skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're not really drawing implications in that article. Profit(or revenue)/employee does provide a fairly decent, albeit rough, measure of efficiency. I think it's an interesting metric that more companies should look at. If that metric starts declining while your hiring is increasing, then it might be a good sign that you're becoming too large and bloated.
Sun JRE to become pay-for under Oracle
Sharing is Important in Relationships
If the personal computer was just coming of age today, the Mac would be a locked down platform with an App Store. Luckily for us, I think it's too late to get away with anything like that on a device that people consider a general purpose computer.
Reminds me of some advice from my intro to law class in college: The "e" in e-mail stands for "evidence".
Android 2010 is Windows 1990
"Quota Poker" on the PDP-11 (Reddit comment)
But why should you have to keep playing catch up? Yes it's not HARD to put stuff there, but you can't argue it's not bad UX to constantly pull the rug out from under users like this. Captcha like text? Seriously?
Devon’s New Bullet Proof-Tread 1 Watch
Devon’s Tread 1 watch is a motorized contraption that is belt-driven. The belt contains all the numeric that rotates the hour, minute and even the second’s belt contraption
If that oath is so 'binding' on first saying how come people are asked to repeat it all the time?

Oaths to flags and countries are pretty meaningless, unless taken by an adult that has a viable option to pledge allegiance to some other entity (say in immigrant).

What if every country should ask for a pledge of allegiance from its citizens, would that mean that any immigrants are to be refused on the grounds that they're oath breakers?

If the Netherlands (where I was born) would ask me to pledge allegiance I'd hand in my passport instantly because I think that is not something a country should ask of its citizens. Especially not a country that has 'freedom' high in it's list of standards.

It's more of a symbolic device than a pledge that you can hold people to or call them an oathbreaker if they don't. Most kids don't even realize the meaning of all those words, just say them to avoid being an outsider.

Get them while they're young...
> The growth of Clojure has been exponential both among users and clients. A few years ago nobody could have imagined that a Lisp would have such rapid uptake, but ...

Reality check. Both are in the noise:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala%2C+clojure%2C+python...

Edit: oooh, downmods
This seems to vary a lot by college. Professors at elite colleges tend to cut breaks, under the belief that it's better to grade a couple of papers late than to risk messing up a student's future. So Ivy League schools tend to be pretty tolerant of late work. I've heard of professors accepting work as much as a year late.

The lower you go on the academic totem pole, the less tolerance there is. Extensions are hard to get at state schools-- even the really good ones-- and practically nonexistent at community colleges.

It may be unfair, but it makes sense. Teacher:student ratios are lower at elite colleges, and late work is rarer, so it's not really a burden. Also, professors at elite colleges are generally happier and have cushier lives, whereas teachers at CCs are usually underpaid and overworked already, so late work is an intolerable addition. Finally, many of the students in middling schools shouldn't be in college at all, while the assumption at an elite college is that the person who's late is a good student with a good reason. That assumption's not always true, of course, but elite colleges would rather make one type of error.
You're absolutely right, without ad revenue, those other verticals would probably stagnate. And Google needs all those verticals to feed into a central repository so Google can achieve it's ultimate goal of indexing and archiving all of the world's content. Search for the web, Gmail for our email, YouTube for our video, Google Voice for our voicemail, etc.
And how is this Google's fault? That's more incompetence on the part of many users.
I see where you're coming from now, thank you. FWIW, the sentence that followed made me interpret it more like this:

Microsoft won on the desktop [while] being developer-friendly and Apple won in mobile [while] being developer-hostile.

(I didn't think the author meant to imply causality)
It gets even worse if you try to incorporate a business abroad and own more than 50% of it. Form 5471 and 8832. Wrangling with the definition of a CFC, qualified dividends, etc. Subpart F (the rules for when the U.S. government considers your company's income as if it was just plain old personal income). Etc.

All these laws were designed to catch rich U.S.-resident tax evaders, but they have the side effect of making life miserable for U.S. expatriates. And probably it won't change, because no one in the U.S. really thinks about expatriates anyway ... maybe because of the ingrained mental image that the U.S. is supposed to be a sink, not a source, of migrants.

And for everyone else, it makes for a very strong incentive NOT to partner with an American when you start a company, because of all the accountants' fees you'll need to keep up with the paperwork, or worse, the danger that you simply don't know about any of these draconian requirements and it hits you like a truck years later when you have some serious income.

Another really perverse incentive created by U.S. taxes on expats is the housing exemption. Basically, if you have a dollar, you can either spend that whole dollar on renting a nicer apartment, or pay 35 cents to the U.S. government and be left with 65 cents to save or spend. Hence lots of American expats keep spending more and more on housing, up until the point where the marginal utility of $1 more square footage or $1 swankier address drops below 65 cents ... and of course, driving up prices for everyone else.
yeah I am going to watch !!!
He's not detached and non-emotional, to me he sounds eager to kill, definitely not without emotion.
Crap, now we need 3rd party review.
Antitrust lawsuit again Google while the Comcast/NBCU merger goes through?! what bizzaro fucked up scenario is this. If you want to leave Google just put another URL in your browser's address bar and export your data through DLF.

Regarding the search results if you don't agree use another search engine, when looking for someone on Facebook you don't get their MySpace profile also you can't 'socialize' with them unless you have an FB profile, these allegations are ridiculous and probably propelled by other corporation with vested interests.

Google lobbies for net-neutrality for fucks sake, they're not the devil!
I suppose they lose the money they would have made if another company had paid for the ad slot.
I am very very sure Google does use the data coming to their DNS for statistical analysis etc. If it is your intend to see what people visit, DNS is a highly valuable resource and an easy IP might make people use yours.
Ask HN: Is it worth saving electricity at off-peak hours?
Power stations continue to generate electricity at a fixed rate isnt it? Say a 100MW power station that is facing a peak load of 110MW at say 1PM. It faces a load of 70MW at 7PM.

Are power stations designed to produce lesser power during off-peak timings? Or in case of hydro-power plants will it continue to generate 100MW ? then it does not make sense to save electricity at 7PM because the saved electricity can not be stored and used later it will be wasted any ways.
Maybe you would need loops for overflow? If you look around on the site, somewhere they talk about being able to call empty cars to a station. I don't think the system is unusable because of these issues; solutions just need to be worked out, like in any new technology.

Edit: Additionally, it's unlikely that 100 people will want to get off at the same time, which is one of the advantages: it's on demand, rather than based on a schedule like a train. Taxi lines have the same issue, but they work out.

I submitted this to HN a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1275848
It's missing text-shadow.. great little tool though. Very nice!
The thing you have to wonder about though is if this would have gotten nearly as much airplay as it did if it weren't for those reuters people there.
That facebook's concern for its users' privacy is secondary to more "practical" matters has been clear for some time now--though perhaps most evident with Zuckerberg's memorable, "privacy can no longer be an expectation." And this recognition is not limited to HN-types and "internet gurus." General users, college students especially, also realize this and so a pattern has developed in which younger users (speaking from the perspective of a college student) exercise a degree of caution (probably less than sufficient) while in college and then upon entry into the workforce, remove the wall, photos from their profile and thus their facebook profiles becomes little more than a prettier linkedin. If this pattern reflects more than just my experiences, Facebook seems poised to be your online passport at the expense of its capabilities as a social communication hub.
SIGH, climbs back on bike
Title is innacurate. This is Dungeons & Dragons Online which is completely different than Dungeons & Dragons. Just sayin'.
One-liners
I've used this for pinging for years when there are dns problems. If dns is working I usually hit google or yahoo.
You can read Microsoft's take on why Google are a worrying monopoly here:

http://microsoftontheissues.com/cs/blogs/mscorp/archive/2010...
Same. Facebook's a giant, constantly-changing mess. I use it to contact people whose email I don't have and for nothing else.

I would fix his public-vs-private status dilemma by having a public Twitter account and a friends-only Twitter account.
> I agree that the US government has shown a remarkable ability to mess things up but we have also been running a huge healthcare system for a while so extending Medicare to everyone would be far simpler than a totally new system.

Except that the goal isn't "simpler", it's better. My offer lets you do what you want. If you think that extending medicare to federal workers is best, great. (I predict that they'll revolt because I've never run into anyone with experience with both who would give up private for medicare.)

> As to savings on "paper trail" is really a savings on the billing with 5 different insurance companies the doctor needs to handle each one separately

Except that it doesn't actually work that way, and the cost isn't significant. (Big doesn't imply significant.)

> lack of interest in the trial period interesting I am pointing at the Medicare system as the trial period.

And medicare is widely regarded as a disaster. I offer a chance to fix it and single payer advocates run away.

However, if you think that medicare is fine, then my offer lets you extend it to federal workers, the VA, and so on. And we get to observe.

And you get to deliver on the promise of lower costs. Since medicare isn't cheaper (I'll deal with overhead below) and delivers worse care....

Of course, you also have the problem that doctors who have a choice tend to flee medicare. If the private insurers are so hard to deal with, what does that say about govt?

> Medicare is actually run at lower cost than most private insurance companies.

Actually, it isn't. Medicare spends less money on one specific category of "overhead", but it spends far more on others. (Govt's overall spending per covered person is basically the same as the private system's spending. Medicare is actually worse than average for delivery vs cost.)

For example, the credible total medicare fraud estimates range from $150B to $250B/year. (The low number is from AG Holder, who said "more than".)

This is despite the fact that folks who raise disputes with medicare are less likely to win than folks who have disputes with the private system. What a deal - more fraud and more denied coverage.

The total profit of the private system is >$10B/year. And no, adding "executive salaries" doesn't significantly change that number.

The medicare fraud number alone dwarfs the supposed overhead of the private system, and the private system is bigger than medicare.

I'm sure that you've seen the "free medical equipment" ads on TV. That equipment isn't free, it's paid by medicare/medicaid. Care to argue that it's mostly medically necessary?

Free rein lets you fix this, if it can be fixed. However, until you do....
thank you! We're putting something new out today that should be really useful.
Google isn't actively blocking other advertising companies from competing; they're just the winner in a winner-take-all market.

Similarly, Google dominates internet search but doesn't block other companies from offering competing products.

Interestingly, a Google search for 'search engine' does not return Google itself in the top ten results:

http://www.google.ca/search?q=search+engine
Apple: 46710 million / 34300 employees = 1.36180758 million/employee

Dell: 52 900 / 94 300 = 0.56097561

Microsoft: 58690 / 93 000 = 0.631075269

Intuit: 7800 / 3260 = 0.417948718

Intel: 38280 / 79800 = 0.479699248

The stuffy large companies seem to make about 0.5 million /employee /year. The more aggressive ones(Amazon, Apple, FaceBook, Google etc) seem to make about a million/employee. ALmost certainly doesn't hold up statistically. Just something that struck me.
What about FTPS (or even better SFTP (ssh))? FTP is a very very insecure way to to things on your site(s).
I am encouraged that researchers are trying to change their processes and policies to better fit the Internet. I think this is a good half way step.

In my opinion, it would be more valuable to go further towards the Wikipedia model. Of course, I say this because I've put my fingers where my mouth is and am building it.

After experimenting for a couple years at http://www.bibwiki.com, I discovered a decent model to keep things organized. Make the wiki-like bibliographies group owned rather than publicly owned, and so I have created http://www.bibdex.com
Anti-trust is a farce used by politicians against political enemies. No market monopolies exist at all. The only way they are even possible is with government intervention in a market. If you never want to use Microsoft software again that's your choice. If you don't want to use Google that's your choice too. Technology is probably the only example of a free market out there right now and I'd like to keep it that way.

The specter of break-ups plagued the car industry and made them very bureaucratic and now we're paying the price for that. I'd hate to see that happen in technology.
My brain really likes glucose.
Even so, browser games as-is are bottlenecked by render performance, not language performance; both platforms are capable of running Quake(1 or 2), but JS holds the advantage as far as running it at reasonable resolutions and framerates, while the Flash implementations are hobbled by software rendering.
Tell HN: I created Facebook App "GoldVille"
Complete free surveys, which only take a minute, to gain points. Then, use those points to buy REAL things like PayPal $$, and Gift Cards!
More reasons why I hate MSFT. Lying, unimaginative, opportunistic, unoriginal scum of a company.
Build for the internet! Instead of writing a ROM chip, you wrote easy-to-port software. So build code for a web browser, and route around the arbitrary limitations.
Yeah, DHH loves to curse. I'm probably going to release a "clean" feed as well that edits out some profanity. I don't like to censor guests, but I also like to be able to listen to podcasts at work. By having two feeds, an uncensored version and a SAFE FOR WORK version I hope to keep more people happy (especially my boss :)
Well - except that it's also open source, so while its producer may be headed for one or more monopolies, it probably isn't because of closed code on mobile platforms.
Don't worry fat people die young...

Well, if you are fat enough for the average american to notice you can expect a reduced lifespan. If you are slightly overweight relative to BMI charts you actually have a longer life expenctancy. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WikiRRM.jpg)

PS: I guess the truth hirts.
Fortunately, being fat is also likely to make you die before you get dementia.

No question that being fat isn't healthy, but I don't think there is much of a practical take-home from this. People already know that.
IME, most home users left IE6 behind a long time ago. Sure, there's still the odd one, but it's the big corporations with their standard desktop configurations and in-house software tied to IE6 that are really holding things back. At least we seem to have turned a corner in recent months, with even major players like Google basically saying that if you're still on IE6 it's now you're problem not theirs, so I imagine even the hold-outs will find it increasingly difficult to ignore progress in future.
Your analogy is poor, not just because neither Buffet nor Gates are short. I agree that the author's list of companies was selective, and a larger list would have provided more insight. But revenue per employee is an important metric for understanding the scalability of a company.
Volcano ash: Threat of second volcano Katla '10 times the strength'
Aspersa, a new opensource toolkit
I wrote something about this a little while ago:

http://michaelgr.com/2010/02/15/why-google-is-not-like-micro...

It's about how Google has different incentives than companies like Microsoft and Facebook; in short, they have incentives to make their customers happy because for most of their products there's very little friction that keeps users from switching, while others have incentives to create more lock in and bigger walls to keep people from switching. Making customers happy because kind of secondary after you've reached a certain mass with this business model.
Just for the record, the concept of the reptilian mind isn't from Godin. It's an old philosophical thing.
"It seems that this is one of those devices that you can not fight with, especially if they are deployed in great numbers. What do you do, stay inside if the U.S has deemed you a threat? Hack it to try to take control of it? That seems like a scarier proposition and one that is much more likely."

Logically you just build an automated robotic anti-sniper system that shoots down any of these as soon as they get in range. That shouldn't be much of a problem for any military force with decent recourses nowadays.
Technology Incubators Changing The World
Artist promotes Subway Etiquette with Guerrilla Campaign
When Will I Use Math?
Can Quantify compete with Basecamp
Corresponding slide show:

http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/16/technology-incubators-chang...
I'm not convinced reputation systems are a good thing. 1) only sites that need a community identity can benefit from such a system, 2) the system allows for arbitrary prejudice, and 3) its utilization is extraneous for building trust and admiration among the real contributors (the users so influential they get referred to by their actual names).

Craigslist is what it is because of its anonymity. On Amazon I usually only buy from sellers with plus 98% approval rating, but I only do so arbitrarily and rarely read customer reviews. I feel a simple comment system, like they have implemented to gauge the actual product itself, would be appropriate; if someone gets scammed that person can write about the experience, conversely, if one's expectations are exceeded then that person can say so as well. Both ways I'm comparing are still subject to slander but value systems distort transparency in the outlier data where one bad comment can destroy a newbie and one bad but genuine rating on a purposed sketchy veteran will just be another notch on his belt.

It's sad but since I only have 9 karma points on HN I doubt anyone will comment on this, and if so only to be ironical. Just like school or any value system, its constituents are greatly subject to conflicts of interest that may coerce corruptive and erosive behavior. In communities where karma is recognized as superficial (like HN, we're all programmers mostly--hopefully the issue is taken lightly) points are a fine means for getting quick feedback and are seemingly harmless. But when you slap that point sticker on your username things turn ugly; it's just too easy to misjudge someone based on this criteria alone instead of empirically. This especially holds true for newcomers and passersby, no?

Kuler is a perfect example of a community done right. The community is this perfect size and the most involved and valuable contributors encourage, if not mentor, newcomers who show genuine interest in the site. The Kuler community has a superficial reputation system, meaning there is no explicit currency or status. Users on the site build relationships, not status, and I feel personally responsible for the content I produce there. It's a positive feedback loop running mostly on respect at Kuler, not a negative one. Points should be associated to the content of a user and not the user itself as a means of recognizing quality--isn't the basis of this idea what that whole crazy internet thing was about back in the 90's?

Some might claim that token economies encourage responsibility but I say they overwhelmingly generate irresponsibility (if done mediocrely or less) as their superficiality moves ever closer to reality. Maybe the times have corrupted my tongue but these electronic reputation systems are increasingly turning into viable currency that some are willing to exchange real money to possess. If you decide on incorporating a token economy into a community please make sure the currency is distributed and controlled by the users. I not sure if anyone else out there does this but every time I use craigslist I quietly mutter under my breath "Thank you Craig for keeping it simple."
Right, because every browser is going to perfectly implement HTML5 without any bugs!
very interesting and gives a good idea!

still a very high-level view of things and rather imprecise (as probably most comparisons) ...

cheers
How to design like Apple -- for startups
Dang, definitely some good deals on there.
The style in which it was written can only be described as "infuriatingly circumspect".
Market monopoly exists. Monopoly doesn't mean sole player in the market, Monopoly means overwhelming share AND control on the market with little to no competition.

Google doesn't have control or overwhelming share in any market they operate. They have large share in some of the markets.

Some good examples of monopoly in market: Monsanto, Microsoft, De Beers, Ticketmaster.
It sounds like the key will be effective communication between the operators and ground forces.
Actually that's what "subway" means in India too. Or at least, that's the word we use to describe the underground road-crossings in Mumbai.
Your ISP's DNS servers are the best choice for use as your DNS servers.

In theory, yes. Your ISP is obligated to provide them, and they're probably very close on the network. In practice, I've seen shockingly slow DNS on fairly high-speed internet connections. Switching to 8.8.8.8 or 4.2.2.2 on those connections drastically improved web browsing.
I find it interesting that folks who quote Eisenhower about the military industrial complex never bother with a danger that he talked about more.

It doesn't come packaged in a cute phrase. The closest that he got was "we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite."
What if Apple developed an API specifically for sandboxed scripting engines? They might consider this to be a bad precedent that will later allow something that they don't want. It would be perfect for enabling educational software of this sort, however. If they tweaked the sandbox just right, it could separate the UX of such sandbox environments from the UX of the iPad/iPhone. This could certainly be done in a way which excludes Flash/Adobe as a general purpose application programming language.