skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just mean that they could both decide to cancel the contracts when not beneficial for them to do so any more.

Say buzz takes off (don't laugh).

I'd just rather have millions of paying customers (advertising) than 2 customers.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19991212&mode=c...
That's daft. Funding isn't a liability (in the financial sense), and those numbers don't say anything about growth prospects.
Fantastic point.

In terms of scaling, how much larger is twitter than twitpic? $160 Million larger?
I felt this way before until they released their widget framework. It gives you a really good option for writing jQuery friendly javascript throughout your entire app. I don't know if that was the intent, but in terms of fitting an application within the scope of the jQuery framework, the widget features are great.
I would not buy one based on what I've learned so far. Having a dongle for 3G connectivity seems like a bad design decision. The storage seems anemic, at just 2gb, and the main memory being 256mb makes me wonder why I would want to get rid of my old N800 for this.

It would be acceptable if the dongle was in an internal or snap-in bay of some sort, so that it could not accidentally become dislodged and did not mar the shape of the device.
These wave sound like Black Swan events - real events whose probabilities don't fit our current understanding and models. On one hand of course it's unsafe to send ships out on the ocean, but on the other hand, there are tens (hundreds?) of thousands of ships at sea every day and these waves weren't even measured until 1995. Right now they need to figure out X and then shipbuilding and insuring will adjust accordingly.
"Rights are what you can't take away, not what you can force on others. No one is required to pay for anyone elses internet or print anyones pamphlets."

There are people who claim that their right to the Internet means that if they cannot afford t then someone else is obligated to pay for it, else they are being denied their right to the 'Net. (And, presumably, if there is no Internet then someone has to go make one.)

This is a 'positive right'. It obligates other people to take action to provide something.
"the tax payers won't do anything to prevent it"

So to you, that's the problem?

A math example:

Milwaukee Area school budget (2008) - $1.2B
Total Enrolled Students: 82,739
Cost per student: $14,503

I can purchase on the open market private schooling in the Milwaukee area for around $6K for K-8 and $9K for high school.

For the record, my wife homeschools for no cost to the taxpayers but we still pay the taxes.
If you can't design yourself, get "inspired" by good designers (cough copy cough).

Here is a list of 20 good designers to start from:

http://www.webdevtuts.net/articles/20-web-designers-you-shou...
eg Employing your own ad sales staff to manage campaigns, and thus cut out the 30% or so that ad networks take?
Microsoft researcher wins Turing Award, computing's Nobel Prize
California State Univeristy
It's a little trickier when you do it left to right.

Suppose you have a DOM tree like this:

div #alert - p, p, p
- div #alert - p [lots of children]
- p - div #alert [lots of children]

[right to left]

In order to find all Ps with an #alert parent, you first get a set of all paragraph elements. Most likely a list of all paragraphs is kept in memory, so it can be enumerated quickly. Since DOM trees are generally well balanced the number of parents of any one paragraph is going to be roughly O( 2log(|DOMSIZE|) ) and it can be enumerated in C, so this is basically nothing (compared to how grossly inefficient javascript is). Total complexity: O( |P NODES| * 2log( |DOMSIZE| ) ). Memory complexity: 1 linked list of size of result set.

[left to right]

If we were to look at it from left to right, it gets trickier. You have to find all #alert nodes (easy & fast), but then you have to take all children of all #alert nodes. Every sub-tree of the DOM can be a significant fraction of the entire DOM tree, or perhaps the _entire_ dom tree. Not only that, but you CANNOT filter for all "p" children, because then you'd need to have lookup tables for every level in the tree (hugely inefficient). So you're left with one solution, that is to enumerate all children (and a DOM node can have a few thousand child nodes easily). But, wait, one #alert contains another #alert. We're already looking at O( |DOMSIZE| * |DOMSIZE| ), and now we have to consider uniqueness as well. We cannot alloc a hash map to keep track of uniqueness, because that would completely fragement your memory space; you'd end up allocating&deallocating hashmaps for every selector call. So you end up having to traverse the result set linked list for every node you add, to see if it isn't already in there. This, needless to say, is another O(N^2) detour. Total worst case complexity for M selectors:

O( M * |DOMSIZE|^2 + M * |RESULTSET|^2 ).

Memory complexity: M + 1 linked list.

Difference becomes more profound as complexity increases:

#uniq p p span b

(R2L) find all "b" nodes, append those with matching parents to linked list. Return linked list

(L2R) find all #uniq nodes, enumerate all "p" children. Make sure all "p" children are unique. Take all children of these "p" nodes, filter for "p" children, make sure result set is unique. Take all children of these "p" nodes, filter for "span", make sure.... and so it goes.

So that's why.
How to make rain boots from plastic bags
I wish this site linked back to the original Mixergy videos from the notes, both for ethical and practical reasons.
The guy turned down a minimum of $10,000,000. Is he stupid? (I should add, I would take that deal, because if twitter add in any kind of image service or some other service gets popular...)
Twitter makes about $25M yearly from search deals, and has a more sustainable business than TwitPic.

When can we kill the meme that twitter and facebook are not making money or are not profitable?
I was working from this: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-in-case-you-...

Those numbers are net sales, not gross revenue, so cost of revenue (revenue splits, traffic acquisition costs, etc.) are factored out.
Yes. I'm a startup junkie and coder who ended up consulting companies in implementing these practices because once your development group starts growing, performance usually tanks. Big companies are looking at the stats and seeing that in some cases they are spending 10 times the cost and taking 4 times as long to develop similar software to what a small company can put out. So there's a big pain out there.

Avoid large teams! The daily stand-up should be 5, maybe 10 minutes, and should move along very quickly. A 30-person team, especially if the PM is playing scrum master and doing Q&A during the stand-ups, can be the worst kind of death march.

I've watched/participated in about 60 teams, and consulted with other coaches on probably 300 or so. Yes, there are 30-person teams that do well, but it's very rare, and usually there are other things that made them do well.

Organizations consistently over-staff teams, especially those in trouble. It's depressing to watch, because it just makes matters a thousand times worse for everybody involved.

Here's a corny tip that I found actually makes standups a little more bearable: Forget the speaking stick. Use a nerf ball, and forbid hand-offs. Everybody stands and nobody knows who's getting the ball next until the guy throws it. Also you have about 30 seconds to do your standup and then you're done, one way or the other. Standups should always add energy to the team and help with the day's agenda. If it's "Lord of the Flies" you guys are really out-of-whack somewhere.
If we could down-vote entries, that might be more reasonable. As it is, we can only flag.
I still dont know what to make of these deals. On the one hand: Twitter brought in good revenue. This is smart and shows the value in their data.

On the other hand: I personally feel Twitter's real value to an acquirer like MSFT or GOOG is the data. The rest of it is kind of gravy and it's only there to provide the data (ie- you need people posting things in order to have the search data). In short, GOOG basically got the value they needed out of Twitter for a measly 25 million dollars. Why would they ever acquire them at what's sure to be a number at least 40x that amount?... Except to make sure someone else doesn't hence cutting off their access to the data.
Total investment into Twitpic was $5,000

Does this mean that Noah Everett's total investment as of now is $5000, or that at one point in time (possibly before he"rebuilt the site from the ground up to run on a scalable platform") his total investment was $5000?

The past tense on "was" makes it hard to tell which it is; it would be even more interesting of a story if the answer is the former.
They indicate a Liu Hong seems to have authored the install package. No indication if he was a Energizer employee or not.
One does not need to "connect" to a computer to commit an offence under the act. One does not even need to use a computer. Consider, for instance, an attacker writing out a paper form with an SQL injection, knowing that the form will be OCRed into a database that does not sanitise it's inputs. Nothing but graphite on paper, but clearly computer misuse under the act.

I don't agree with the law as it stands, but the law was clearly designed to cover every possible circumstance of unauthorised access to a computer system.

As an analogy, imagine yourself walking down a shopping street. You have tacit permission to walk through any of the open shop doors, but that permission ends at the "no entry" sign on the stockroom door. Walking beyond a "no entry" sign is trespass because you are aware that you do not have permission to enter such a place. Likewise with authorisation to access a computer system. Your right to connect to the system ends at the point where the system tells you to go no further.
Davidson College, North Carolina
Increasingly common among large ISV sales teams. Not my niche, but I know plenty of (almost exclusively) guys that used to hit the office every day but now work almost exclusively from home.
That's about half of it. You bought a computer and generally got the source to the software, such as it was, that ran on it. But the main reason you had the source to the software you were running was because you wrote the software you were running. The market for 3rd party software came later, but also at the same time as people were already mailing tapes around and posting stuff on usenet. There's no reason to believe people would have suddenly stopped mailing tapes around if the FSF didn't show up.
If I were representing an accused linker, I'd be inclined to argue (among other things) that in view of longstanding, worldwide custom and usage:

1. Anyone who puts up a Web page is implicitly authorizing, nay inviting, all comers to access the page via normal protocols;

2. As a matter of law, the only way the implicit authorization can be negated is to deny access to the page, for example, by putting the page behind a password wall -- simply putting up a terms-and-conditions notice, that you don't even see before getting to the page, isn't enough (that's pretty much what the courts have held, at least in the US);

3. Therefore, any notice on the Web page that said "thou shalt not link to this page [or site]" would be of no legal significance.

A site that said "you can't link to me, even though I'm out here in the public square, so to speak," would be like a company that decided to hold a confidential business meeting at an outdoor restaurant table, put up a sign on the table saying "thou shalt not listen in," and then sued people who eavesdropped from the next table over.
Georgia Tech
UC Santa Cruz
There's a strong relationship between the quality of software packaged with a product and the relative importance of software to the maker's product line as a whole. This Energizer example is an extreme point on the graph.
Oddly enough, I've actually DONE this with off the shelf products, and didn't really consider it that big a deal at all. The only thing that needed modification was the app I was writing that needed federated access to.

If the company is using a recent Active Directory, it's a snap to set up OpenSSO within their environment to consume Kerberos tokens to authenticate the user (in a browser) via passwordless login.

From there, you can configure OpenSSO to federate authentication by providing your site a SAML token, which, when consumed for authentication, means that the only thing you really have to worry about is authorization -- e.g., what a given user can do from within your application.

One of my best friends is a developer who often cries 'impossible', only to brilliantly solve whatever problem a week later, usually with some fairly creative thinking, but I've always considered that his one biggest downfall -- crying wolf.

That said, I certainly get that if you're an app developer for a given product, the work that was sold was well out of scope.
Not exactly.

Prior to the 1980s, most computing was on highly proprietary mainframes. The industry was dominated by IBM. Consumers (companies, not individuals) could not _own_ their software. It was all licensed product by IBM and the big vendors. Many vendors did not sell, but instead licensed, their machines, as well. It was very closed, and innovation cost the inventor dearly, and made the vendor a fortune.

The 1980s saw the maturation of the mid-size market, the revolution of the new PC world, an opening up of the hardware and software world, and a hugely exploding new user base. The entire paradigm for the computer market changed. Note, though, the tendency of vendors (ahem, Apple) to return to this world.

Anyone who wants the old days has not been studying history.
I live in Charleston and have met Noah a few times (nice guy, incidentally). If you come visit, you will see why someone would want to live here pretty quickly.
Tron Legacy Movie Trailer 2010 3D - Tron 2.0
Apparently without the eternal vigilance of the FSF, BigEvil Inc. is going to break into my house and take away the source of all the programs I've written because I forgot to GPL them.
SCALE 8x: Relational vs. non-relational
Whether turning down $10M was a bad idea depends on a number of factors, from expected revenues to his own life goals. $10M would certainly provide for a lot of freedom.
The 800lb gorilla is Twitter, and if/when they start to cannibalize the third parties in an effort to build their own revenues. Twitter certainly isn't at that point yet, but it will happen eventually.
Wayne's World was set (not filmed) in Aurora, IL, where I now live. (I did not move here out of Wayne's World nostalgia).
Scale first, monetize second
If you are brilliant, cultured, and educated, chances are you aren't struggling to pay rent. If you are, then you aren't brilliant or intelligent.

I'm not struggling, but I know smart people who are. Startup founders and people trying to make it in the arts come to mind. Not everyone smart immediately becomes rich, you know. I know you don't understand this, but that's how it is for the other 99% of us.

I also would like to hear your definition of "cultured".

Those who have the appropriate sense of historical perspective, appreciation for the arts and aesthetics, sense of social justice, and depth of knowledge necessary to be an adequate leader (in business, politics, the arts, etc.)

By contrast, we have a world run by snake-oil salesmen and bullshitting rainmakers, while culture is utterly devalued. Hence we have graduates of great colleges busing tables in cafes while mouth-breathing trash-fuckers make big decisions that affect their lives.

You really think this is why we don't have universal healthcare? I really don't want to debate healthcare here, but I have seen it first-hand, and I don't ever want it here in the US.

Let me guess. You got really sick outside of the US and experienced another country's health system. You chalked your negative experience up to that country's health payment system rather than, I don't know, maybe the fact that getting sick really, really sucks no matter where you are?

I have seen US healthcare as well. Poor delivery, long wait times, bad service and high error rates. We have the same problems and potentially life-wrecking bills.
It's not just about the cut. You can sell inventory for more than the ad networks sell it (their business is about volume and teeth whitening ads).
Can Urban Design Alleviate the Need for Cops?
ODBMs? Transactions! Sometimes you need them. Admittedly, not as often as once thought. RDBMs too, but with ODBMs, you have no impedance mismatch.
Did Steve Jobs hand you a iPhone 3Gs? To expect being handed the latest and greatest product because you bought the first one is nuts.
no... please no... I don't want to be compatible with yet another browser...
"funded by, but independent of"

The philosophy of the American teenager is apparently alive and well in the UK.
Free ebooks
I think it means his out of pocket investment to bootstrap the company.
Yes, and Twitter could start hosting images. Nothing is safe and eternal.
"For instance, I've installed node.js via homebrew which means I can type man node"

Hmm. If I release a project, node.hs, can I also name my man page 'node'? What happens if there is a collision?

Are there rules of etiquette when deciding what to call you man pages entry? I.e., what it not have been better for node.js to have it's entry be 'nodejs' or 'node.js'?
This actually happened in Britain in the 70's. At one point the top marginal tax rate topped 98%, and a large number of luminaries either moved out of the country or heavily obfuscated their finances. If even one warren buffet moves (or, more likely, suddenly shifts most of his income to barbados with legal financial engineering), it costs the government massive amounts of money.

I won't touch the ad hominem attacks against an entire class of successful people, except to ask if Bill Gates has done anything useful with his money.
There is no "truth" about what necessities and luxuries are. Put any of our great-grandparents' families in a time machine and their children would now be taken away for neglect. For everything you own, somebody out there thinks it's a self-indulgent luxury you'd be better off without.

What gets taxed as a "luxury" would become a political decision, which is a game the rich know how to win. Have you heard why SUVs suddenly became popular? Somebody figured out trucks over a certain weight limit were classified as business necessities with favorable tax treatment.
ErrantX,

I added a third paragraph that might help with some insight as to why I feel this way.

Going the BDD (or TDD) route first can help you in many ways... They include: finding unintended bugs, ensuring code works the way you want always, helps convey code intentions to other devs, etc, etc.

If you found it was taking too much time, I would suggest you slow down a bit and really focus on BDD for a few weeks, you only get faster by practicing.
How one Philly Start-Up Perfected Raising Humanitarian Funding
Why even try to compete with the iPhone in the browser space? Without color or responsiveness I don't see the point.
“But we don’t need to change it for everyone,” Craig jumped in, “just one client. Surely, you can do that!”

That's probably the most frustrating thing I hear from non-technical people, because they really think they're making it easier. Sadly Kolmogorov complexity is not yet a required course in schools.
Doesn't look like the results are cached.
most of the time this certainly falls under pointless microptimisation, but if you are doing a complex web application with cpu intensive operations, it can be really handy to know how css is applied (and how reflow / redraw works) to help the user experience.
> The iPhone already supports that kind of multitasking (Phone app, iPod app, Voice Memo app) but only Apple can use it. I see no reason why they wouldn’t extend that to all developers sooner or later.

I see a reason. Apple may want to give iTunes a competitive edge over other music apps by keeping it the only music app that can work in the background. This doesn't seem out of line of Apple's character as of late.
Hilarious, and yet, sadly, this must be true. I've been asked countless times by end users why they must login to applications. I think the general population of business (read: average) computer users honestly thinks that passwords should not be required for accessing any information. These are the same type of users that have post-it notes with passwords attached to their monitors and probably write their ATM PIN# on the back of their debit cards.
A resurgence for business of death
Interestingly, California's debt is seen by investors as riskier than Kazakhstan's, according to Bloomberg News. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/01/californias-debt-no...
CSS3, Please The Cross-Browser CSS3 Rule Generator
China builds green facts on the ground
Microsoft warns: Don't press F1
> Our broadcast media is regulated rather differently than most.

Germany seems to operate a similar system. But there the broadcasters themselves can decide on how high the fee should be. Who does decide on that in the UK?
Freakonomics: The Persistence of the Primitive Food Movement
The best I've seen is Icon Factory, I have a feeling they're pricey though :)

They've done the icons for Coda, Windows XP, and others I believe.

http://iconfactory.com/design/icon
from what I've heard (I cannot remember where, but it's likely some discovery channel gumph about the "10 000 year wave") it's the best kept maritime secret that one large boat a month goes under...

... keeping in mind that these ships are most likely shipping containers, and that all things involved are likely covered by some insurance policy that has evolved over hundreds of years of industrial experience (where rogue waves need not be known or even measured to be a factor). I don't think it's too unreasonable to carry on regardless, however misguided. I've always found it strange though.... especially since I've always wanted to do the banana boat "cruise" thing!
I would say that a very large part of modern politics is defining (subverting?) the terms people use.

"Abortion" or "Women's rights"?

I'd also point out that law is in many ways like software, if you try to do a large number of things for a huge audience, the number of edge-cases that must be addressed can quickly become overwhelming.

Unfortunately national governments don't generally have the luxury of just targeting a niche audience or creating different products for different people like a startup might, so there's inherently some complexity in the process, thus room for mistakes.
I don't want to read several pages of badly spoken chat english to find the conclusion. Could someone be so kind and explain what the shocking truth is?
I meant no disrespect to SC. I've actually heard Charleston is a nice example of "New Urbanist" housing development and the southern charm and warm weather is hard to beat.

I just thought it was really funny that he cited the Patriot movie as a reason to move there. I like a lot of silly movies, but never thought to relocate because of them!
constitutionally disinclined to enjoy shallowness

The 154 people who upmodded this article didn't get the memo:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162832
Goodness as a Virus and the Power of Social Networks
Unintended bugs?
Rework is now in stores