skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
love it. to quote steve again from his famous commencement speech:

for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

I wonder if he's proud of suing HTC over those silly software patents like "Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image"

I'm not sure what to be more appalled at, the fact that the patent office actually issued that, or that apple is seriously suing over it.
How to Improve Your figure And Top Tips Tips for a Perfect Figure
I have read nearly half of it on my kindle. It's quite short, to the point, and what you probably would expect from them.

They talk about how they run a business, and how you can start one by giving practical principles. For example in one chapter they say don't take external funding if possible, and that you have to treat it like a business, not a startup.

So far I think it's a great book. Many principles are not new (they talked about most of them in the past), but I still think it's worth it, regardless you having a company or not.

Now I'll go ahead and read some more pages.
I have a feeling this writer has no idea who 37signals is. He's probably realizing right about now that he's stepped on a land mine with exploding 37signals fanboys.

Edit: No offense to fans of 37signals (I read svn). This guy is about to get a lesson in how many fans of 37signals there are.
European Parliament Unites Against ACTA and 3 Strikes
The Hidden Risks of Flying
There really isn't anything in this story that would allow us to comment on the profitability or lack thereof
how is this better than yahoo's offering? with their woeid and whatnot? as mileszs points out, the tos arent so favorable...
EDIT: Quite ironically... they use a QR code on the Android download page! http://www.stickybits.com/android/

QR codes for the win! Seems like the Android world has really latched onto this... with the iPhone kind of not so much. You can store a lot more data in a QR code.

There are some handy tools for a common Android workflow which is, I'm at home and I need to bail real fast to catch a bus or head out, but I want the site I am viewing on my computer on my phone. I generate a quick QR code of the page, snap a pic with my phone, and leave.

Here are some links: http://code.google.com/p/qrbookmarklet/ and http://servletsuite.blogspot.com/2008/11/qr-code-bookmarklet...

I built a simple tool here in Honolulu to enhance a service that does estimated arrival times. You can find it here - http://thebus.ws/about. One of the thing I want to do as a public service and because I am a bus nerd, is get some durable plastic tags printed out with a bazillion QR codes for every bus stop on the island, and mount them in a semi-secure fashion (punks are always gonna fuck with things.... but these will be cheap so who cares). That way when you're at a bus stop you can snap a pic of the QR code and load up the page with all the bus arrivals.

GPS is even easier (which is how I am doing it right now, finding stops near you) but this is just another way to make things quicker.

I wish we would adopt QR codes more here in the US of A... Japan uses them all over the place.
Looks awesome. I'm anxious for the Sunnyvale edition! :)
At most I thought it was just a distraction technique or see if you can scare them. While you threaten the company with your lawyers and patents the top brass will have to dedicated some amount of time to fight it with their lawyers, figuring out which patents your infringing on, or what they can say to get rid of you.

If you're lucky you might get a settlement out of it. Otherwise you've slowed them down a little while they were distracted fighting your lawsuit.
Yep. I recently saw the lighting setup of one of my favorite cooking websites, FXcuisine.com:

http://fxcuisine.com/zoom-image.asp?image=http://images.fxcu...

It's amazing how professional it looks, but then again, the pictures always look delicious.
The EFF is about electronic freedom. The iPhone takes away the freedom of users and developers.

From my perspective, users and developers have MORE freedom now with the advent of the iPhone than they had before it was introduced.

Before it was introduced, you had NO FREEDOM at all to develop, sell or use iPhone apps. Now, you have freedom to develop them under certain conditions that are not as free as possible in an EFF-idealized world, but to say that the introduction of the iPhone strictly takes away freedom I think is wrong.
Braintree minimums depend on which of their services you use. See http://bit.ly/braintree-pricing
If you're familiar with everything we've ever said, and all our posts and talks, then this book may not be for you. There are definitely some new ideas in here, but if you already know it all then there's probably not much more for you to learn in REWORK.

But you are amongst the 0.000...% of the world who's ever heard of us.
That's always been one of my favorite speeches. I highly recommend it to anyone who's never heard (or seen) it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA
Meet Picnik, Google's New Photo Editing Tool
> Compared to the US media we have incredibly liberal standards of taste and decency, especially past the 9pm watershed.

I think there is a bit of a misunderstanding on this issue. Compared to US broadcast media, sure.

But you can find quite distasteful and indecent content on US TV 24/7. You just aren't as likely to find it on broadcast TV or basic cable. The FCC is really only concerned with broadcast TV. You'll find uncensored shows on channels like Comedy Central at night and beyond basic cable, everything is fair game.
Great read! There's lots to ponder, but this cracked me up:

In referring to the Pink Flamingos Godel's wife put in their front lawn, Godel says "urchtbar herzig," or “awfully charming." If that isn't the greatest definition of kitsch, I don't know what is.

[edited for clarity]
It's not hard to generate a certificate request. While Firefox and IE may use different routines to do a local key generation, it's certainly not difficult.

The scary warnings you're talking about come up if you're connecting to an "untrusted" site - who's SSL server certificate isn't signed by a known, trusted root CA.

It's certainly the best solution to this problem.
Somehow the link to the (awesome!) patent troll patent got hosed up -- http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Se...
Colorado Doctors Avoid FDA Jurisdiction to Provide Human Stem Cell Therapies
Yes, but I don't think that's more true of TailCallHelper than of any function calls using a stack. This sounds like it's saying that even with tail call optimization it's possible for the arguments to a function to be too big for the stack. For example, if the arguments you pass to the recursive function call are stack allocated and grow each time then each call will increase stack usage, even though it's reusing the space from the previous call.
And what exactly separates Decko from the other numerous ad serving platforms who are already up and running?

The only thing I got from the page you linked to is that Decko has 40% more love in it than others.
Couldn't they just let the browser remember the password?
Foursquare Introduces New Tools for Businesses
would they really need such a thing? street lights tend to point downwards, don't they?
Those of you with sales teams, what guidance do you have about sales people promising features that don't exist without getting input from the rest of your team?
Sure.

Or, y'know, if there's some vulnerability in other code that runs automatically when devices are inserted or browsed that we don't know about. There's a ton of that stuff: think desktop integration, thumbnail generation, file indexing, ...

Repeat with me: the proper, mature response to an incompletely-described vulnerability profile is not to scream at the top of your lungs denying any such vulnerability is possible.

Consumer computer systems long ago became so complicated that even smart technical people like you can't possibly understand how they work at all levels. Security analysis, however, is a field that can only be practiced via careful analysis of all levels. Don't fool yourself into thinking you have a complete understanding of your computer. That's precicely how security bugs happen.
Kolmogorov Complexity relates to the idea that you can use some kind of computer to encapsulate repeating patterns. When you do this, you have to store the data of your program somewhere and its size relates (sort of) to abstractly just how complex the problem was.

It's also equivalent to Minimum Message Length, so looking into that might help.

Roughly, the relevance remains the same if you just remove "Kolmogorov" from the op's statement. The manager doesn't understand that inventing a whole new solution is complex no matter how many or few people use it.

Which isn't strictly true, but it's definitely a good rule of thumb.
Fine as long as it's for a lot of cash. If the customer is willing to pay for it, I'm happy to jump through crazy hoops.
from article "I have the pleasure of working with real businesspeople who care about doing a good job, not talking about doing a good job."

Well, I don't know if he did research about the software that 37Signals has made, but I consider Ruby on Rails a "good job". I haven't used any of their other products (Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Campfire), but I would bet that the 3 million people using them would consider those products to be a "good job" too.
January 2009 was the month in which I had my eureka moment too. Unlike you I still dont know whether it's going to work, but I can see my idea failing as well now. This time last year however, I was almost convinced I would be winning a Nobel Prize.

Seriously, I remember having sleepless nights back then, so full of excitement. I remember not wanting to take a plane for vacation, for fear of an accident and not being able to see my idea through. And I remember accidently copy-pasting my idea into Google, and being so mad at myself for having spilled the idea to a possible competitor.

I've always considered myself a very sceptical person, always questioning things and very down to earth... and yet for a long time I was so crazy and obsessed about this idea that I almost dropped out of uni (I have lost a year).

You said that many have probably gone through something similar, I don't know about that but if so, I would love to hear from them too. I enjoyed your post very much! Thanks!
Data Compression Explained by Matt Mahoney
Ditto, I'm in the UK and bought a Kindle Monday. You can only browse to Wikipedia, but as this XKCD cartoon says, that's almost as good as a hitchhiker's guide because (I assume) the Web access from the Kindle is international - and because Wikipedia is huge. But unlike the XKCD, it doesn't actually let you go to Wikitravel: http://xkcd.com/548/
Location Sharing is Coming to Facebook
Kindle version 2.3 (eg, Kindle 2 and DX) support reading PDFs. But it's only really practical on the DX, because a PDF is generally A4 - and the Kindle 2 is like a small paperback - A6 or so.
It'll be interesting to see how Twitter grow their revenue. The number of customers who will pay $m's to do a deal seems reasonably small.
I guess it could be worse if the phrase were "taking a piss on my wife"...

I once had a friend from England ask me very skeptically if you could really say someone was just "fucking with you" to mean someone was just joking around. So I guess it goes both ways.
Ask HN: Recommend Statistical Software
I'm looking for a suite of software that is able to interface with ODBC databases, automatically build basic regression curves, perform quick relationship mapping, and provide some decent reporting options with the data.

My hope is that someone out there lurking is a data miner by trade and has an opinion on this. We're looking for more intermediate level stuff (I can use basic SPSS/excel but I'm looking to make it quick for some new positions.)

I've taken a look at SPSS's offerings and Rapid Insight's Data Integration. Both look nice and carry hefty price tags, so I'd like some opinions besides my first impressions. Any help is greatly appreciated.
there was recently a great article posted somewhere on exactly the subject of steam engines and how little progress was made until the patent expired. now I can't find it damn it.

edit, found it!
http://mises.org/daily/3280

edit: it's an excerpt from the book kiba is talking about above.
Game developers don't like to ship code for Linux. In any case the state of the drivers is such a mess that supporting a game on Linux would likely be a nightmare.

Linux support would be great for some kinds of hardware / software bundle, where you control the hardware, though.
I read as you do, and as the provided linked page explains, but how is it described in the book?

If the general tone of the "Meetings are toxic" chapter (passage?) is such as "you're dumb for even trying to attend, let alone organize, a meeting", then recognizing that some meetings can be good, as a footnote to a stronger idea of toxicity to most meetings, shows a lack of understanding of importance of good meetings from the author. While if the opposite is true, and the book tries to show how good meetings are good and bad meetings are not good, than the reviewer did not read (or understood) what he's criticizing.
I'm guessing he probably knows, and hes trying to be a troll to get hits.
"I am not sure these guys are real businesspeople."

What exactly are "real businesspeople"?
This is amazing. HTML5. No Flash. No Java. Works on iPhone.
To someone who doesn't understand what's going on, it may seem simpler to make something work for one person than to make it work for lots of people; but in fact the version that works for lots of people may be no less simple. (It may even be simpler, if it's necessary to put in special-case testing to make sure that only one person can use it.)

From an implementer's perspective, the right measure of the complexity of a system is "how much code does it take to implement?" (which is more or less Kolmogorov complexity) rather than "how many things can it do?" or "how wide is its range of possible behaviours?".

A few other remarks on Kolmogorov complexity:

1. "Random" is often best understood as "of high Kolmogorov complexity": a sequence of numbers is random if there's no way to generate it that really saves anything over listing all the numbers; no pattern that makes it predictable. (In practice, what you usually care about is that certain restricted kinds of pattern don't occur, which is kinda like a version of Kolmogorov complexity where you're limited to using programs in a language that isn't Turing-complete.)

2. If you apply Ockham's razor in the form "prefer hypotheses with lower Kolmogorov complexity" together with Bayes' theorem, you get something that in a certain (rather artificial) sense is as effective a problem solver as anything mechanized can be. Unfortunately it's unimplementable in practice, because ...

3. It's more or less always impossible to determine for sure what the Kolmogorov complexity of anything is. (Because to be able to do that you'd need to be able to answer the question "do these two programs do the same thing or not?", and that's equivalent to the halting problem.)

4. (This is controversial, but it's my opinion and that of at least some other contributors here.) When assessing (e.g.) scientific hypotheses for "simplicity" or "parsimony", something like Kolmogorov complexity is the Right Way to understand (un)simplicity; failure to appreciate this is, e.g., what makes some people dislike the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics on the grounds of extravagance, or think that "God did it" is a useful explanation for otherwise-surprising features of the universe.
WP Shopping Pages Plugin - Create your own affiliate store using Wordpress
Figelian - Telusuri dengan Google
The question now is how appropriate are patents in software, a field that is very very different from the mechanical nuts and bolts field that they were created for. I don't know the answer to that question, but it is shitty for small players to be in constant fear of the big guys.

The real question is whether patents are really appropriate at all, not whether it is just inappropriate for one field or another.
Read it over a long lunch- it feels like an overedited SvN greatest hits.

That's both a good thing and a bad thing- it's like reading their best posts in a few hours. Awesome! But, as a book, it's pretty terrible- there aren't really any anecdotes, any stories, any discussions of turning points or moments of realization.

What would have been more interesting is each of these essays (Outside Money is Plan Z!) written around an actual story from their company history. A time they considered outside money, a month where they fucked up cashflow, the moment they had a Series A in corporate savings, a story of how they managed their finances versus competitors who took investment, their first full-time hire and the company's numbers at that time, anything to really dig into why they have come to these conclusions.

I agree with most of those conclusions, in fact, as a book the format sucks. Felix Dennis' How to Get Rich is a great example of succint, important points intertwined with stories that build up the background of each of those point. That makes them more memorable, and makes for a MUCH more enjoyable read. That's a book. This is a greatest hits of a blog. It's good for what it is, but it could have been a whole lot better.
Of course it doesn't tell you anything. If this stuff could all be reduced to a simple formula, it would all be outsourced to India and China.
I'll be quite surprised if it doesn't end up being based on KHTML/WebKit, in which case the extra compatibility burden is likely to be small.
Sort of playing them at their own game?
It sounds to me like the stack space required by TailCallHelper is proportional to the largest amount of stack space ever consumed by a single call of the tail recursive function(s) it's assisting, whereas without it, the stack space required would be proportional to the depth of recursive nesting. So using TailCallHelper you should be able to guarantee arbitrarily deep tail recursion.
I had one waiting for me bright and early this morning thanks for Amazon. It's going to be hard deciding between Final Fantasy 13 (long time fan... I can't help myself!) and reading this cover-to-cover tonight.
Adnostic: Privacy Preserving Targeted Advertising
DD-WRT is the firmware for the most part although I'd bet there's some embedded code running below this Linux-based OS. Is there enough wiggle room "down there" to, say, surreptitiously forward inbound traffic between network segments and back (like a mini NAT)? I have no idea. Does anyone here know anything about the WRT54GL board?
How to Ask for an Introduction
I have a feeling that author did not even read the book properly: maybe a couple of opening pages and chapter titles.
Normally I feel tacky submitting my own stuff to Hacker News but I think (hope) this will help anyone in the fundraising stage out.
The Unpersuadables
I read the back cover. That was enough to know it's more of the same. Not for me.

"Fire workaholics", "Meetings are toxic", etc etc it's just linkbait hyperbole.

I think this review managed to accurately sum up what 37signals puts out.
Here is a related lesson on pizza flyer design: http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/002462.ht...
In other words, what orangecat meant is that adding more code, even "simple" code, adds complexity to a software project. Adding 50 easy features is equal to adding one heck of complex feature made of 50 sub parts.

The link with Kolmogorov is, I believe, that each piece added moves the set away from being simpler.

First time I read about Kolmogorov, hopefully I got it right. Anyway my first paragraph is true!
The back cover could've been part of a guerilla marketing campaign for Fight Club.

I had absolutely no interest in reading Rework until now, and now I don't think I can refuse it. 37Signals' marketing is quite impressive.
The Humble Programmer by E.W. Dijkstra [1972]
I think the grandparent meant cyclomatic complexity rather than Kolmogorov complexity. Special-casing a change for one person means at least one more execution branch.
Mini Wireless Keyboard
How regular are HackerNews meetups in Atlanta? Is there a calendar for future ones? I'd like to go, but I'll be out of town this Thursday :|.
University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire
I'm excited to learn more about this. What's interesting is that they plan to feed off of Foursquare, Gowalla, etc. I'm happy that they decided not to kill everyone off. Working together is great =)
I think it's better to keep additional logic in your page view functions instead of letting it bloat the template html. Why use a two pass method to parse your custom template logic into python code when you can just write the python code in the view functions?
Apple Ipad Top good things
Silicon Valley Executive Search 
I am going through a transition and trying to find the top executive search firms that work with serial entrepreneurs to find new projects for them. I have 10+ years of startup, and management experience. I am still involved with my current project, but am having partnership issues and would like to transition out west. I have successfully raised debt and equity for previous deals. I am looking to join a company post funding to ease my transition out to the Valley. Would consider working with an early stage company depending on the deal.
Tim Berners-Lee: The Year Open Data Went Worldwide (TED Talk)
Large Numbers
In the spirit of "doing less", Squeezed Books aims to take the actual useful material from books like this, and summarize it on our web site.

I'll buy you the business book of your choosing if you're the first person to post a good summary of this book to Squeezed Books. (I reserve the right to choose what's 'good', and also the right to veto any absurdly expensive business books you find).

http://www.squeezedbooks.com
From the inside flap - "REWORK shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and you’ll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don’t need outside investors, and why you’re better off ignoring the competition."

Note that the claim is not 'Rework shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in a business that is similar to 37 signals. Maybe'.
The Best Jobs In America (Systems Engineers Rejoice)
No hire. Don't make me click around to read your resume.
Godzilla Haiku
I would be really happy if the Kindle made it easier to read stuff on Fanfiction.net. Their current web browser is less than ideal. (My current solution is to use a Python script to download a bunch of chapters and mangle them into a single HTML file, which I convert into a Kindle-compatible ebook format. This is a hassle.)
Adam Savage's Lifelong Pursuit of the Perfect Blade Runner Gun
Indeed. Unless you have snow that is falling UP, that shouldn't be a problem 99.999999% of the time.
Check out http://yellowicon.com/

The design company is run by Everaldo, the creator of the Crystal Project http://www.everaldo.com/

His icon sets have been some of the highest rated and most downloaded at kde-look.org for years now

If you are not familiar with kde-look.org, check it out. There are hundreds of very impressive icon sets you can download for free. Many are released under LGPL and can be used in commercial software