skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>He regularly gives advice to people who have risk factors like high blood pressure or high cholesterol, but the advice he gives them (eat in moderation, eat more vegetables and less junk food, exercise a little) is pretty generic, and none of them follow it anyway.

Doesn't that kind of justify his ignorance, though? Doctors don't have time to be experts on everything (or on anything, really), and it seems unlikely that an ability to hold informed discourse on the nutritional value of broccoli would have anything more than a marginal effect on outcomes for his patients.
Actually you do lose functionality by going that way. SVN handles binaries better. I can also cherry-pick files from a directory structure, so if I need to fetch out a subfolder or an individual file, I can do so. With Git I must clone the repo or set up a web service so I can get access to the file system. But they're different tools for different audiences. In my environment, I do use both of these tools together.

The lesson Git, Ruby, Subversion, Apache, and many other projects have taught me is that instead of saying "What I have is fine, I don't need what you have", I need to ask "Why do you use what you use, why does it help you, and how might it help me?
> let's not be angry at tigers for chasing sweet little antelopes.

It's a bit of a different scenario when the antelope is yours.
Despite the encroachment of patents on the ridiculous (one-click, etc), I respect the value of having a patent system when it comes to real technology or design that deliver a new type of value to the consumer. Its a noble attempt to reward innovators. While weakness in the system has been top of mind recently with big player oppressing the little guy, or holding companies using patents to extort money from innovators, patents can also protect the little guy. So, just because there has been some excess, we shouldn't see patents, as a whole, as a bad thing. Instead, what we may need to reconsider are the bounds of what should be patentable, and possibly duration.

In regards to Apple, it may be that some of these patents in question are completely legitimate, and are consistent with the spirit of the idea of patents. I would not view Apple in a negative light for protecting what others might have knocked-off. Lets see how the case works out. It may turn out that many of Apple's claims are invalidated through prior art, etc. But if they do hold, I say good for Apple. BTW, I carry an Android phone.
Reminds me of the Hitchhiker..
Are you saying that shareholders are twisting Steve Jobs' arm, forcing him to sue HTC?

My humble guess is that Steve Jobs would, in fact, not have been thrown ass-first out of Apple had he not.

Apple did this because they wanted to, not because anyone else pressured them into it.
Show HN: Backtype's (YC S'08) Twitter tracking lags far behind Tweetmeme
I suppose it could also be said that spending time designing relational schemas that will change drastically, then migrating data every time they do, is wasteful. Many non-relational databases allow quite a bit of flexibility in terms of incrementally changing structure as you learn about your business needs.

Not that I am in one camp or the other. We use both relational and non-relational databases where it makes sense. The more of each (both in choices and users), the better, so far as I am concerned.
Sorry, I still maintain that pushing to a live site is a bad idea -- and that includes indirectly pushing to it with a auto-triggered script. Deployment should always be a deliberate operation and not related to simply pushing code to a blessed repo.

About (2), the script approach is the right one here. Again, just because you have some case where pushing to a working copy is easier doesn't mean git should make that a feature. Write the script once, problem solved.
Google taking ReMail off of the App Store is a very nice stroke of theirs against Apple. This gives Android phones the big advantage of Google's gmail search.
Sure - I've read that - but even if you record >10 second visits, you're still not finding out if users did what you wanted them to do based on bounce rate, unless your metric is time on site.

I don't think the 10 second rule minimizes all other points in the article.
Ritornano gli anni '80 con gli Spandau Ballet
You ever used a Bloomberg?

It's not just that they have some data. It's that they have:

- strong completeness of data

- often they have data you cannot get elsewhere (bond trading data)

- there's a built-in messaging system that traders often think they need

- it is itself a development platform

I've been in the position of being a trader and considering data to purchase. Everything seems too expensive very quickly.

My trading desk had ONE terminal in the corner. And that's at $1500/year.

And that's for something as essential as a Bloomberg.

Do you see what I mean?
A small and light form factor tablet with a touch interface and a way to hide away a EVDO USB modem would probably sell very well.
HTC is not new to the business, Apple is new to the business. HTC has been around since before the iMac.
You are a fool. If you make a claim that demands proof by exhaustion, do not complain about that very fact when someone asks you to back it up.
Graphic concepts too vague to even claim copyright of are not equal to patents. Not saying that makes this right on Apple's part, just saying it's a world of difference.
As someone who was using macs even when there was a death watch on the entire company 1997-1999'ish I find all this wringing over patent fights to be silly. For better or worse, it's what companies do in this day and age. It's also hard for me to imagine that Steve Jobs is going to let someone do what Bill Gates did with windows in the mid 1980's (e.g., steal Apple's dominant market position by basically copying Apple's stuff and then selling it for a lower price) again without a fight.
"Adobe wasn't the obvious match, but it was the one that was willing to spend the most money, and that's really all that matters.

In the last 13 years, I never had to go to a meeting internally that I didn't want to. Now there are meetings I have to go to. It's part of working for somebody else."

Those last few paragraphs sound a little, I don't know, apologetic? Resentful?
The Eight-Year Escape Plan: Interview With Tsilli Pines
Behaviour driven development
Los Angeles Startup iChange.com hiring talented Web Developer
I worked on a system a couple of years ago where we ran calculations nightly and then we write the results of this calculation to a row in a table for caching purposes. This row was then fetched by another job to generate a PDF. We used SQL for this because Reporting Services could build a pdf from a row in a table.

It's not a good solution. This type of data doesn't need to be searchable. It's using a database server as a caching mechanism. That seems wrong. Seems like memcached, mongo, couch, or anything else would have been better.

Heck, people have been using memcached for a long time, and yet all of a sudden people don't see a use for NoSQL setups?

Are we sure we're not just doing the same old "Defend what you know" dance?
I think the issue is with the government issuing patents like these in the first place. Multitouch...are you kidding. I can see a patent on the technology behind multitouch so you can't open the iphone and steal it. Unlock by dragging an icon. rediculous. I am going to patent the form submit button. "an action by which a user submits information to a back-end server" Then I will sue everyone. Done!
apple did this because they thought enforcement would make money for its shareholders
How to Learn Embedded Linux (For Free Again)
I'd argue that you really should use an animated SVG for this, which is well supported in WebKit.
> Relational databases scale. NoSQL databases scale.

This is simply not true, if we're talking about horizontal scalability (which is probably the most relevant kind of scaling these days, because it's the most cost-effective).

You can't add more nodes to an RDBMS, keep ACID, and get linear scalability. You just can't.

From what I know of CouchDB, you could scale it linearly if you manage the partitioning of data yourself according to load. But if your data distribution changes you're a bit screwed. My impression though is that most people just use CouchDB on a single machine.

For BigTable, on the other hand, it really is just a matter of adding or removing machines at any time and getting nearly linear scaling. The load is dynamically balanced between machines, so this is actually practical.

Are there ways of scaling an RDBMS architecture? Yes, but they involve giving up ACID (like having read-only replicas, for example).

So I'm not saying RDMBS's are bad, just that there is a real limitation here.
The last thing I expect to see when I come to HN is a post about the site I work on every day (well... one of the sites). I would love to have some sort of semi-technical blog on our sites to showcase what actually happens behind the scenes more often.

From the thousands of lines of code per month to the multiple tiers of network redundancy to the hours upon hours we spend optimizing page performance for a better user experience, I would love to show some of it off to a technical audience.
Yeah, everybody knows that Apple invented PCs, OSes, GUI interfaces, word processors and everything else. Microsoft would've never succeeded without copying stuff ... contrary to other people's beliefs, the backing of IBM didn't help one bit.
Performance Analysis of Facebook Share Javascript
So we bought a 10-minute spot for $15,000 at a trade show. We had this sales guy say, "Everyone stand up, because we are going to play rock, paper, scissors. And the winner gets a Hummer. But instead of saying 'rock, paper, scissors,' we're going to say 'Om-ni-ture.' " So you got 1,500 people chanting "Om-ni-ture." Ever since that day, there really haven't been any RFPs that we didn't get an invite to.

Simply brilliant.
No, he's saying that Jobs has a fiduciary obligation to protect the interests of Apple, and that given the reality of tech business, he must play the patent game.

Every other tech company does it; why hold Apple to an exceptional standard?

The OP is not making an ethical or moral critique.

As regards to Apple, he's merely saying "in the long-term" it is bad business as Apple will experience a brain drain, and, there is an implicit shaming aspect (remember those blue boxes Steve? ;) by pointing out past actions of Steve Jobs himself.
Sounds like he's studying Scientology.
This holy war seems to just be in the open source world. I really don't see cio's rushing to get rid of oracle/db2/sql server
Ted Wang and Andreessen Horowitz Put Open-Source Investment Documents Online
I've Managed to Speed up Gmail POP Fetching
The way to speed up Gmail POP fetching is to send a steady stream of emails that need to be filtered out to its own label. (Do not filter to the trash, Gmail thinks trash is well. . .trash)

This way their algorithms think you get lots of mail and will check every 5 minutes.

Let me know how it works for you.
How looking away prevents pedestrian collisions
It seems the author is unaware of the multitude of managed vps and dedicated server options out there that would be a perfect fit for his needs. But I tend to agree with his general point about cloud services not fulfilling promises of performance. The general logic of what it's supposed to be is sound, but it just seems that no one has figured out how to really optimize it.
After the Kodak / Sun patent suit, I wouldn't count on HTC's ability to invalidate any of the patents. The power patent might be unavoidable.
Limo Las Vegas, limo service Las Vegas, limo services in Las Vegas
I'd like to read this article, but the belly fat ad is too much.
More a publicity stunt than anything. China can't get pushed around by the us government, forget google or the wto.
Dodd Bill Could Drain Angel Pool, Make Startup Financings More Confusing
And the people who think the pale imitation's lack of software restrictions is far more important than any amount of polish.
I would say skip the big stuff and just do a netbook or netop that is rock solid and requires no user expert knowledge.
I'm sure the blatant misreading of his tweet by techcrunch last week had something to do with it.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/27/new-twitter-features/
I like your nick. Sophacles was one of my favorite philosaphers.
Time tracking - hassle or help? Independent LetsFreckle Review
Shawn Adrian discusses the issue of time tracking for freelance designers, and reviews LetsFreckle, with plenty of screenshots.
I've started using a similar plugin called sparkup.vim, which I like it a lot.

input:text followed by C-e creates <input..etc
Working at Fog Creek - a promotional video
Wow, the screencast is impressive: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw3jipcenKc

I'm putting this plugin on my to-review-and-perhaps-write-about list.
Perhaps these tech blogger/entrepreneurs will get round to doing real work now. Streams of messages (twitter) and bug tracking (frog creek) is great n all, but how about something with more than a handful of features?
A crisper statement of your "outlier" objection is "selection effects." Well, yeah, the reason many Wall-Street types are rich is selection effects (though lately much of the wealth of the politically-connected ones seem to derive from feeding at the public trough). But Buffet has made so many public bets and profited so much from them that selection effects might turn out to be quite unlikely an explanation if you did the calculation.

Remember: the more bets a bettor makes and the more profitable a bet turns out, the less likely the whole series of bets is the result of luck. It might be the case that the probability of the "Buffet just lucky" hypothesis is so low that you would not expect to see even a single professional investor with Buffet's track record (or a better track record) even though there are 100s of 1000s or millions of professional investors if the professional investors were just rolling the dice. Eliezer's "Einstein's Arrogance" (its the first google hit) is a good explanation of this point though it takes a little work to see how "Einstein's Arrogance" applies to the present topic.

Selection effects is the most likely explanation I know of for why most rich small-business owners are rich, which makes it odd or perverse for you to hold up the small business owner as an alternative role model. (In the U.S., unlike the avg founder of a tech startup, the avg small-business owner earns less than the avg employee. Smal-business owners, like investors, though, have more opportunities for dice-rolling than employees do.) In other words, I think you have it backwards.

This is not to say that there are not small-business-owning strategies (even ones that do not involve tech development) that can do much, much better than rolling the dice -- just that most rich small-business owners probably did not follow those strategies.
I would rather that law makers deal with the IP issues in a mature way then wish ill-will to someone using the current system. We really need to get some pressure where it matters (government). The courts do what they are told for the most part.
"At the end of the day" is a Britishism that got transported over here during the leadup to the Iraq war, mainly because Tony Blair used it so much. I actually have not heard it very much recently.
The Most Insane Movie Trailer About Silicon Valley You'll Ever See
I'd go with Talib Kweli, Jay-Z, Common, Kanye - in that order - for their lyrics. And really, the first three are in a league of their own.
How-to: Integrating CMIS with Zoho using gadgets in GateIn
Especially these bio/medical types, rigorous thinking isn't a requirement in their qualification process.
They know that some people would be bothered by this but they don't have any great reason to care as the competetive edge this might give them on the 99% of their market which does not care would far outweigh the damage done by bothering the 1%.
Great artists sue?
Ask HN: Is there a list of dead YC startups?
They can't all be chugging along..can they?
Very insightful interview. However, I'd like to hear more interviews of startups where there is more of a "fight" -- where getting traction is a battle that requires a lot of iterating. Model startups that tend to be interviewed seem to:

a) Come up with a great, simple idea

b) Make the site very clean and simple

c) Launch publicly

d) MASSIVE VIRAL GROWTH! (Of course, more modestly ;))

That seems to go against conventional startup wisdom, where you have to fight tooth and nail for a long time before you start getting traction. These interviews of late are really motivating and awesome, but at the same time, they are sort of demoralizing because the subtext seems to indicate that if you aren't growing super fast from day one, you are almost better off just starting over.
Y Combinator Will Now Accept Late Applications
I think that it serves to make reading an essay more fluid, as you can crop a lot of unnecessary information this way. If every "it turns out" was to follow the path that came to the conclusion, then there'd be a lot of extra detail that would divert the reader from the intended direction, without providing necessary information.

And if the exact path is illuminating in some way, but distracting from the original intent, then it would serve to put the explanation in a footnote.
Furthermore, you can fake curiosity in hopes of generating reciprocal curiosity. Everyone likes an opportunity to talk about himself.
Every other tech company does it; why hold Apple to an exceptional standard?

Is that really true? Can you cite Google suing to enforce a patent? What about HTC iself?
A point, re muslim expansion to the Balkans. But still, just the Spain/Persia/Iran expansion makes the Crusades look like a tea party with centenarians.

But where the Ottomans religiously tolerant in all periods?

It seems the Turks where really disliked by their subjects (both in Middle East and in the Balkan), where did that come from, then?
Morning show with John Richards on Seattle station KEXP
Probably the best radio station I found so far
http://kexp.org/
They stream it in NY on 91.5 from 9am to 12pm

Metacritic

http://www.metacritic.com/music/

Write down high rated cd's then listen
to samples of songs on Amazon to see if you like it.
The patent system is a attempt at achieving a noble goal (rewarding inventors) but in my opinion it fails both at:

- Generally failing to reward innovators.

- Encouraging more benefits than it costs to society.

The former is because:

- Generally individuals cannot afford to effectively use the patent process.

- Any innovation usually has a couple of good ideas but requires many other (already patented) building blocks which makes the new innovation unprofitable or impossible to pursue.

- Companies that can afford to file and use patents generally can't realize their new ideas, or if they do, not to the full extent of their promise. (Every company has limited resources and a patent on, say, the mouse has a whole load of possible applications.)

- Technology moves so fast than 20 years is essentially 5 product life cycles.

I would argue that the patent system does nothing at all to deliver value to the consumer.

Generally things are cheapest for consumers when there is a large market of near-homogeneous products, such as consumer televisions - exactly the kind of market patents are designed to stop by the granting of temporary monopolies. Yet in that market (where everyone can build a TV) we see pretty rapid innovation - when I grew up in 1980 we had one black and white TV. Now we can reasonably expect that 3D TVs will be available for twenty bucks before 2020.
Baseline consumption does not raise linearly with body mass (otherwise no-one would gain weight.) While there is some truth to a larger gain, we are still talking about percentages in relation to existing mass and weight maintenance intake. I was merely making the point that at intakes sufficiently larger than the maintenance level, the 10% just means packing weight slower.

Overall, I think eating slower is a good idea, preferably after cooking it yourself. Eating less is too. But, ultimately, increasing expenditure is probably the best of the options (unless you do something dramatic like combine the approaches;)
Doctors are typically educated in how to fix problems, not so much in prevent them. This is unfortunate, since most people think they're experts in everything including nutrition, and treat them as such, but they're really not.

Maybe if doctors were paid to keep their patient base healthy rather than just fix them when they're sick, they'd look into more of that.
The only thing about your comparison that makes sense is the word "magic". I am not taking a position for or against factory farming or eating meat, just against the ridiculousness of comparing war to farming.

First: the most efficient war killing methods are still very inefficient. This lies mostly in the fact that the other side consists of free-range actors, who are actively trying to kill and not themselves be killed.

Second: Killing a person, for the purpose of making a point, is different than killing a person for food. Further killing a non-person for food is even more different. My species is more important to me than theirs.

Third: The animals are domesticated, therefore are part of a symbiotic relationship in which they get to live fairly well, without so much worrying about getting to eat, breed etc, in exchange for being docile, and eaten at the end of the road. Death by bad slaughterhouse is less painful, less terrifying, and quicker than death by wolf. People are not on the eating/killing end of such an agreement.

Finally: regardless of the ethics/morality of eating meat, appealing to emotion is still a logical fallacy.

Your comparison is roughly the same as: "I cannot believe that there are 100K new porn vids (not including cam girls!) released every year. Its unconsciable. By comparison, the catholic church, the most efficient child raping organization ever[1], only managed a few hundred boys per year. Thats just 3 days of filming in just our country."

[1] not a belief of mine personally, just a random "fact" like wwii being the most efficient at killing.
That's what made it so sweet. Fun had nothing to do with any rules of play.
I think this story (your a-d) is rare, which I tried to codify in this powderkeg/movement metaphor in a recent blog post: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/02/are-you-building...

Posterous seems like the typical powderkeg. And at any point there are powderkeg ideas out there waiting to be launched, so a-d can work. Or in other words, some ideas are valuable! (Not to discount execution at all, which is usually a necessary condition.)

Half of my other interviews already, however, have told a different story. Steve Welch and Steve Barsh made cold calls endlessly. Rand Fishkin blogged tirelessly, for years. And Mark Cramer experimented with lots of things before he hit on some success with a Firefox add-on. Wikipedia was also a slow growth story that really capitalized on SEO.
A couple months ago someone posted a fairly complete list of every startup we've funded, including his guess at their current status. IIRC it was wrong in some details but not far off as an overall picture.