having mentors who you can trust won't steal your idea is the way to go.
Of course, the reviewer neglects to note that writing a book and then selling it successfully and profitably is a case of a businessperson doing a good job.
The fact that the book is written by 37 signals (the people behind Basecamp) compels me to read it on that merit alone. Just to get some insight from people who actually have proven themselves in the marketplace.
Essentially correct. Kolmogorov complexity is the amount of information it takes to fully describe something. A million random bits have high complexity because the shortest way to describe them is to literally list them all. The first million bits of pi have low complexity because they can be generated by an algorithm that takes much less than a million bits to describe. (The algorithm may take a long time to run, but Kolmogorov complexity doesn't care about that).

From that perspective implementing a new login process for "just one client" is worse than changing it for everyone, because it increases the size of the program's description. The revised software must describe the existing login process, the new process, and the logic for deciding which clients use which process. Whereas changing it for everyone requires only describing the new process, and allows you to eliminate the description of the previous process.
Yes, I did that so people could see what the app was before deciding if they wanted to try it. And since someone here has reported a connection error, it seems the app itself is getting hammered.
IPhone dev? Going to SXSW? Let's meetup
Lifelock Dinged $12 Million for Deceptive Business Practices
Microsoft seeks browser comeback with IE 9