skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've got it installed, actually, so I can give some basic feedback.

10.1 is definitely faster when playing h.264 movies. I used Vimeo as an example, and CPU use by Flash alone went from ~95% to ~85%. Hooray! It also seems like it might be more responsive playing other content, but I don't really do that because most other Flash content is junk.

Note, if anyone is thinking of trying it out: some websites don't work because they check that your Flash version is '10' and not '>= 10'. A friend who upgraded had to use a website that required flash, but was unable to. This is obviously a developer problem, not a flash problem, but be aware.

Oh, and you can't downgrade. Once you upgrade, you're stuck (unless you are willing to dig around).

In the end, I don't care. I already block flash because most uses of flash are obnoxious and irritating; now with 10.1, I can block a newer, more responsive version of Flash. Sorry Adobe, it's great that you're pretending you care and all, but it's too little too late. You've ignored us for years, you stuck us with a shitty Flash player and now you're telling us how lucky we are to have had it. I'm done with you.
apparently, the explicit category has already disappeared: http://gizmodo.com/5479497/apple-removes-explicit-option-fro...
I think that distractions can be productive.. a few moments away from a problem can clear my head.

For that reason I didn't read the article, but judging by the other comments, I'm glad I didn't :)
Creative Recruiting Strategies
Sure, I'm not denying you can implement the actor model in Mozart. I just don't think it's quite a fair comparison to say Mozart/Oz does actors better than Erlang. That's just my opinion though.
Yes, We Have a Ph.D. Glut.
I'm really tired of pretending that the number of google results for a phrase actually tells us anything interesting.
So I guess the question is - should disabled people be able to use these devices on the sidewalks (with appropriate license/plate)? And should non-disabled folks be able to use them in bike lanes? Etc? Honest question, I have never ridden a Segway but want to try it.
Beyond the hand-waving about "big industry" and "corporate agendas," there's not much here beyond the willingness to endorse authoritarianism in the service of encouraging the style of internet sharing the author prefers.

More serious is the apparent blitheness with which the author assumes that only big companies will be affected by speech regulations. On the contrary, it's normally small operators who are intimidated into shutting down by speech regulations like DMCA or the late, unlamented COPA. The Google in Italy case is newsworthy precisely because the government there bullied an entity with the resources to try to fight back.
I find it interesting that the example they use is 'playing h.264 video', something which the Nexus One can do hardware-accelerated. How many hours of actual animation does it get when it doesn't get to offload 90% of its work to dedicated silicon?
Deep-Sea Bacteria Form Avatar-Style Electrochemical Networks
As I understand the situation:

Adobe's representative to the WHATWG, Larry Masinter, filed a formal objection (FO) on a private WHATWG mailing list to the publication of the HTML5 standard because the standard, at present, includes extensions to HTML such as Canvas and RDFa that Masinter believes are beyond the scope of what HTML5 was supposed to entail, as outlined in the working group's charter.

Since Canvas, in particular, would be very beneficial to those wishing to emulate Adobe Flash's capabilities using solely HTML5, ECMAScript, and CSS, some have interpreted Masinter's formal objection as an attempt by Adobe to prevent HTML5 from taking root in order to prevent competition to Adobe Flash.

In this letter, Berners-Lee is saying that he believes that Canvas, RDFa, and microdata are legitimately part of the HTML5 spec, and even if the current charter does not explicitly allow for them, it should be amended to do so.
Are you ready for venture debt?
Well technically armed robbery is a subset of theft so I don't think it's unfair really.
The obvious downside of greylisting is that the first contact takes some minutes.

Another downside is that some poorly written applications try to deliver mail on their own, instead of using a real mailserver.

It is somehow required that the mail user knows about the greylisting setup so that he can request the other application to send the same mail again after some minutes.
One real world example are those registration links you get via mail to confirm your account. It happens very often to me that I have to re-request the mail, to get it into my mailserver.
Word on the street is that Google has a custom Ubuntu distro for engineering. I heard this years ago, haven't asked anybody recently.
Cox also points out that most Google engineers are on Linux, too.
Windows Live MSN Messenger Tips, Tricks and Hacks
* that it's much easier to produce power by burning, oxidizing in a fuel cell, etc. than by using solar, wind etc*

I agree... it would be nice if it was easier to use solar, wind, anything with zero-carbon footprint. I just don't know if they are going to be sufficiently powerful enough to replace the current coal / gas fired plants. But, if you could effectively use a fuel cell as a battery to produce H2 from H2O during the day, and then consume the same H2 at night, that would be a very good thing since the biggest problem with PV and wind isn't the technology, it's storing the energy produced so you can deliver electricity when its cloudy.
How do you download it?
Yelp Hit With CLass Action Lawsuit
A nice back-of-envelope calculation. Someone posted a picture showing an antelope running through shallow water. Someone else realised that you can use just that single picture to estimate how fast the antelope is moving. The clever bit is estimating the speed of the water waves you can see spreading out from places where the antelope touched down.

However, I am unconvinced by some details. For instance, I think s/he overestimated the amount of water wave movement by maybe a factor of 2, the wavelength looks way too large too, and I suspect the water is deeper than s/he assumed. My estimate of the antelope's speed is more like 40mph, which is still very impressive given that it's running through water.
Sure. The idea is that the first rifleman you build costs nearly as much as a wonder, if your opponents are using archers. That way, you can have a unit that pretty much demolishes anything, but you still have to use it strategically. As you field more of them, and your opponents develop similar technology, the cost goes down.

So people with technology will field smaller, more effective armies; as the technology spreads, the armies get bigger but the individual units are comparatively less effective. This would make the game more balanced.
Note that the vast majority of the sqlite tests are functional tests written in TCL and are not "real" unit tests. His test test stuff like "does select (this, this, this) return that under these circumstances.

There's some test setup stuff written in C and maybe C-level interface tests, but I think the functional tests are what lets him modify his optimizer, rather than some unit tests which are tightly bound to a specific implementation.
Pretend you have Gordon Ramsay, or someone from your life who can act like Gordon Ramsay, yelling at you.

Here's my inner monologue when I know it'd be better for me to do something but I'm too "tired" to get it done: SHUT THE &@# UP YOU (&@#ING WHINER. DO YOU WANT IT OR NOT? JUST (*@&#ING DO IT.

And then I get to work!
OK, but it's still proprietary and closed-source. Fix that, then we can worry about how much battery it uses.
Yup, this is exactly why I wrote: You should NOT follow me on Twitter http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/you-sho...

A/B Testing case studies are good for two reasons:

a) Help create curiosity on what the heck this A/B thing is (good for my product)
b) Gives you ideas to test on your website

But it is very dangerous to implement results without testing for your case. Very, very dangerous.
Illinois aims to assist tech entrepreneurs
No, sir. :)
I agree with the general sentiment (don't deface your hobbyist site with ads until you want to seriously monetize it) but I disagree with his solution. He basically advocates "just suck it up -- $100 / month is not that much."

To many people that is a ton of money. A better solution would be to

a) switch to something like Google App Engine which will not charge you a dime until you are serving millions of pages a month.

b) ask a buddy to let you put the site on one of their under utilized servers (this is what I do for my startup, even though we run through terabytes of bandwidth per month)

c) ask a company to sponsor you. Many companies have a plethora of unused servers and would be happy to donate some of that to someone in need.

d) ask the community for donations. I bet you could scrounge up enough to cover hosting, especially if the community realizes that the alternative is ads.

If all of that fails, then go ahead and fallback on adsense - at least you tried.
I'd be more likely to hire the flip-flop guy, especially if he also played Dungeons & Dragons.
I totally agree. That is why only about half my free time is spent on Gridspy.

In fact, part of the decision to stay full-time employee right now is so that I can spend time with my family without the huge stress that I might sink our financial ship.

Anyway, It's not a "gold-rush-webapp" - we are satisfying a real need and our clients are willing to pay us well to help them.
Draw a lot. Practice a lot. Give yourself some random constraint (ie no lines between 45 and 90 degrees, or do it in 95 seconds, etc). Stop wishing, start drawing.
On the flip-side, I once had an interviewer ask me to solve a problem where several hurdles/criteria were introduced randomly based on rolling a 20-sided die.
You definitely can downgrade — you just have to download the uninstaller from Adobe's website [1] before reinstalling 10.0. After giving 10.1 a try and it being so ridiculously buggy, I had to give up.

[1]: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html
New rules for big data: Regulators are having to rethink their brief
Good points. I used to do enterprise IT consulting and we couldn't integrate many spam cutting techniques without getting a large dose of complaints saying "where is my spam".

In our case, it's just two of us, and the level of spam was overwhelming. I accept the trade-off.
Clicking for gold: How Internet companies profit from data on the web
I don't think many (if any) web services work that way. I know that at my company we set up a Postfix daemon on one of our servers which all of our web servers connect to to send mail. So, when you get your password emailed to you, it's Postfix doing the actual sending, and Postfix will retry for hours, let alone 5 minutes. Same thing for all my personal projects.
That's an odd thing for them to look for. Almost any dufus with FrontPage,etc. could put up a reasonably businessy looking website. I don't expect bankers to be internet experts, but I would think they'd realize that the presence of a website isn't much of a proof of legitimacy.

As an interesting counter-anecdote, I recently opened a business account with TCF bank. We definitely didn't have our website up (not sure we'd even registered a domain name at that point). TCF didn't seem to have any interest in our web site, they just wanted our federally issued EIN and a copy of our business registration with the state (in our case, Articles of Organization for an LLC.). IMHO, those seem like sensible documents for them to request. A website? Not so much.
I went straight from school to a startup. I think there was two weeks in between. It was the start of being in an incubation program, though, so I at least had a tiny amount of cash to pay my bills.

I wouldn't have been able to stand going into the regular workforce.
One real world example are those registration links you get via mail to confirm your account. It happens very often to me that I have to re-request the mail, to get it into my mailserver.

Oh, you'll get those in an hour or so, when their mailer retires. I have never had a problem.

I did kill greylisting, though, because it breaks when the mail server that first tried to send the message is not the one that tries to send it again. Gmail does this, for example, and unless you keep up to date on Google's internal architecture, you are going to lose mail from Gmail users. Combined with being tired of waiting an hour or more for every email, this killed greylisting for me. Now I let the spammers deal with spamassassin, which is quite nice if you bump up the scores on the content and URI blacklists.
the latter: transition to new framework before big sale.
Web Laureate Insight, "ad.ly: agree wee"
the regulatory hurdles faced both by small business owners and those who invest in small businesses is the clearest sign that despite any huffing and puffing to the contrary, the government really doesn't care all that much about job creation.
This was presented in one of the PyCon 2010 conference - check out
http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~yfan/PyConPoster.pdf

for a demo of the library.
every one I've ever played seems like excel with a GUI

This is true, but the art of strategy game design is in bolting the right interface to the right spreadsheet so that the people will actually enjoy applying themselves to the problem. Relatively few people find the math inherently fun. The better games lend weight to judgement with layers of complexity, competing demands, random elements, and multiple victory conditions. On higher difficulty levels, the Civilization games actually cheat, which means by that point not only do you have to be an expert optimizer, you also have to have very good judgement in order to win. And when that becomes stale, there's always other humans.

In the meantime the game is dealing out rewards not only of military victory, but also the joy of "gardening": tending to your cities, your bases, your whatever. This is a big part of the gulf between turn-based and real-time strategy games. Turn-based games can take weeks or even months to play through, which changes the kind of thought you're able to apply to each move and amplifies the reward of seeing your empire grow, while real-time strategy games tend to favor entering a match with a pre-determined strategy and implementing it efficiently. In my experience, people tend to have a strong preference one way or the other, not because the core game is so different, but because they find different things rewarding.

In that sense most strategy games are variations on a theme rather than truly unique. Compare correspondence chess and speed chess to OTB chess--the game is the same, but the experience of playing them is quite different.
Sarcasm as a Cognitive Challenge
Secret Sauce of Successful Self Organizing Team
Why Do so Few Men Graduate College in Their Early Twenties?
Truth be told, I'm a bit disappointed with HN comments on this one. Most (and the most voted) are the very predictable "they're so stupid, how can they do that". Maybe they are, but I was really hoping for some discussion on why.

Anyways, AFAIK (and it's not much) Berlusconi right now controls/owns a good majority of media companies. Also there are a fair numbers of scandals involving him which aren't reported by the media outlets he owns. Now if Italy is anything like my native Romania, lately the Internet is becoming both a tool and a media for the political life. And we all know the Internet is harder to control, so efforts by the government in this direction could be expected.

I also think Google is not a chance target. A conviction, even a weak one like this, sends a very strong message to the _local_ companies. If Google couldn't win, who can? And I think the Italian language sites were the target from the beginning. If the conviction stands (and maybe even if it doesn't), this will still have a terrible chilling effect on the news sites there. Now they know that no matter how big or insignificant they are, their owners or operators can find themselves in jail at a prosecutor's whim. Because ways of breaking such laws are not hard to find.
How do you guys feel about this? (taken from the Data Liberation Front's website which was linked at the beginning of the article)

"...we always encourage people to ask these three questions before starting to use a product that will store their data:

Can I get my data out at all?
How much is it going to cost to get my data out?
How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?

The ideal answers to these questions are:
Yes.
Nothing more than I'm already paying.
As little as possible."

My problem with it is that there IS a cost to exporting this data. That cost has to be paid by someone. Is it fair to work that into your price when it's a feature that perhaps very few users might actually use? How often should you allow users to back up their data?This is mostly in the context of SAAS products that are not free.
Wow. This is amazing. Thanks so much for the link - bookmarking for later reading.
If they can't bother to do something as simple as dress nice for something as formal as an interview, I don't want to have anything to do with the candidate.
I think doing a neighborhood wide ban would be excessive, but it makes sense for the streets mentioned. Hanover St. gets so crowded on some days that pedestrians will walk in the road in order to pass people. I don't even see how someone would be able to use a Segway when it is that congested.
Three Startup triplets that I like
1. yEnc a DVD movie
2. Chop into many, many tweets
3. Fail whale!
The Evolution Of The Customer Development Interview
(Re-)Watch how artists draw their pictures on Colorillo
IPad: It is All About Pain
You're right. I think he and I both are guilty of lumping several kinds of tests (functional/acceptance, integration, etc.) under "unit tests".
We're going through panel interviews right now, and a lot of that article is rubbish, as others have pointed out. But I want to tease out the "don't be negative" because it's got the reasons wrong.

"Also, no matter how tempting it is, don't say negative things about a previous employer, regardless of how the job ended - hiring managers may fear that you will say the same things about their organization."

That's not why you don't say negative things. You don't say negative things because it means you blame other people or you're a negative person. You say, "I don't like my current job because they don't listen to me," and all I hear is that you don't have very good ideas, you're very bad at explaining those ideas, or your disconnected from the people you work with. And on top of that, you don't understand how to solve interpersonal problems. None of that make me super excited about you.

Instead try realizing that you might bear some of the blame for the things you don't like, and realize the other party might have good justification. So instead: "I find myself getting excited about very different opportunities than my current coworkers. They have a real passion for solving the immediate problem whereas I'm far more interested in solving the underlying cause. So while I appreciate their desire to provide a quick solution, and have even learned when that can be appropriate, I'm really looking for an environment that emphasizes long-term thinking while still making sure customer needs are met as quickly as possible."
Also as I have already mentioned. It would also be nice to understand whether the Address is optional in both of the examples.

Right now it looks as if it's only optional in the "after" form. And then it's quite obvious why it converts better.
Look at it in the reverse. Dressing appropriately dramatically increases your chance of being hired.

Do you really want to hire the kind of person who can't figure out how to avoid this disadvantage?
post hoc ergo propter hoc. just because you see A and B together doesn't mean A caused B.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc
The industry has been around for a very long time, and it still has a pretty strong B-school flavor.

You'd think that this would be a candidate for change, given that the industry is losing money. However, I don't expect ever to see it happen.

Even though MBA culture is anachronistic and less-than-useless, it persists because it convinces a set of people who can't actually do anything that they deserve to be the High Priests of the economy.
What kind of company spends so much time making direct/fallacious attacks on their competitors instead of just talking up the best parts of their product? Apple.

Apple has directly put both Microsoft and Adobe on the defensive. This time it's because of a recent, widely aired comment made by Steve Jobs about battery life.

Apple is the aggressor here, they are the one's being dicks. I don't hate on anybody for defending themselves unless they lie about the facts. Aggressors who lie are the worst though.
I love couchdb and what jchrisa is doing there, but this wrong on a variety of levels IMO.

First, on a practical level, no one wants to deal with hosting anything, let alone "civilians", so billions of web servers on the edge of the network is simply a no-go unless and until doing so becomes appliance-esque (which will necessitate provisioning of backups and failover using...wait for it...third party services that could only exist given safe-harbor provisions.).

Second, 99% of users and cumulative usage time is spent consuming, not producing stuff.

Third, this is just crazy:

"""The online content farms profit based on the fact that it's hard to share your own content, yourself, via a means of production that you control. This is the central fact free-speech activists should be upset about."""

There's oodles of places to go that will host your stuff far better than YouTube et al. can, but most people don't care enough to pay for it. Go to vimeo, pay whatever trifling sum they charge these days, and you'll have all the control you want, a better experience to boot, and all the free speech you can muster.
So basically, everything but taking someone's property illegally. I love hyperbole.

I don't understand why "theft" is the crime of choice, though. There are so many things that sound even worse, and are technically just as true. "Downloading is terrorism." "Taxation is child rape." "Inflation is murder."

It is interesting that "is" in that context actually means "is not". "It depends on what 'is' is," I guess.
Ask HN: Legal Hacks.
I recently found out that the best state for registering a C-Corp is Delaware.

Post your legal hacks here.
What you get when you buy a £25 iPhone down the pub
And the guys who really care have an ad-blocker anyway.
What you're overlooking is that attention is a limited resource. Someone who pays attention to how they dress has thereby paid less attention than they might have to something substantive.

So not only don't we care how people dress at YC interviews, dressing up is actually a (minor) red flag. We'd rather you spent that effort on something else.
The standard editor!
And no one is forcing us to adopt communism. Nothing is truly forced, in the sense that you have no alternatives.

They are similar because they both take an all or nothing approach that only works in a perfectly ideal situation.

In a perfectly free software world the GPL would have no problem, but the GPL (if you want to use the software) forces you to adopt the policies of that ideal world in the current incompatible unideal world.

Like. Communism, if it is being attempted, people will have to be forced to be dedicated to the whole (if they want to exist in the group).

Free software should be enforced by nothing but practical reasoning, just as communism should too (but most people are selfish idiots). The GPL seeks to enforce it through law, regardless of whether it makes sense here and now (similar to forced-upon communism).

Also if anyone disagrees with me I'd love a response. Better to win over enemies than destroy right?
Why's it funny? The Linux plug-in /is/ terrible.