skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People have said similar things about Marxism, Christianity, and Manifest Destiny. Forgive me for taking the wait-and-see approach to this one.
I highly recommend checking out the Little Manual of API Design for anyone looking for more on this topic: http://chaos.troll.no/~shausman/api-design/api-design.pdf
Ask HN: How to rapidly get a product/company website built?
Startup founder here, busy bringing up a non-web software product.

How could I rapidly get a compact/editable/live website that clearly describes my product/company?

I envision that I need a minimal website that:

1) Clearly describes the product

2) Clearly describes the company and what it does.

3) Does not look mediocre. (E.g. those static html sites based on those usual narrow rectangular templates with links at the side or top).

To be more precise - it should show that it is a startup website, but one that seems a little established with the look & feel. It should show it is a small company, but give the impression some investment has been made on site design.

4) The site must be easily changeable. (i.e. updates on parts of it without much html tweaking)

Extra:

5) An easy-to-modify company blog, can upload product news/descriptions/videos. A startup is changing quick, and so should the website.

For this, I mistakenly invested my precious time and built this: http://tinyurl.com/y994z55

It works but it partially has (1) and (2) and neither of (3), (4) and (5). I learned from my mistake and built this without spending much time:

http://tinyurl.com/yevywv5

This one is better, because it partially has (1), (2), (4), and somewhat (5) (i.e. videos)

But It's not good enough. I have a feeling there must be a way to quickly bring up a decent site with all of the above.

I am not posting this for finding a consultant, simply asking for opinion. I genuinely believe it does not require complex specialized specs other than stated, its a common pattern.

This on its own is a startup idea I think, a company website package that doesn't suck. At least I haven't encountered any easy solutions so far.

From recent posts: Rethinkdb and Pivotal Labs sites are quite close examples to what I need. Weebly and google site templates aren't as they don't have (3).
I'd like to see Apple encourage its consumers to be a little more conscious of the planet and their place in it. America's disposable culture is ruining the planet and taking resources from those who live on the land where it's mined.
So it wasn't clear to me initially which phase of cpu development you meant. I agree with your statement regarding cpu development in the 90s. Looking at the performance equation I gave earlier, the second portion has gone from several 10s of cycles/instruction in the 486 timeframe to 2-3 INSTRUCTIONS/cycle for the Pentium III.

My point was that your statement about 90% of the gains being from Instructions/clock (ie. architecture) was not always true. The Pentium 4 being a prime candidate, where the number of pipestages was dramatically scaled up (reducing instructions/clock) to increase frequency.

WRT cost/die: Cpus are created on circular silicon wafers. http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/09/moore.ars/2
Every move to a lower process node, reduces the area for each cpu die. For a given cpu, this means that more of them can be added to each wafer, driving down the cost for each unit.

Ofcourse, as you mentioned, by keeping die size a constant , they get get more transistors/die, allowing them to cram more features on a chip. Lowering costs v/s adding features is a tradeoff that every cpu design team has to make.
3/14 1:59 - Google Trends for Pi
I don't have much doubt that Chavez is not doing a good job running the country. I also don't doubt that he is a thug.

However, he's not a dictator, anymore than Berlusconi is a dictator. He's been democratically elected several times. Each time the election was sufficiently clean that there can be no doubt that a majority of Venezuelians voted for him.
Do you really think it's less hassle to package up your ipad, put it in the mail, wait days for a new one to return and then unpack the ipad and reinstall all your stuff, than to simply replace a battery?
I would be really like to see the HN community do a project collectively. Come up with the idea, design, develop and launch it.

It probably sounds more fun than it is going to be. But it should be cool.
Easy on the over-reaction. I've never asked anyone to be banned for anything. I've said that, even as the articles align with my political philosophy (and, yes, are interesting to me)... they should stop being both posted and upvoted (nee encouraged) here.

Nothing more; nothing less.
This is why RailsCasts is awesome. Every article links to ASCIICasts, which has the exact same content, just written down.
This book is like toothpaste - no matter how long you use it for, you can always squeeze more out of it. There should be a theorem of some kind about that.
Case in point on credit for ideas: Shipley reports him saying he invented a parameterization of shell designs in nature. That subject got a few pages in a Richard Dawkins book, and I'd remember if Dawkins had credited Wolfram. (Maybe Wolfram got it independently. I don't know.)
Wall Street's Hackers - Deathbed Bonds
I read that just now and just makes me think how often I would have to use pi/2. (I'm in mechanical engineering.)
NYC Founders Enjoy Proprietary Consumer Dataset
I think this news has it's place on HN, just as well as other news on ACTA, net-neutrality, etc.. But some comments are really inappropriate to put so much political polarity on it.

Venezuela is a country relatively "rebel" on US domination: that doesn't make it a devil, but that doesn't make it a angel either: comments on Chavez being a "dictator" seem inappropriate in this thread (what about a previous US president who cheated with voting machines then ?). Essentially, beware of not distorting the perception of things by highlighting many more such facts when they happen in Venezuela than when they happen e.g. in France or Italy promoted by major media companies and securitarian policies. Overall, think about Chomsky...
Just like our OUR politicians!
Isn't that nice!
Map/Reduce: A visual explanation
There aren't any others that I know of. Most people are incredibly secretive about their stock options - to the point that they give you a vague absolute number (that will likely split or merge at exit) without disclosing a percentage. It's mathematically impossible to evaluate offers like that. "Ten thousand shares" sounds better than 0.001%, though.

There are some very good arguments for keeping the information closed, but we thought we'd try it. So far we've had very positive reaction, but the real test is internal dynamics as the company grows.
Sounds like it could be describing Saudi Arabia. Of course, whether we treat either country as an enemy or an ally has nothing to do with any of that stuff.
Oops, meant to edit, not delete. I mean perhaps Apple knows the iPad is susceptible to statistically more battery failures than normally expected from a product like say the iPhone.
It's not that hard.

If the process works at all like how they handle warranty issues, then they send you the replacement before you send your device to them. This means you have use of your old device in the meantime (assuming it isn't entirely dead).

When the package arrives, you take the new one out of the box and put the old one into it and slap on the prepaid sticker and drop it in the mail. Sync the new device with iTunes and you're done - everything is right back where it was on the device.

It's just about the same level of difficulty as ordering a replacement battery and waiting for it to arrive - except they also take back the old battery and recycle it for you. If you live near an Apple store, it's even easier because you should be able to just go there and swap the device immediately without messing around with shipping.
I've been using enlive for a "learning clojure" project myself and love the approach it takes.
Imagine it's 1998. Google doesn't exist yet. Would Larry Page and Sergey Brin have added their big idea to this spreadsheet? My argument is that if you have any idea that's worthwhile, you're not going to publicize it. It might make sense to get feedback from a few friends. But you don't want potentially dozens of other people trying to execute it before you have had a chance to. Brin and Page are good examples of the fact that ideas in themselves can be extremely valuable and are worth guarding.
Is this a good idea of a communication tool to replace the telephone, for sme’s?
Think of, the Philippines. Where 90% of businesses are Small to Medium Enterprises and are slowly coming to terms with technology. The number of businesses with broadband connectivity are increasing making it more pervasive than ever.

About 50% of those SME's do trading/retail and wholesale of goods. Goods need to be reordered from suppliers. They most of the time do ordering via phone or email. Phone calls are forgotten, emails get lost. The two solutions offer very little ways to keep track of orders. While sales/Inventory systems are in place, they don't usually have supplier collaboration features.

Im asking this question in the perspective of the Philippines. Just try to imagine the situation. The startup I am thinking of involves a product that potentially addresses the issue. It's a web-based sales/purchasing system that organizes the way suppliers communicate with customers and vice versa. Think of it as a social network however built for Business to Business transactions. In essence, it allows the two entities to transact, to make orders to suppliers, and for suppliers to send invoices to customers. Through the system, both entities can track receivables/payables.

It's going to have a basic CRM module where customers can submit issues on their products. It'll also have a project-management module for project-based deals where customers and suppliers can track milestones and billing schedules.

At this point it's still a rough idea. What do you think?
We don't have the time or the resources to "wait and see." Additionally, we aren't waiting and seeing, we are printing trillions of dollars.

You even have to wait and see, just look at history. What mises describes has happened countless times already. One particularly popular austrian school student has predicted many collapses just a year or two before their occurrence.

Don't wait and see
Study history!
The world will be better
for you
and for me
The problem is that whoever owns the domain or the password to the repository owns the project.
also jrockway's http://search.cpan.org/~jrockway/Template-Refine-0.02/ works similarly. I've used it before in some perl stuff.
anonymous posts can very quickly change the atmosphere from thoughtful to spiteful, and it makes spamming/trolling much more difficult to stop. So you have to weigh those costs w/ the benefit of one fewer barrier to posting.
I'd not react if someone used "fuck" as an expletive (depending on situation), but if someone called another in the discussion for "fucker", or similar.

In sum: A curse is not high class, but might pass. A general insult to someone, because they disagreed, is much worse.

(And I partly agree with the poster, if someone disagrees I'd like a motivated comment. A vote up/down is just frustrating; what can I learn? [Edit: But to vote up/down to show you're (dis)agreeing is the culture on HN, it seems. So I accept that.])

Disclaimer: I'm not a native English speaker, but afaik "cunt" is quite offensive.
Part of that fight should be flagging articles like this that are basically about politics. Look at the discussion it has generated:-/
There were plenty of search engines in 1998. Larry and Sergey's implementation just happened to be much better.
"Actual capitalism" is as far from "capitalism" as "actual communism" is from "communism"...
Well, other than the homicides committed by the dictatorship itself, of course.
To be fair, regexes can still be used when parsing a CFG.
Just out of curiosity, what are the arguments that you considered for keeping the information closed?

A somewhat related anecdote... I recall with chagrin the first startup I joined. The CEO was a friend of mine. I kept asking him how much equity he was offering as a percentage. He kept responding evasively by snowing me with all sorts of dealy jargon that I didn't understand. In retrospect, of course, he was concealing the fact that the percentage was negligible. At the time, though, insecure in my knowledge of business, I walked away thinking that I was a pathetic noob for having the idea that percentage was a meaningful metric. (This guy was good at what he did, which was deceive smart but gullible people.) That experience is one reason I like your job post. I totally agree with the commenter who said that they hate the jockeying of the negotiation process and would find it a relief to just know up front.

Anyway, I find your post to be an interesting experiment and I think many of us would like to see a follow-up report on it someday.
True, they're great for a site like 4chan. I think I'll just keep arguing for users only for now.
Wolfenstein-like games with JavaScript, DOM and HTML 5 canvas
Brin and Page are good examples of the fact that ideas in themselves can be extremely valuable and are worth guarding.

They're probably one of the worst examples. It was technical brilliance, not their idea, that allowed them to succeed.
I didn't say rationally self-interested. It just has to have a probability to survive. It's not a given that self-interest is the best survival trait, groups working together might improve their chances. No point in giving a crash course on evolution theory here, though.

Also, of course gathering data and evidence would be useful, too.
Gotcha. That makes sense :-)

(and yeh I agree with the rest of what you say)
> I have worked as a researcher and the kind of defensive mentality described in that article is not normal. The most obvious explanation I can think of is that they were consistently attacked by vested interests.

You make it sound like the attacks were unprovoked and somehow unfair. Considering that they proposed massive social changes, said that "heretics" should be jailed, and so on, that's simply wrong. They acted as crusaders.
Egypt Just Blocked Skype
You pick a bad example. Andrew's comment was unusually thoughtful until the end bit, it was the end bit which derailed the thread, and the end bit has nothing to do with politics.
As far as I can recall reading, they did go to a bunch of places to sell their idea. Needless to say, none of the companies took their idea seriously.
To be less fair, it can also be used to parse some strictly written XHTML.
Off topic:

In my opinion, the current job sites in India are completely broken for the smart programmers who are looking for interesting work. And the few companies/startups who would like to hire such people again fail miserably (most of the times) when they try out these sites.

These sites cater to the majority - companies doing low-end services work & average programmers. (Sorry for sounding elitist here.)

It is a very good opportunity for a startup to bridge this gap. Make a smart programmer meet a smart company.

HN seems to be a good place to reach out for good people but a country/location specific (apart from Silicon Valley) job post doesn't stand much chance of being on the front page for long.

It would have been great if we had a job board for HNers where job posts can only be made by people with a certain karma threshold (e.g. 500) and each of it costs 50 points for the submitter. Allow browsing through the job posts based on locations/countries and type of work.

It is no different from any other job listing out there, but since it comes from a HN user I think it would have a higher chance of being interesting enough for people who hang around here (and other smart people as well who are not on HN).
that is one awesome tool, simply powerful thank you for the tip.
As a point of reference, presumably.
Actually I can see a future for it as energy gets more expensive (it's more efficient), and people, cheaper.
This is sort of a technical solution, but as long as I'm working on something that doesn't need a browser for reference (so, C programming, where I can look up manpages), I just kill X and do my work on ttys. It helps you focus on only one thing at a time.
That's wild, I have 3 laptops right now, one purchased in 2001 (dell latitude), one in 2003 (dell inspiron) and a macbook pro from 2006 and all work perfectly -- all with dead batteries.

I still use them. One for my home theater, one for monitoring web sites, and one to type this comment.

I'm not saying this to be mean or anything, but I think your stuff could last longer or you could fix them. One time, the inspiron died on me. I called dell and they said i had to send it back for a new mobo at $500. I said, "No way!" and opened it up. Turns out, it was just a loose connection on the power panel! Fixed it for free and saved a little piece of the planet in the process.

One thing we agree on is that we've been doing it wrong for many years. The wrong is disposable. The wrong is not repairing things. The wrong is filling up landfills.

Apple, with these battery decisions, is exacerbating the problems caused by the wrongs we have been doing for years.

Regarding the razor issue, you're right -- not the best example of sustainability, but it was a gift and it was a decade ago before I realized I have an impact on the planet. I no longer shave every day and I use a $19 trimmer once a week (sometimes month or quarter) -- traditional razors just won't cut it (pun intended) after that much growth and I leave a 5 o'clock -- better for the skin and I don't waste shaving cream. When I run across a strop, I'm going to start using my great granddad's straight razor.
I just tried it and it isn't working very well for some HTML pages. But thanks,anyway.
If you're looking for more examples for comparison, tekpub.com has really good screencasts, including a series for Rails.
how do you feel about the environmental concerns?
I picked a great example:

> the "western model" isn't that great either

and

> classic socialist play

How much more shallow can you get in your analysis than pithy comments like those? Both of them are flame bait for various people and ultimately don't seem to produce productive discourse.
It's only a paradox, I suppose, if you buy the prosperity hypothesis of obesity. Another word for "paradox" might be "refuting evidence". Gary Taubes has done some excellent work on this. My mind was changed by watching some of his talks, which are readily available on Youtube.
Yes, I was thinking of the relative ease with which you can reset an iPod (and presumably an iPad) to factory defaults and the restore from backup vs. a MacBook, and since the iPad you get back is not the one you send in, it seems like a logical precaution to take, but "equally important" was probably not the best way to put it.
Suppose you pay your top guys $100k, and a candidate comes along with about the same level of skill and experience that you really want to hire. But he won't join for less than $120k. At this point you either have to pass, or you have to bump everyone else's salary. If you have ten guys, instead of paying extra $20k, you suddenly have to pay extra $220k - a massive difference. Same goes for stock options.

I haven't heard a good argument in favor of hiding stock option percentages - I can't think of any other than concealing the fact that your share is negligible.
Making the battery removable would make the overall design thicker and less rigid.

My Nexus One disagrees.
1) I think the actual story has elements of both variants--keeping an idea secret until execution, as well as executing on it and improving the idea.

If PageRank was closely guarded in any way, it could have been so that Page and Brin could submit their research paper about it to SIGIR--at which point it would be public. On the other hand, Page and Brin hosted the search engine for anybody to use.

2) As an aside, assuming the page below is the actual paper, does it mean Larry and Brin already have funding at the time they were writing it up? It mentions that users should try the search engine out at google.stanford.edu, but supposedly, it was their first investor who named Google.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
Hmm, looks good. Cannot find your email in your profile, can you kindly let me know your email? Or can you email me at rolf.oltmans@gmail.com. Thank you.
Ask HN: Is functional programming really worth it?
Do you think a better language makes you more productive than a language with great libraries?

There's Arc. There's OCaml, Haskell and a plethora of so-called next generation languages. These languages are supposed to be far superior to today's measly languages like Java or C++, and in pg's own words: they're supposed to make you more productive, get work done quicker. (Quote from Revenge of the Nerds: "1 line of LISP replaces 20 lines of C")

But is that really true? From experience I can tell you the lack of libraries in these languages kills off almost any code size advantage you get from using them. So I ask you all, be honest to yourself; is using such a language worth it?

And one last thing. Is functional programming really better than imperative programming? All that brain-racking to implement a multi-level loop using recursion in ML? IMO, imperative programming cleanly maps out to the real world. The world is imperative! Things have state! We do not live in an imaginary fluffy world of mathematical elegance & correctness. Truth is it's so much more easier to think imperative.

So, Is functional programming really worth it?
That artificial barrier also happens to screen out a lot of unqualified people - which would be lowering the market clearing price otherwise. I posit that these barriers have no real effect on middle and top tier professionals in these fields.

The top computer programmers also make as much as top lawyers and doctors - possibly more if you count entrepreneurs.

It's not so much a price / cost issue as it is a respect issue. Can you imagine how the legal or medical profession would suffer if anyone off the street could claim to be a lawyer or doctor and get hired for the job?
Many dictators were first elected, and with time eroded democratic institutions enough that subsequent elections meant less and less, and in the end the country became something else than what could fairly be called a democracy.
The fact thats its 2010 and no one else can get search right shows its pure execution. Google just does it right and keeps doing it right.
It is called "realpolitik" -- to a large part, all countries let their interests go before most other considerations and they lie about it.

That doesn't make all countries equal.

(Yes, Saudi Arabia is a typical example of a country that can get away with breaking human rights, because the rest of the world needs a stable Mid East.)
I'd argue for the opposite, allow anonymous in the beginning (during "bootstrap mode"), to minimize hurdles for new users, and switch to users only when anonymous users become a nuisance.
Who's technical brilliance? Sergy and Brin's got them a better search engine, but wasn't it the AdWords idea that originated at Goto.com that got them to the Google they are today?