skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In fairness, the day the iPad came out, 16 out of the 30 were Apple related. Most of the articles were rubbish, I really can't understand why people would upvote tbem. As somebody who at best doesn't care about Apple, and at worst despises what they are doing to computing (from a freedom point of view, that they're doing it with shiny things isn't hugely relevant to me), Apple news is all noise to me.

When so much of the stuff here is noise, it becomes pretty hard to just not click on an article I'm not interested in. There are no articles that I am interested in, but I still have assignments that I'd rather be procrastinating, you know?

I would agree with the GP. There is a disproportionate amount of Apple news here. I mean I know that's because people here find it interesting... I guess I'm feeling more and more disillusioned with this place in general. But when Apple actually do something, more stories are about Apple than not (it's not that big a deal when Apple release a product, is it? Lots of companies release products every day). And when Apple aren't releasing a product, there is still perpetually two to five articles on the front page that are Apple related when there is no Apple related news at all. Bah. I don't like it anyway. I understand where the GP is coming from.
Totally second that. Don't live in Boulder. Much cheaper to live say 15-30 minutes away and drive/bus in as needed.
I grew up in Boulder. The reputation that Boulder has is interesting, but it's not always like that when you're there.

If you want to hang out with new-age people, you can definitely do it in Boulder. If you want to be a pretentious person you can find like-minded people in Boulder and feel good about yourself for living in Boulder. But living here is pretty normal overall.
Can't speak for the Dell or Aspire, but I have used ubuntu on the eeepc, classmate pc, hp mini(~6.5 hrs on battery) and the samsung nc210. Among these atleast I prefer the samsung, which im using currently(int warranty, good keyboard, ~5 hrs on battery, no driver probs and incedibly cute to boot).
You might have to run a few scripts, but driver support is generally pretty good on any netbook(consider ubuntu unr).
Also, some IDEs dont display as well on smaller screens, so do keep that in mind.
Slither: taking a bit out of canvas (game)
Work at a Startup is a brilliant move and I'm looking forward to learning from it.

I don't agree that "usually startups in trouble end up dying, or getting bought in a fire sale." I don't know if anyone has a big enough data set to give us the "correct" answer.

But if you talk to thoughtful, experienced VCs and entrepreneurs who have seen many companies through their whole lifecycle (birth to IPO and beyond), I think they'll tell you that a lot of the successful startups get in significant trouble along the way. And if that trouble coincides with the need to raise a round, common stockholders get diluted.

Preferred stockholders have anti-dilution, pro rata rights, protective provisions, and cash reserves to protect them.
Super simple: eat to keep insulin and cortisol levels low.

Avoid sugar (including artificial sweetners), juice, grain, starch and sweet fruit (berries are fine). eat enough fat and protein to feel full. get plenty of sleep (8+ hours / night).

Exercise will improve strength, muscle tone and metabolic conditioning, but diet is far more relevant to body composition.

As Gary Taubes taught us in "Good Calories Bad Calories" this is a hormonal issue, not a thermodynamic one.
Facebook rolling out new security features
How facebook was founded
Management Consultant Gary Hamel on Technology
They are currently using hay bales on the gulf's beaches as a barrier and absorbant.
Right-click on Portal in the Library, then select Properties. Should be obvious from there.
The good news is you don't have to choose.
They released an update today that, among other things, fixes "screen fuzziness caused by color correction operation".

It's an interesting comparison, but considering that Steam/OS X is barely 2 days old it's a little early to start drawing conclusions.
Yeah, annotation is coming in 1.2. Keep having to cut features to get the thing out.

Looking into improving the synth as well.
If you are getting so many business cards that you can't take 5 minutes to type in my address into your precious CRM system, perhaps the connection isn't as strong as I thought it was when I handed you my info.

My business card is not an invitation to spam me.
Also, you gotta love an outdoor street mall that goes like this: coffee house, art store, coffee house, bongs, Tesla Motors showroom, bongs, big retro book store, coffee, pizza.

It pretty much illustrates all the demographic groups of Boulder.
You're being generous. There are loads of "senior programmers" who don't know how to program.

In fact I'd guess that the OP knows how to program, but she's not yet a good designer and is aware of it.
I'd imagine it's done by having a separate entity in each country, or even having each employee incorporate himself.
I caught this on the radio the other day, and it's the first time in ages I've heard something that made me think positively about management, something other than the PHB / clueless middlemanager stereotypes.

One interesting take on things is where he says "I think of management as the technology of human accomplishment; arranging and organizing people to achieve things".

Also he asks what the management world's equivalent of the human genome project, or one laptop per child is.
Not being from the area, I was quite surprised to find that Boulder was not the hippie enclave (a la Burlington, VT) that people say it is. Vast tracts of shiny new development overshadow the few remaining vestiges (ie, Naropa University) of a more philosophical time. At any given moment you are more likely to be run over by an expensive SUV than to bump into an honest hippie. When you do find an honest hippie, they are generally ranting about the way things have changed.

On the whole, it was a nice place to be, but it should no longer have a reputation of counterculture... a 30+ person SWAT team keeps the kiddies in line. Boulder is now best described as a nature oriented suburb of Silicon Valley.
Skype Group Video Calling is Available
Well, it's not like it's going to go straight up. Keep in mind that if you pour vegetable oil into water and stir it vigorously enough, some of it will go beneath the water (admittedly, it won't dissolve into it or anything, it'll remain in big globules). A lot of oil is below the surface due to the sheer volume coming out (and yes, currents carrying it around :)).
Help Musopen record and release all the Beethoven Symphonies
Kickstarter project to record and release the rights to large sets of music, starting with all the Beethoven symphonies.

http://bit.ly/bVh1dJ
The only bug I have is that I don't get any sound. I haven't really tried anything yet to fix it, but played for about 3 minutes. Anyone have any thoughts on what may be the issue though?
I had teachers who told be that learning one language is enough to learn them all (except for the syntax).

That sounds like typical academia-speak (assuming you mean to say they were implying all general-purpose languages are essentially interchangeable by Turing-completeness). But if you're going to go down that road, you might as well go all the way and just program Turing machines. Believe me, if you thought assembler on real processor was low-level, nothing beats directly programming a universal Turing machine.
We are open to helping with TNs. I am sure others are too.
Could we get one of these in Chicago and New York?
I'm not sure what he needs to come clean about. His recent actions speak louder than any words he can come up with now. It's pretty clear where he stands on this.
You know the problem with simple analogies, they're simple, the world isn't.

> I didn't say anything about benefits. I was talking about money.

Of course you didn't because you think it's about money, but it isn't. So lets complicate your analogy a bit.

> 10 people are on a deserted island, and there are tasks to be done to survive, which is fish, collect coconuts and fresh water. If 5 people are collecting coconuts, fish and fresh water, and sharing it to the other 5, then it doesn't matter what the other 5 are doing.

It most certainly does matter because reality isn't that simple. If the other 5 people, in exchange for those fish, coconuts, and fresh water, also provide in exchange other necessary services to those workers such as medical care, law enforcement, and education then they most certainly are not parasites living off the backs of the productive as you wrongly imply.

It matters not whether you pay a private company via income or government via taxes if they are providing the same useful services to you; those services don't come free. The difference is a philosophical one of whether you have a choice in the matter. One half is not supporting the other, both halves are mutually supporting each other, the flow of money is irrelevant.

Your mistake is in wrongly saying the government workers are not doing anything productive or contributing in any way and that's simply not the case.

Collectivism tends to benefit the weak the most and the whole group overall while disadvantaging the strong. Individualism benefits the strong the most, benefits the collective some, and disadvantages the weak massively. As the strong are always going to be outnumbered by the average and the weak, it's only natural that any democracy tends to eventually slightly favor the collective rather than let the few dominate. But swing to far to either extreme and everything falls apart. You can't let the strong take too much or the collective rebels and you can't let the collective take too much or the strong rebel.

Redistribution of wealth through social policy maintains this balance and prevents the fall back to serfdom which is what happens when the strong get too much power/money and pass it down one generation to the next. Not taking too much and letting the individuals still accumulate a decent amount of wealth prevents the fall to communism which destroys any incentive to be productive. It's a balancing act, and it's not at all simple.
Tricks to Play with your Brain
I'm seeing the same bug here on a pretty recent (November '09) Mac Pro.
> If they can do it, we can do it too.

Actually, no, not for useful values of "can do it".

Consider Microsoft and Google. Microsoft has lots of smart people, but Google can do things that Microsoft can't.

Yes, Microsoft is capable of doing those, but in some very real sense, it can't.

It's sort of like Bill Gates' phone number. I know it in some sense (4 digits of area code, 3 digits of prefix, and then 4 more digitis), but not in any useful sense.
Can geeks drive a product exodus? Yes, but making people give up a bad habit is a lot more difficult than convincing them to adopt the next cool tech. Case in point: Windows.
These reasons seem more than a little bit outdated in the modern age of ubiquitous cell phones, blackberries, and smart phones.
Yammer : Enterprise Microblogging
For people who can't move to Silicon Valley, it is excruciating to watch all the cool startups in the USA and be stuck

Guess what, that was exactly the genesis of our startup. Startups are bound to go virtual. The Silicon Valley model should become accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, from anywhere in the world.

So we did http://fairsoftware.net. The only problem, is the imbalance between people with ideas and people willing to implement them.

Working with some of the people I "met" on HN would be awesome.

Totally agreed. That's why we even considered highlighting people from the HN community on our site, kind of like adding a badge of quality/honor. Who knows, we may eventually do it. Because trust and shared passion is so important to starting something together.
I've had better results with Facebook Ads than with Google AdWords... but that could be due to any number of things.
Are you still in Bozeman? I'm in Helena myself.
It comes down to whether you can afford the flights to bring the team together.

If you can, get a regular, non-luxury cabin/summerhouse in the countryside for a week. Beer in the fridge, hamburgers on the grill and a bonfire at night works every bit as well as Bangkok nightlife for bonding.

Good internet might be an issue, but if you bring a 3G modem and a router, and spend some time setting up a server, so you can bring a local repository, build-server, test-server etc., you should be able to get by.

I've thought about equipping a summerhouse for this model, as a business (good chairs, good desks, good internet aren't usually found in summer houses), mostly aimed at teams that need to get out of the office to bond, kick-start a project etc.
The ability to apply a label or a star to a particular EMAIL, not the entire thread.

Use cases:
- You send out an email to a large-ish group asking for their opinion, and want to categorize the responses.
- You have a long thread discussing social plans, and partway through the thread, somebody includes the address, and you want to star that message
This is a good description of my position as well. Unfortunately it seems like this is something that does not get taught at schools much, and I will admit to having been trying to learn everything from school when I should be doing more independent work. Does anyone know any useful resources on how to proceed from this point? Or does it require just working on a larger-scale project and figuring things out along the way?
Agree. I'm about to graduate from CMU, and their OS class was an extremely rewarding experience. I've heard similar things about their compilers class.

The required intro classes are also pretty rigorous, although I didn't take them personally. I'd bet that any CMU CS (note that engineering is a very separate program at CMU) grad would at least somewhat know how to program, and will have programmed in assembly and ML, along with the usual Java and C. Obviously you have to check whether they got C's in the big rigorous classes or not, but it's basically a good bar. It would be impossible to graduate and then fail FizzBuzz, for example, which to my understanding is not true of most CS programs.

The one main complaint I had with it was that the required freshman theory course (251), which is supposed to be this great legendary weed-out thing, was just a hodgepodge of badly specified discrete math, and still is, to my knowledge. It was hard, but in my opinion not in a good way. Maybe it works as a weed-out but not as an educational tool. The later required algorithms course, 451, was much better.
Talk:Malamanteau - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I saw this and it's a good overview of the fringes of higher education.

How to make people more "productive" by essentially finance them to a small bump in their qualifications.

Very very predatory (at least for me, coming from a top school)!
It doesn't seem to me that a lack of interest in starting a company is simply indicative of a lack of tolerance for stress or financial risk, nor the absence of an adventurous spirit or anything like that.

Business is a very particular discipline in its own right. While the technocrats and bureaucrats of corporate America's professional management and executive corps have certainly done enough to exaggerate its exclusivity and idiosyncratic character, the fact remains that it's a rather distinct kind of thing. The qualities that make one a good programmer, a good technologist, a good innovator, etc. aren't necessarily the same qualities that make one a competent or happy business owner, especially when, as a matter of practical necessity, much of the everyday workflow is tedious administrativia or other things banal to engineers.

I'm all for the idea that intelligent, confident and well-rounded people are better off doing something more interesting than fighting mediocre fights in the cubicle trenches, but that doesn't mean they're all--or even a majority of them--are entrepreneurially disposed per se.

Plus, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this post, joining early often brings equity with it, which, from a certain point of view, is quite an entrepreneurial proposition.

If nothing else, it's simply not mathematically possible for everyone to be the chief in the driver's seat; many technical endeavours seriously require people to build out and scale.
Afaik, most pre-IPO/acquisition employees get attractive amount of money but you can't really retire with the money earned.
Their screenshot comparison is inaccurate. It didn't look right to me, so I duplicated their screenshot on my own Mac at 2560x1600. My Mac Portal screenshot matches their PC screenshot in sharpness. For some reason it looks like the Mac version was not running at 2560x1600 (or even close) in their screenshot.

Here is the Mac screenshot I made: http://bayimg.com/image/eamojaack.jpg

Their Mac one: http://images.anandtech.com/doci/3726/Portal2Mac.png

Edit: thought_alarm noted that there was just an update that fixes "screen fuzziness caused by color correction operation". That's probably what was going on.
Extremely long, but definitely worth the read.
Acer to launch Chrome OS devices in two weeks
"... Because we (people I met) don’t have standards and simple process for exchanging information electronically, business cards are still critically important. ..."

Today most people I know their twitter address is sufficient. As for business cards, I've never worked in a situation where I've needed or been given them. I do however give away half size Moo cards ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157616147825654... Each card has a unique photo & I get people to choose some they like.

Makes for a good conversation point as @brolewis mentions.
I got my wife an eeePC a while back. It's stock windows of course, but the machine itself seems well made and hasn't had any issues.

I'd recommend it.
Evoluce 47-inch HD multitouch display gets off-screen gesture control
Is #2 an illusory rickroll?
Worse Wedding DJ Ever
If it fast-forwarded, it's because you haven't added any changes that aren't already upstream. If you're losing information, it's when you considered starting a branch.
That's my attitude as well: I love coding, I don't enjoy doing the business operations aspects (I do like being able to set the direction of a project/product, something typically done by program/project/product managers in big companies but by developers in start-ups). Entrepreneurship to me is a means to an ends, my ends being "working on interesting technology" -- if I can get a job doing that in a place with relatively low amount of bullshit and high amount of autonomy, I'll take it.

The latter requirements (interesting project, high amount of autonomy, non-capricious requirement) does, however, exclude the typical "I'm an alpha-male with an MBA who can't code, I need a beta-male coder to implement my vision"
situations. I have a very strict requirement when joining other companies: I can't absolutely be the smartest or most technical person in the company.

Several times I've worked on side-projects/ideas that could bloom into something and I am not opposed to starting a company to pursue that, along with another technical founder. Being a founder also means the ability to completely set the technical direction, something you can't quite get when joining as an employee (corollary: if you can't set the technical direction of a company, you're not a founder).

Success in a start-up requires drive, solving fascinating technical problems drives me. I've absolute zero interest in being involved in media or enterprise-y start-ups (either as a founder or an employee), no matter how much money is dangled in front of me.
He's talking about the book in this one as well. I made it about halfway through and there wasn't much more to it than a pitch for the book. He recited some common quoted statistics (top 1% have as much wealth as the bottom 95%), and suggested that the solution is for the willing super-rich to pour a substantial amount of donated capital into progressive causes.
so his choice is to either celebrate his marriage, or celibate it? I'll take celebrate for 900, Alex.
Ask HN: YC S10 startup wants your opinions about wikis
We're a incoming YC team exploring online collaboration tools and workflows. We're working on something completely different, but are running into the same annoyances managing shared information that we've experienced before in other teams. We already know about basecamp, sharepoint, etherpad, unfuddle, jotspot, pbwiki, google sites/wave, chatter, solutions mentioned in previous HN posts(1) and wikimatrix.org... But amazingly, nothing seems to fit quite right.

We're wondering if there's room for something light & inspiring, like github and posterous are for their respective tasks. We've found one key driver to a successful collaboration experience is how effectively it integrates into your workflow, which for us means email. Few tools seem to do this well without being heavyweight.

Most people we've talked to are passionate one way or another, and we've enjoyed the discussion. Some of the questions we've asked are:

1. What type of projects have you used wikis/shared documents for? How many readers and writers were involved?

2. Think of a specific project where a wiki or <insert your tool(s)> was invaluable. What made it work?

3. What didn't work? Was it an issue with the collaboration process, tool or ... ??

4. What was the typical workflow like for you? What were the pain points? How would you have done it differently?

5. What is the minimum set of features that would be required to be useful?

Tell us your thoughts. We would be happy to clean up & publish the results if it would be helpful for others (we'll do this if there are sufficient responses to warrant this, say, 50)

(1) Previous HN posts about wikis:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49440
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1257106
http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=371133
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=569189
what a badass
In the testosterone-crazed and liability-ridden culture of corporate America, this viewpoint is consistent with the rest of the universe.
More importantly than what others have commented... this is why there are daemons and different parts of the app can run at different levels of execution for security reasons...
These hardly seem like large bugs. More importantly I can't imagine that Firefox doesn't have more significant security issues at play.
Page views and ad impressions, sure. But what about licensing all of the data to others? Sure that must be an attractive source of revenue, and if it's 'private' it's harder to do.
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=481392

I voted it up anyway, that's how much I like this article. After reading this comment thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=481557 on that page, I decided to read Moneyball, and it was one of the most riveting books I've read.

Thanks, HN.
A question I'm surprised isn't on here: what's the motivation to do this? Is it becoming harder for YC companies to hire, or a way to share resources, etc?
Maybe, maybe not. With respect to the first one... I sleep with earplugs and a sleep mask. I don't hallucinate with these on -- I just don't get woken up by sound or light.
New? A bunch of these IM conversations have been high profile discussion pieces repeatedly over the last several years. This isn't surprising in the least. The more that Zuckerberg's shit comes to light, the more he looks like a complete douchebag.
As far as I can tell, Apple still doesn't care much about gaming on the Mac. I'm sure they could offer better graphics cards if they wanted to, it's just low on their list of priorities.

Hopefully Steam will get enough people to start using Macs for gaming that Apple feels pressure to start offering decent video card choices.