skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
RethinkDB: Why Start a New Database Company in 2010? (MySQLConf)
At least in silicon valley, I don't think the tech sector was ever in a slump... companies left and right have been trying to hire people here.
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Virginia Tech students remember those who died in shooting
How did this make it to HN front page? It's just an image of Apple as HAL. Nothing particularly interesting or intelligent about that.
Ask HN: How to file a patent?
I am developing a mechanism that I would like to file a patent for. Does anyone have any useful references they could point me to regarding the process? I am trying to avoid hiring a lawyer.
> In fact, there are some huge usability gains to be had with an on screen keyboard. For example, when typing into an email field, the keyboard changes to specialize for keys important for creating email addresses.

On an iPhone, this is merely a way to compensate for the lack of real-estate you can dedicate to the keyboard. On a blackberry you have all of these keys accessible as alternates by holding down the ALT key. This includes all of the letters, numbers, backspace, enter, shift keys and these characters: ()_-+@#*/:;;"?!,$.

Typing on a blackberry is much easier and quicker, making it a lot better for email and chat.

I'd personally like to a new blackberry all the same, except the screen would also be a touch screen. Keep the small laptop-like touchpad, though.
Yeah....NO
They are getting bonuses because of the loans. The issue whether they are getting the money directly out of the loans or not is impossible to decide because once the bank gets the money it treats it like any other money.

But if the loans did not exist, many of these people would not be getting these bonuses either because their employers would not exist either, or because their employers would not have sufficient capital to generate the profits from which the bonuses come.
The page crahsed Safari on my iPad.
What level of gun ownership would you characterize as "common"? Wikipedia says that there are more than 30 guns per hundred people in Canada. Are you basing your assertions about ownership distribution on casual observation? Perhaps you are not the type of person that others mention guns around.

The author way oversimplified a complex situation. The US and Canada both have high levels of gun ownership. Canada also has significantly higher crime rates in many areas. The US still has higher violent crime rates, but that gap has been closing in recent years as the rate in the US drops.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gun_owners...
Ask HN: Something to be said for slow software?
Does quick software always leave the best impression on users? In many cases, yes of course: people hate when a slow computer gets in the way of what they want to do. But I wonder if an application that's too zippy can be perceived as cheap in some cases.

Analogy: Everybody loves low prices, but if you sell your product at a bargain (or give it away for free), its perceived value can suffer. People see a competitor who's charging more than you and assume their product is higher quality.

Compare:

* "It's free so I guess it's not worth much."
* "It takes no time to load so I guess it's not doing much."
There was one last weekend, might want to check it out:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1255491
That's nice and all, but Firefox is still one of the biggest browsers out there. It's not obsolete, and you can't ignore it if you value users. In fairness, not everyone values users.
RIM clearly has some problems with their OS and library of applications, they both suck.

But one thing that's going to stick is their contracts with businesses. Almost every business that deploys devices to their employees issues blackberries, and they make a lot of money off the Business Enterprise Server and integration with Microsoft Exchange.

RIM has only recently emphasized the consumer smartphone market, relative to other companies like Nokia and Apple which have only done consumer the entire time they made smartphones.

Nobody's going to oust RIM in the business market any time soon.
I find this particularly interesting, especially as a CS student. Is this hiring binge across the board, or primarily for developers who've been in the market for awhile now?

Because if it's the latter, startups can continue to siphon off from universities (through internships, and later job offers) and the like.
It may end up, like SOAP, more name than acronym.
Why do you say that I find this personally offensive?! You are not making a lot of sense. I'm just quoting Linus who probably had more experience with various VCSs than any of us.
Mine passed the got-run-over-by-an-SUV test, modulo a new external keyboard and monitor.
Oh look, they're making a hardware-keyboard-touchscreen-slider combo that just got leaked:

http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/03/03/device.follows...
FF is hardly obsolete. The presentation used vendor-specific extensions (-webkit-) that are not part of the CSS3 spec, much less HTML5. Many of the features could have been implemented in FF had the author used -moz- alongside -webkit-.
I agree the odometer-style widget makes sense as a spinner, this [1] doesn't in my opinion. First choice would probably be popup menu or drop down possibly, then picker and chooser.

[1] http://www.designerandroid.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/ds...
Rubber Door Mat & Kitchen Door mats
I've just got to chime in with an oo-rah for the deadlifts... they hit your whole body, and really improved my climbing performance.

The clean-and-jerk with Olympic weights was awesome, too... anybody know of a place in the bay area where one might find some used rubber weights, cheap-ish?
There are some of us out there that are actively looking for start-ups to jump to, I think a lot of top caliber guys look for start-ups to get involved with. But I have to agree the market is pretty hot right now, which is a good thing.
In almost all cases where you have a prediction, you can put your money where your mouth is. If you find a flaw in the original program, you can make better predictions than it. Then you can invest in things that correlate with the correctness of your prediction (or you could just use Intrade).
I would make an opposite point: software that's distinctly faster than its peers impresses users not only as faster but also as generally higher-quality in ways one would not think had anything to do with performance.

Users are sensitive to tiny differences in speed, much tinier than most software developers consider significant. For example, there have been many studies showing dramatic drop-offs in web usage with what seem like micro-differences in response times.

A good example is how Chrome is gaining rapidly in market share primarily by being more responsive. There was a fascinating post recently on a political blog I read where the author was talking about switching to Chrome even though he couldn't quite figure out why. I read it as an example of the psychological spill-over effect of performance. (Edit: here it is: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/12/the_case_f.... Well worth reading for anyone interested in the psychology of software.)

It's a fascinating conundrum that while hardware has gotten orders of magnitude faster, software has remained sluggish. I know it's fashionable to explain this by saying "but software is doing orders of magnitude more than it used to", but I think this is only a partial explanation; it's also the case that we're leaving huge amounts on the table because of the way we write code. I used to believe in the dream of an ideal high-level language abstracted away from the hardware altogether. That now seems to me a harmful delusion. What we need is a better way to combine high-level constructs with low-level ones. This in turn (veering wildly off on a tangent here...) explains the persistent appeal of C++ despite its manifest perversity. No other mainstream language is even in that game.
Just got an unsolicited from Amazon in my inbox, a good job too, something is going on.
Some pre-school proto-mathematics
This is extremely cool. I admit it scared me a little bit just how easy it was to do the geolocation. The web is about to change dramatically, again. :)
Because learning Latin trains the mind in logical thought.

[citation needed]

Really, there has been experimental research on this subject, and the best considered conclusion is that Latin doesn't have any particular virtue in training the mind in logical thought.

Note (as anyone who reads my HN profile will see) that I by no means disparage the study of foreign languages, dead or alive.
"The big way to save is by hiring less engineers"

The big way to save is by hiring less business people. I've come to the realization that in today's startup climate, developers often add more value than business people, because a skilled developer, if interested and motivated, is able to eventually pick up the business side of things pretty well.

I'm finding this a wonderful economic climate for a single technical founder to bootstrap a startup (or two technical cofounders).
Replace "Firefox" with "IE" and your arguments are even more persuasive.
Awesome. A coworker was walking by just now and he couldn't believe so much thought could go into typography. Or that there's an entire movie about Helvetica.
Good catch, I'd argue non-technical people should be as few as possible. The big way to save is by hiring less in general.
G5s? G4s? It's been 4 years since they switched to Intel. All that says is that at least 4 years ago they weren't making great laptops.

"To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates." - http://lesswrong.com/lw/lw/reversed_stupidity_is_not_intelli...

Rephrase the question, then, who makes better laptop hardware than the Aluminium Unibody MBP?
I find that separating connotations from the core meanings of words leads to clearer arguments. In your position, if someone calls you sexist and you deny that, it's not clear if you're denying treating someone differently based on their sex or if you just don't think you're mistreating the person. My stance is more likely to lead to a response of, "Yes, I'm being sexist, but not in a wrong way."

We generally agree.
I agree this is garbage. Click the "Flag".
Who Has the Most Dedicated Servers?
Big tech companies already heavily use internships as a recruiting method for new-grads. When I went through, I remember the big 3 all paid substantially more than all of the local companies. A lot of the interns I know (including my self), returned to one of their internships.
Which rather confirms his point about polish being more important in attracting people than is typically acknowledged, don't you think?
The Day Einstein Died - Photo Gallery
I don't presume to know what is necessary by everyone's situation. If the argument is that mercurial is better because you don't have to use -b, well that's weak sauce.
What I don't understand is cops usually have no problem finding a judge to sign any kind of warrant, no matter how crazy or wide the scope.

So exactly how wild of a goose-chase are they doing that they can't even find a judge to give them a warrant that they feel the need to skip the process entirely?

Also very bothersome, Yahoo gave them a great deal of info already without any warrant, they just didn't want to give them email that were less than 6 months old.

The emails they want must have been internal to yahoo's system (yahoo to yahoo account) because there is no way you could convince me that the government doesn't have a copy of every email sent via pop3/smtp since 9/11 because they are completely in plain text.
This piece is from Nature Biotechnology magazine that I received every month. Fortunately, it is available also online. I think the content is relevant to every aspiring company founder...
I have had wrong code delivered on more than one occasion because of workflow of using tarballs and/or backup folders.

If you are working on windows, there is no GUI better than TortoiseSVN. Give TortoiseSVN a try, it won't replace the #ifdef's; but it will certainly be better that tarballs for solo development.
Having a price is really cool for getting profits
Oh, I also forgot to say that you made some really good points.
If that's the case use tools such as wordtracker's to see if the keywords that you're targeting get enough traffic. You could also be competing on some keywords where your competition has a higher PR. Or possibly the customers you want simply don't think to use search engines to find your type of service. What percentage of your traffic comes from search engines?
The letter i?
this video works on iPad :-) I was kind of amazed actually.. oh and good stuff Slava and Michael!
Which hosting provider do you use?
Hi All,

from the past 5 years i am running couple of websites but i am frusteted with my host. there are CPU cycle limitations. i have a site which is getting lots of traffic,comes around alexa 60,000 rank. so i am facing lots of downtime.
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Okay, I stand enlightened. Yeah, popup, drop-down or combobox makes more sense for a radio button popup list.
Thanks for sharing that article. The Chrome example is definitely relevant and compelling.

No doubt the case is strong case for better performance improving overall perception of the software by the user. My question though is, is there really nothing to be said for slowness anywhere? Nothing for the occasional well-placed delay? Nothing for dramatic pause? Were all those accumulated hours of my childhood waiting at loading screens on the PlayStation 1 really for nought?
How is that neither? That is the control part. They control what software gets on the device, period. If that is what bothers you then you should be just as upset with Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. They all run their own stores and they tightly control the retail channel. Their devices are computers you can't freely put software on too.

Where's your indignation about them?
Except for corporation and income tax.
If web sites can be like apps, why can't apps be like web sites?
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/04/16/cartoonist-apple-back...

Don't be playa hater.

:)
The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make
Tried in FF and in Chrome and the browser "Back" key doesn't work, only <- and -> arrows do.

Is this expected of HTML5?
For those like me who came away from this wondering what windows tweaks were available, I found a good thread here: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?47212...

It is a lot of the same types (ramdrives, no hibernation) of changes but for windows users.
Indeed; I clicked the arrow three times before realizing it referred to the right arrow key.
I didn't realize inline-block was considered html5 -- I had been using that for almost 2 years already.
Cool demo, but it's a bit odd to tout new, standard features, when you have a disclaimer that this is only intended to completely work in Google Chrome with experimental features enabled. Part of the excitement is that these features are being standardized, and aren't just one vendor wandering off and doing their own thing without consulting with anyone else.

What would be far more impressive would be a demo that worked seamlessly in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, and IE with Chrome Frame, with graceful degradation (or, preferably, progressive enhancement) for features which aren't implemented yet in IE without Chrome Frame (and the features that aren't yet fully supported cross-browser).
I used to believe in the dream of an ideal high-level language abstracted away from the hardware altogether. That now seems to me a harmful delusion.

Abstraction to the point of losing all access to lower-level details is restrictive, but having processes that handle them for you automatically is very useful. Isn't it great that compilers do a good enough job most of the time that we don't have to write binaries for each architecture by hand?
I've been politely asked to leave 3 different shared hosting companies. Most advertise unlimited disk space and bandwidth, but they never offer unlimited CPU cycles or disk I/O. For the past two years, I've been hosting with Rackspace Cloud (Cloud Sites, Cloud Files, and Cloud Servers).

Cloud Sites is nice because it scales with demand, and there is no upper limit to CPU cycles. The one caveat is that the databases don't scale (basic master/slave setup), so you'll have to go heavy on the caching for DB based sites. This tradeoff is worth it to me because I don't have to worry about server administration or scalability.

http://www.rackspacecloud.com/?id=605
Direct link: http://www.life.com/image/ugc1039332/in-gallery/41842/exclus...
I never knew the existence of this hotkey
ctrl + alt + F13

The version of windows shouldn't make any difference
I tried searching within text and it works okay (in some cases it even moves to the appropriate "slide"). I managed to break things, however.

That said, I hope Adobe is scared as hell--and more importantly, that they get their act together... or else.
Yay, Shiny  JRuby 1.5.0RC1
Very nice. Not very FF friendly but still very nice. I am liking how the web will be in the coming future. Only need all browser vendors to get their act together and get standards compliant. Microsoft can be augmented with Chrome frame so the one hindering block can be ignored.
re #3:

"shallow repository
A shallow repository has an incomplete history some of whose commits have parents cauterized away (in other words, git is told to pretend that these commits do not have the parents, even though they are recorded in the commit object). This is sometimes useful when you are interested only in the recent history of a project even though the real history recorded in the upstream is much larger. A shallow repository is created by giving the —depth option to git-clone(1), and its history can be later deepened with git-fetch(1)."

There are still issues; you can't commit for instance, but you can update to HEAD to update your patch, with a depth of 1 you only get the most recent changes.
I have a rule in my team that you can only have 2 major tasks at one time. This is supported by this research. However, we can also have multiple short tasks that take < 30 minutes to do.
Mine had a cracked motherboard because I was apparently picking it up off the table wrong, by the corner vs gently holding it on both sides, as designed. IBM initially claimed that it was water damage (6 months prior), searching online revealed a small army with the same problem as I.

I still use that ThinkPad (well minus the new motherboard) on my electronics bench, but to say that its on par with the iPhone or Mac Pro in terms of quality is laughable. The whole thing looks and feels like its made out of recycled plastic. Its so ugly it looks rugged.

And I still love the damn thing... go figure.
Written by cstross ( http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross )
I quite like Toast. :)
Can you explain more about these unexpected markets?
YAHOO!!!!
(HOORAY!)
This is fantastic - my favourite part "The Netherlands is nice right? No? Get out of my flow chart!" Need this printed on a massive poster. Also the path to Comic Sans is fantastic. Trajan belongs on here too.
I thought this was conventional wisdom. Just a couple of months ago, we all kept hearing stories about how a recession/depression was great for finding cheap workers for a startup.
It's all a single page, so the browser's back button wouldn't come into play.
The SEC should have gone with JSON or YAML rather than XML though, as long as we're trying to keep things readable.

Otherwise I applaud this requirement for filing.

I would love to run to track the history of all submissions over time and see which are the most accurate performers.
Handguns are far more restricted in Canada than the US. You can own them if you get licensed, but you need a permit to transport them between (and only between) your home and a specific shooting range, locked in a case in your trunk separate from the ammunition. Open-carry permits are effectively impossible to get unless you're driving an armoured car. In short, anyone with a handgun in public is carrying a one-way ticket to jail if they're stopped by police. It probably discourages criminals from casually carrying (and then using) guns.

edit: according to http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/publicat/cdic-mcc/19-1/d_e.html the US has 77 times as many handguns as Canada, with only ~10 times the Canadian population.
> Their product sounds interesting but they blatantly stole Werck/Checkout's logo for use on their site.

Are you sure Werck owns that logo? It may be a stock icon.
Not sure if the headline "biggest mistake" fits here. But the product complexity and selling the business into bigger organization is a valid point.
I suppose an algorithm that takes a little longer to run might make the user think that the software is doing something more advanced, but that would only apply when the software leaves room for the user to make qualitative judgements about the answer.

Take the filters in photo editing software for example. In Photoshop, you can apply many types of filters. Let's say you apply a noise-reduction filter in Photoshop and it takes 3 seconds to run, then you switch to the Gimp and apply a noise-reduction filter and it runs instantaneously. [1] The slowness may lead users to believe that Photoshop's algorithm is more advanced. Of course, this may partially be due to branding. Photoshop is the $1000 professional photo-editing software, whereas the Gimp is free editing software put together by hackers. This ties it to your analogy in the original post. Now if the situation were reversed, and Photoshop's algorithm ran faster than the Gimp's, I suspect it would be less likely for people to believe that the Gimp's algorithm is more advanced.

This may work for a noise-reduction algorithm, because there is no one correct answer. People may believe that the microscopic differences in the pixels represent a difference in quality. Obviously, if you compare two algorithms that are supposed to compute an answer for which there is an oracle (e.g., Fibonacci or factorial), then slowness is just slowness. If I write a slow implementation of fib(n) and you write a fast one, people will know yours is better because it's faster and there's no ambiguity in the answer that could allow room for people to believe that mine is "more advanced."

Of course, this is just me speculating. I don't know of anyone that's conducted research on this.

[1] This is hypothetical. I know nothing about the performance differences between Photoshop and the Gimp.
Not quite true. Each page has its own anchor, so making the back button work properly is pretty trivial. That's a big oversight in an otherwise awesome presentation.
Ain't that the truth :)
A good starting point is the Nolo book "Patent it Yourself". Best reference book for this matter I can recommend.
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I've never really paid attention to PR (although apparently my blog is sitting at 4 without trying anything, which is kind of neat), but I'd really like to see is a graph of Page Rank over time. Does such a service exist? I doubt it would be easy to do so for any arbitrary page, but even a way to add my site to it and check it occasionally (perhaps get email alerts when the status changes?) would be cool.