skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Tea Parties, Pro-life movements, and anti-war folks regularly marched on the capitol when I lived in DC.
Others could have done the same. BeOS didn't succeed. You don't see Linux everywhere and it was (and still is) based on openness.
This is pretty smart, I never thought of it before. You can't really advertise on facebook etc. as an F500 because of unpredictable content, but here you'd have access to all the same metrics and targeting minus the unpredictability. Nice post.
Invite beta is definitely the way to go. We are also launching an unrelated web app in a few months and found that invites-only beta is great way to get people talking about your app.

Read this as well:
http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch13_Hollywood_Launch.php
I have no idea where you got this info but it is not true. I'm not a big Biden fan but he did not have anything to do with crafting the Patriot Act. Here, go to the Wikipedia article and do a search for Biden, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_USA_PATRIOT_Act , you'll come up empty. You will find names like Specter, Leahy, Sarbanes, Lott, Hatch, Daschel, etc. Biden did vote for it, but so did 98 of his useless colleagues. Russ Feingold was the only true patriot in the senate.
atari australia job tooo
Vaguely. It was around in about '99 or 2000? If I remember correctly it was the IE COM (Webview was it?) object embedded in an app?

Also I remember it being pretty useless outside of looking nice. In retrospect it probably didn't even look that nice, I can't recall.
Do Climate Scientists Need to Be More Transparent?
A few more examples of what you can do with continuations (some of my articles):

http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2008/07/24/fun-with-contin...
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10177
FWIW, not all of those apps are using native UI components. Some have their own that are drawn.
This is beyond absurd.
He knows its getting hot when you give him the card back and tell him to get serious. (That might almost qualify as frothy.)
Currently trying making my homegrown arduino clone (right now using a breadboard version) and learning the Wiring language. Granted it isn't a complete language but just a library for C but they advertise it that way, I seriously dont know if it would be called a language or not.(Linguists have your say here)
SEC wants python code for simulations of financial instruments. See; Accelerando
This has been happening to me a fair amount as well. It would be nice if downvoting required a reason.
You're right, they couldn't tell. But that doesn't mean they're not disallowed -- unless you're writing C, C++, Obj-C, or Javascript, it's disallowed, period. But that doesn't mean people won't do it.
Is it a good thing that universities, who hold an implicitly benevolent, non-profit societal role, should also have such high profit margins on their "student"-players?

If the football team is bringing in the dough to fund a big chunk of the operating expenses, but aren't being fairly compensated, then the universities are exploiting those students for profit. What I don't see is how universities can use this same logic to justify using their sports teams to fund their academic operations.

This pattern sounds familiar, where else have I seen it, oh yeah: the rich should pay for the poor, because they are lucky enough to have more. (I actually believe this, and I'm just using parallel logic). A few student athletes will win the lottery moving into the pro's, so colleges "tax" athletes by not paying them, and substitute the incentive of "you might be the next Lebron." (Do s/Lebron/Google/ and doesn't it sounds eerily similar to VC startup logic?!) Then the rest of the student body benefits because the football team just paid the salary of the Poetry professor.

It might work this way, but I doubt it, although I'd love to see a study confirming how much money trickles back into colleges from their sports teams. We can just look at the larger macroscopic view for how efficient trickle down economics really is: of all the hundreds of billions given to the rich elites, how much of it trickles down to the poor? I bet the football team is keeping most of its profit, and in fact on average is a net loss to its attached college.
Trolling/linkbait. The points made are taken out of context and mixed with a conspiratorial tone.
By saying "Microsoft-free", you're generally saying "I don't want to use this company's products, regardless of the product." That's ideology, period. There are obviously exceptions to this, but in 99% of cases, it's ideology.
Were start-ups squeezed by hiring in 2004-2007?

Joining a pre-funding start-up is a huge decision which takes dedication, passion for and expertise in the company's focus. It's a lot closer to starting a company yourself than working for Google. Salary is not the deciding factor, engineers considering such a decision are very specific in what they're looking for. From the company's point of view, first non-founding engineer is an employee that can make or break a company and set the engineering culture. It's a mistake to take someone who's only there because he had nowhere else to go: the sort of people you want for that position are confident that they could get hired elsewhere, even in a recession.

On the other hand, funded early-on start-ups (i.e., post series A, but pre-revenue/follow-on funding) can afford to pay market salaries, unless they're hiring "warm bodies" which is again a mistake. The big way to save is by hiring less engineers, not by paying engineers less. The way to make do with less engineers is to go for quality instead of quantity: you're always going to be paying top dollar for top talent.
Yep, the bursty, generally curious (rather than intentful) traffic from social media links absolutely pales in comparison with the consistent, large, and high-converting amount of traffic Google can send.

Social media is much better at engaging with customers to get feedback and figure out where the holes in your product are.
Terrible submodule support.
Entrepreneurship just isn't in my blood, unfortunately. Nor is the risk particularly desirable given its potential effects on my kid's college fund :)
Tools for Marketing & PR Management for Small Startups?
I'm curious as to what tools small startups use to track and handle their marketing and PR. This is on the assumption that hiring a PR firm isn't an option yet.

The usual for marketing would be social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

For PR, how do startups find and keep track of any blog, twitter or facebook posts made about them and respond to them?

Is there any single application that allows this sort of management?
Why not just have a "happy normal person mode" and a "dangerous geek warrior mode" for devices? Why do the two have to be mutually exclusive? In normal mode, all apps are certified, the device is guaranteed to be almost foolproof, etc.

To switch to geek mode, the user has to solve a math problem involving SI units, answer "Do you really want to forgo ease of use for flexibility?" a dozen times, or some other ritual to prevent normal users from accidentally entering geek mode.

The core firmware of the device has a switch to do a factory reset to normal mode no matter how much damage has been done to the software. Look at the OLPC XO for an example of how that can be implemented. That way, if a geek ever sells their device, there's no need for the buyer to worry about the device being all "geeked out."
Sjs is proposing not a third-party app store (impossible given the code signing requirement) but a third-party web app store.

I could see this working.
> He says in this article that SVN is still better than CVS.

He says SVN is better, but is more fragile (which for source control, I interpret as being worse):

SVN fixes (supposedly) those "implementation
suckiness" issues. ...
I think it's also a much more fragile setup and
there's apparently been people who lost their
entire database to corruption

Even if SVN = CVS, clearly Tarballs > SVN, according to him. His actual quote was Tarballs >> CVS. I can dig it up if you can't.
Considering how long the App Store has been like this, I think it's fair to assume that Apple wants the approvals process to be opaque.

Objective, published criteria would make it harder to justify rejecting apps that threaten their business model. (Google Voice, for example) In addition, it prevents third parties from investing a significant amount in any one app.

At this stage in the iPhone's development, Apple may actually prefer not to have highly sophisticated third-party apps. Third-party apps add value to the iPhone, but they don't supersede the core OS applications. If apps became more like proper desktop applications and users came to value them more than the core OS, it would be easier for Apple's customers to follow ports of those apps to another platform. By undermining the third-party ecosystem, Apple gives itself time find out what people want and ensure the core OS apps have an insurmountable lead.
That was great!

though i didn't get the last comment about IE6. I tried loading the url in IE6 twice, and both times the browser crashed.
I like Stephenson's distinction as well, but have often found it difficult to get other people to understand it. Regardless, thanks for posting the link. It prompted me to buy a first edition of The Diamond Age to replace my exceedingly battered paperback. The Kindle edition would probably be more practical, but it's a book that belongs on a bookshelf!
An exec from Sony who spoke at our uni said the labels know and accept music is destined to be free very soon. They just keep charging because there is a portion of population still willing to pay(aka iTunes).
> My philosophy is MAKE BRANCHING HARD.

You outline problem with branches that are long-lived, but the majority of branches created in a typical Git workflow are temporary, often lasting only a few days or less before they are absorbed into master.
Now, if only they add a provision that enables wily coders to earn bounties on finding flaws in the assumptions...
Light on the santorum, please.
For brand monitoring on things like Twitter/FB using social crm? I'd go with the following as basics: http://cloudomatic.com/tag/brand-monitoring/

There's definitely more out there. CoComment is the most popular it seems, though we use ubervu a lot.

As for actual pr and marketing, there's a wide range of apps, but depends what you want to accomplish. Hubspot is great for inbound marketing.
DMOZ is unfortunately inundated with requests for inclusion, the editors are all volunteers, and it takes a significant amount of time and effort to properly review a site for inclusion. (I used to be an editor, my category had a backlog of 150 sites when I joined)
I follow the Git mailing list, and he's even-keeled and surprisingly helpful in discussions. The tone of the original post is representative of what he normally writes.

I'm sure he's no saint, but his most famous rants were responses to sniping. The Minix/Linux debate was started by Tanenbaum, Bram Cohen picked a fight over merge strategies in a list discussion, and the 'C++ sucks' rant was in response to some flamebait.
Did you check the search volumes for the topics you cover? Did you look to see that your content includes the most popular keywords for that content? Do you have a lot of content? PR is just a modifier... you still have to have the things that people are searching for for them to come to your site.
That's probably the point. It should work with Google's compatibility layer.
We just made a selection of version control system at http://getnightingale.org, and Git isn't that great either (it's over-hyped). CVS does suck (and SVN does too for our purposes). But Git requires that users either use cygwin or install half a linux environment in Windows. Just because Git is coded by Linus, doesn't instantly make it a good product. In the case of Git, I REFUSE to force newbie windows developers who want to mess around with our project to be forced to install 2 linuxy environments, or have to integrate it into mozilla build (every other system is just a simple file you can add to path).

We settled with Mercurial, because hgweb isn't that memory intensive and our 512MB RAM prgmr VPS can handle it (although, we hope to upgrade the VPS, to allow more checkout's simultaneously). SVN/CVS also consume little ram on the server too though.

People who wish to make a selection should try them all out, and ask around. Because whilst Git users are very passionate about Git, I couldn't find a single one on IRC who had recently tried mercurial or Bazaar. Furthermore very few (if any) actively used Git in Windows

But that's just what I found. I didn't run proper benchmarks and things would be different if we had a better server (Loggerhead for bazaar wanted 2gb when running).
So, you need a typeface...
I realize that HN is a bastion of keyboard-worshippers, but it bugs the hell out of me that I can't click that arrow to progress.
It's very simple. Smalltalk was expensive. Students, hobbyists, people working at cheap corporations, startups, open source projects, and the like couldn't write, share, and distribute working systems on it.

In fact, it was the deliberate strategy to become a "boutique" language, a secret weapon of the Fortune 500. The Smalltalk companies missed out on "The Bazaar" and the mindshare benefits of an open community.
You've Got Spam
Ask HN: Please rate my idea Localized cheap Hobby Kits business
Hi,I have been really impressed by the startup culture that is portrayed here. Before discovering this site I wanted to get a PhD and live my life as an academician. But after looking at lives and works of fabulous startup people I am greatly inspired to do something like this on my own.(Not like the PhD idea is totally abandoned but something is pushing me towards the startup culture).

I have cooked up an idea, not a very original one, not exactly complying to the web apps mostly discussed here and not something nobody else has ever done.

Ok enough of a preface, now the idea. And the idea is... DRUM ROLL ... a online hobby electronics kits shop. Ok Ok don't abandon me now. I know its very very oooooooollllllllllddddd concept but there is a twist here.

Let me tell you something about the scenario where I will apply this idea. Indian colleges are freaks for robotics and electronics. Everybody (who is not even in the electrical engineering branch) wants to be an electronics engineer. But there is a catch. They can learn everything from the Internet in theory. But in practice they can't. There is a language barrier. It is a culture, at least in my state, that there education till high school is done in Gujarati(our states language).

So the idea is to make the material provided with my kits localized. I would translate these materials in Gujarati and advertise this fact and to make the kits cheap.There is one startup doing the same thing in my own city robokits[1]. But there are two problems in there model in my view. 1) Their kits are really expensive 2) Their kits are focused only on robotics.Mine would be focused on getting them up and running on basic concepts of electronics.

It would be a totally online shop (mostly because I don't have money to rent an shop or time to maintain one as I am in first year college). The kits will have to be cheap as hell, nothing above 500Rs (10USD). I have friends in most of the engineering college in the city and other cities of the state, so those can help me with shipping. Payment can be in cash handed to me or my operative (read friends) or by demand draft.

The other aspect is marketing. I am planning to advertise 1)by word-of-mouth 2) byt spamming orkut and facebook groups 3) by setting up desks at techfests at different colleges.

All this I have planned till now (working on and off on the idea and site and cheap kits design for about a month).So I ask people of HN to rate my amateurish idea(specially anyone from india).
I'm not sure there are that many Mac apps that have been built since the Intel switch that are used by most of the types of folks that are new to the Mac. Lots of Mac users don't run much at all on their Macs besides Apple software other than perhaps Firefox and/or a 3rd party IM client.

As I see it, the Intel switch was mostly important to get Macs being used (and thus recommended) by geeks for the same reasons it's been popular among non-geeks: the ability to run Windows (and, of course, to a lesser extent, other Intel operating systems).

This, along with the increasing importance of the web (and thus lessened importance of the specific OS platform), the spread of Apple retail stores, and the iPod/iPhone halo effect I think are the main reasons Mac sales have done so well.

Because of that mix, it's hard to tell how much the platform's openness has been important to it. It certainly hasn't hurt any, though, and it's a very likable trait in a "desktop" OS!
I wouldn't doubt it. Microsoft has fought the hackers in a seriously lengthy and costly campaign.

Apple on the other hand hasn't been nearly as big a target.

It stands to reason that Microsoft would have developed better processes to deal with the problem, even if it was by mistake. It's been 30 years and they've taken many casualties.

But you wait- hackers go where the users go.

BTW, I'm using _hacker_ in its popular usage. As TFA is.
Anecdote: I'm a software developer writing trading systems at the moment at a large bank, and I've known three people at my workplace who have interviewed at NYC area startups in the past year or two. All of them received offers from at least one of the startups they interviewed with, but only one of them took it, and this was during the period of the recession when morale at the bank was at its lowest.

I think there's probably going to be some squeeze on startups, but the people willing to work for a startup are a subset of all developers out there, so the effect won't be as dramatic as this article seems to be implying. There are plenty of developers, who probably would do great at a startup, simply won't take the risk.
Messing around with csound.
Well, really depends on the hobbit...
Awesome. It doesn't work on the Droid, because of the arrow key requirement.
I also think it is missing a position-in-presentation indicator, like a progressbar or a smaller zoomed out version along the bottom.
Apple: The Modern Day HAL
Over the life of the code, I'm only gonna type it once; I may read it a hundred times.
The cloud is not an awful lot different in principle to when we used to lease managed IBM mainframes.

I find it hilarious how quickly the IT industry forgets the past. The thick/thin client rotation has been going on since before Unix epoch.

It's all just a little bit of history repeating...
What do you need help with exactly? Happy to help
Easier way http://www.prchecker.info
Doesn't work in opera. Alignment is screwed up.
Thousands of companies (and millions of developers) use Subversion. It's 10 year old. It's an Apache project now. It's solid. It's a simple and easy to use tool that will make your life better. That's all.

If you find that personally offensive, so be it.
PCBs aren't so hard to make and needn't break the bank
This American Life had a program on this last weekend: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/405/i...
It's also relevant to understand how we got here, a read a little history to avoid repeating it. An oldie but goodie:
The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling
http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html

The book is about the incident where the Feds first raised the legal issue of reading anyone's email without a warrant, and in a way it became the war that launched a thousand Internet legal advocacy organizations; which is where we are right now.
It really depends on how much data you need to write to stdout. If you're writing a single character at a time with no buffering, many terminal programs (GNOME terminal, etc.) will struggle to put out more than a few dozen lines per second, which can significantly slow down your program (I've known people who redirect their cc's stdout to /dev/null to avoid terminal latency slowing the build).
terrible way to filter quality developers... why not just post an open test instead...?
If you've got limited RAM (which is the main problem with the 3G) you won't be able to multitask as many applications. A big game might knock out all the other apps.

However, I don't see this as a problem. You own a 3G, you know it's limited. Why not just have slightly more limited multitasking? It is supposed to seamlessly handle this sort of thing anyway.

I would be curious if the device is really unusable with, say, Pandora open and trying to surf the web. But if it can handle that, then I think Apple is probably just trying to force people to upgrade.
He's definitely not sideshow-freak material today, but he'd definitely be the fattest person on an average subway car.

I don't get your point. He might be the fattest in a subway car, but the point is that there's another like him in just about every subway car.

One hundred years ago the fat guy was (say) 1 in a 100_000; nowadays it is 1 in 100.
Does the amazing presentation go to 5 pages only ??
Rather a HUGE letdown, i'd say.
Chirp 2010: Scaling Twitter
The "Web 2.0 Logo Creatr" slide is both useful and hilarious.
No, it's 46 slides long.
Bet Dreamed Up by Wall Street Made Crisis Worse
most CDs have no dynamic range

I thought that music normalized to -13dBFS was as bad as it could get, but I discovered a new low: some recently-released dance music I examined had an RMS of -7dBFS over the entire song, including silent parts. Highlighting just the active parts of the song showed an RMS of -5 to -6dBFS. ReplayGain scanning says it needed almost 20dB of gain reduction to match reference volume levels.

The sad reality is that music with no dynamic range sounds pretty good on audio systems with no dynamic range and no headroom, which basically describes most car, retail bookshelf, and personal playback (i.e. MP3 player with cheap earbuds) systems. To get a similar volume level but while preserving full dynamic range would require 20dBV (i.e. ten times) more amplifier power, not to mention better speakers, quieter listening environments, etc.
lots of failures in FF
> Uh, everyone makes this? All decent laptops are Centrino these days

Which laptop maker will sell a machine where every single hardware component is guaranteed to work perfectly under Linux? Without endless driver-hunting, Dependency Hell, crashes, and "small" but intolerable imperfections.

My Centrino-based Thinkpad (circa 2007) failed to properly suspend the video chip under a perfectly-configured Linux, draining a freshly charged battery in only twelve hours. Note that I do not care if this (documented) bug has since been fixed. Neither do I care just who was at fault (the chip vendor, for failing to release docs; the slacking developers; the devil - I simply don't care.) Such cases are rampant, the culprits are unrepentant, and there is no vendor which will offer a money-back guarantee of nothing of this kind happening.

> Suspend / hibernate also works fine with modern BIOSes.

Which ones? Is this authoritatively documented anywhere, in real time? What is "fine"? Apple-fine, Microshit-fine, or sea-of-hacks-Gentoo-fine?
"Eaarth": Earth is over
Stand-up economist
Seinfeld + Adam Smith = WTF?
WITH NATURE LIFE - Photo Gallery
Good question.

In short, you can use the macros to hide the context-switching (yielding).

You could, for instance, force every function to perform a context switch right after its called. Since languages like Scheme encode even loops with function call, you're guaranteed to eventually hit a switch point. (And, if you allow other looping constructs, you could use macros to hide a yield inside them as well.)
FF is quickly becoming an obsolete browser. iPhone uses Webkit, iPod Touch, iPad, every single Android phone (like the Nexus One and Droid), Chrome on Windows & Mac... every new Mac... the list goes on. I'm all for competition, but Webkit is clearly the champion here.
It looks like HTML is no more just Hyper-TEXT Markup Language.. It should perhaps be called Hyper Markup Language.