skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two words: real estate.

Silicon Valley became disgustingly expensive after building substantial momentum in technology, gaining enough strength that entrepreneurs would live there in spite of the quality-of-life/cost-of-living problems.

New York needs something short of a miracle to become a startup hub. It's not "golden handcuffs" that keep people in the banks. It's the fact that the cost of rent for what would pass as an average apartment in most of the country is more than the median American's after-tax income.

Also, although finance is contracting, it's not quants who represent the bulk of the layoffs, but floor traders and M&A types. These people are useless to a startup, unless that startup wants to target the financial industry (which has sufficient resources to develop NIH syndrome, so good luck). Quants are generally being kept.
Bug or Feature?
One thing that's cool about HAML and SASS is that since they are all about syntax parsing, it's not a huge problem to deprecate and change the syntax and provide an upgrade utility.
I too love snickers bars! I pick them from my garden each day.
Yeah but it was a pretty good movie and my nephew a big fan of towmater (that might be cause his dad makes a perfect impression of it ;p)
If amazon is advertising that single failures can't cause data losses, then a single exploding power supply (for instance) breaks that agreement.
Surely, the reality is that Nielsen wants to increase his relevance by glomming on to the current hype surrounding the iPad. Hence he releases the report is a freebie.

I am glad he did this, now I actually have an idea about the product he sells.
There are logical times to roast people for using flash over html5, this is not one of them. For really advanced animation like movie sites, Flash is sadly still king. HTML5 can get there.

I also don't know how involved steve jobs is on a day to day basis at pixar anymore. I'm pretty sure he isn't reviewing the website though.
No no, federate it. If you want an open facebook, take design lessons from DNS and mail.
wow, thanks dude, diybio looks like an awesome little community, some interesting looking projects too
Saying it "doesn't mean crap" is an exaggeration. AWS's physical redundancy offers a marginal increase in reliability (roughly 3.5%, according to their stats) at potentially lower cost than providing the same system in-house because of economies of scale. They never promised to be 100% fail-safe (and would be foolish to do so.)
*owned by Disney and managed by Jim Morris (he produced WALL-E)

Although, you could argue that Catmull and Lasseter are more responsible for this than Jobs is...
That is somewhat true. The market caps have been closing their gaps quickly, so it's not completely different. The companies are nearing equality as far as stock worth.

The point is, since Steve came back to Apple, he has soundly out done Gates.
utah..hmmm
I'm not convinced anyone actually understands the economy, so there might not be anything to analyze.
>this was 50 years ago when such schools were widely funded by local sources

This is really the only significant part of the equation. The system is basically designed to fail. You pass a tax levy for X mills, which brings in X amount of money for the school system, and never a dollar more. Property values go up, but property taxes do not. The budget therefore shrinks every year due to inflation, and every 10-15 years the situation gets so dire that the district has to put a ballot issue up for a tax "increase" to get funding back up to the levels of 10-15 years ago.

In most areas of the Midwest, this poor voter understanding of how schools are funded has resulted in a steady decline in school expenditures, even as actual costs of education have outpaced inflation.
Facebook hires former Bush regulator
The problem is this; if you receive a complaint about child pornography what do you do? If it's about an individual and the complaint is not by a family member etc. then probably not much will take place. But as soon as there is reasonable cause for suspicion then an officer is on dangerous territory - if it turns out there was abuse etc. going on then they are screwed (usually by the media) if it is uncovered later.

If it is about a public place etc. like the gallery example they really have to take a look/action. Removing the image is standard - if it turns out to be CP and the Police left it up then there would be hell to pay ;) The problem is defining if it is CP or not - and you will find some lawyers whose sole purpose for the UK CPS is to assess if images break CP laws and can be prosecuted etc.

You will see mistakes; predominantly of the side of innocent people being investigated. But, again, many of the child protection officers are not idiots - they spend their career investigating these cases and, so, will be able to make a decent judgement whether there is merit in the accusations or not.

If they don't, then they'll try to make 'child porn' charges stick using just the art because the authorities involved at this point either don't like the person or just don't want to admit that they were wrong

Bullshit I am afraid. Fortunately the law doesn't work like this. Also, CP charges are hard enough to make stick at the moment for all sorts of reasons - it would fall apart due to impracticality.
No, because in the US the people are the militia, and outside of a few states and D.C. are allowed to provide their own protection.

And of course in those nasty state the powerful hire their own militia (private security) anyway.
Regardless of the whole Apple/Flash issue:

Refusing to support older technologies helps encourage people to start using the newer technologies. If everyone dropped support for flash (obviously this wouldn't actually happen) then developers would be forced to use alternatives. If flash continues to be supported then developers have less of an incentive to replace their current solutions.
That is not Pixar's website.
Obama: iPad, Xbox turn information into a distraction
You can be "a little bit pregnant" when you're talking about large groups of people. Of the women in your country, how many are pregnant at any given time? It's probably "a little bit". Obviously someone is confusing a statistical sampling of 1 with the kind of volume Amazon must deal with.

I find it informative that a rare event such as this is being given so much press. If this was more routine, this wouldn't be news. Amazon seems to be doing better than 0.1% based on that alone.
From below: "They didn't have a single trading day in which they made less than $ 25 million"

Anyone who makes more than 25M per day can take a little heckling, if you ask me.
We can hope. It might also turn out that censors, irritated by the resistance, would criminalize participation in it.
Just, you know, in case you happen to be driving by ;)

I imagine there are a handful of people from Utah on here. I know of at least a few.
Fluoride in Drinking Water
I watched a program about this girl and I remember thinking this the whole time. She stopped development in most ways, but that doesn't mean she isn't aging.
It took you less than ten minutes to notice the reply and debunk its false claims. Don't you wish people would bother to see if they were, you know, right, before they tried to call you out on something?
"Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund" continues to have influence on startups
Granted that they are different industries, but still you'd think the putative intelligentsia of our times, our writers and story tellers, especially in sci-fi, would be ahead of the curve and not so far behind it.
What technology should I use to build my product?
The percentages they give aren't for a single drive failure, they're for data loss (multiple drive failure). So the odds are .1-.5%.
Elena Kagan: "She is certainly a fan of presidential power."
The discoverability of commands is particularly important, and something I noticed a lot after starting out with iPod Touch, then Android (Nexus One), then iPad.

With iPod / iPhone / iPad, applications need to be very carefully designed to reveal actions; but every application exposes those actions in slightly different ways. Android, on the other hand, has built-in buttons for Back and Menu, and has a generally common theme of long-press for "context-menu"-like action. This ends up making Apple-platform apps inconsistent, occasionally brilliant but frequently odd, while Android apps are pedestrian but consistently usable, in the sense that actions can easily be discovered and reasonably easily invoked, but not necessarily with a minimum of taps - usually there's at least one or two extra taps involved with Android apps.

I think the optimum would be somewhere in between. Android has too many buttons: the Search button is ironically mostly redundant. The consistency of a back button works really well. The utility of a menu button is debatable; it many ways, it's a cop-out. I wonder if a universal gesture might be more appropriate, a little like the status area of Android is accessed with a pull-down from the top of the screen. Perhaps a pull-up from the bottom for general actions?
I'm not sure why exactly we "need" an alternative to Facebook.

But why not leverage what's already out there. I recently killed my Facebook account out of frustration from seeing their social widget all over the place. But the main reason I was using it was:
a) People who felt the easiest way to do event invitations was through facebook by way of a point and click here's all my friends in one place interface.
b) People sharing Photographs with groups of friends w/ discreet privacy interfaces.

The C) of this list is all my friends who aslo have twitter accounts who add #fb to the end of every.damn.tweet because that's some kind of special operator to "update their profile message".

The question I put forth is why not create a thin layer to pull together the services which provide these already? Twitter already does short one line status updates. Flickr has discreet friend-level privacy settings. There are 8 billion easy to use invitation services. There are other photo services which I'm not familiar with like Picassa which likely do the same.

Rather than reinvent the wheel - we should be pushing for some kind of OAuth or OpenID services to tie these things together CLEARLY. Maybe a simple one-stop page to manage relationships with people, and your services. Your "profile" page can simply be "rit stores his photos at Flickr." and a link to those (or show them inline). But nothing stops me from having a friend who does things on Picassa.

The last few iterations of Facebook seemed to me designed to be more and more like Twitter. Why reinvent the wheel when you can just integrate?
Missouri Divorce Lawyers
Missouri divorce section provides a professional divorce lawyers, family law, mediators, counselors, financial planners and other divorce professionals as well as articles
Scientists consider asteroid as target for manned mission
One of the best ways to market yourself is to give away freebies.

For example, I knew a graphic designer who did pro-bono work for some non-profit organizations. He did really good work and some of the non-profit board members gave him work to do. Really lucrative work - corporate annual reports.
3 mins to install CodeIgniter on Windows Server 2008 R2 on XAMP
BTW, you can get italics by surrounding your text with asterisks (*).
Knuth agrees with you (see the bottom of the page):

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html
So it would just not come with a delete function. Once you've given someone a piece of information, it's hard to revoke it anyway. If you published a phone number to a bunch of friends that you didn't want to have the number, the protocol could allow your client to contact theirs, and ask to delete that information if it exists. Sure their client could refuse to abide by that request, but it's equally likely that they could have exported that phone number info Outlook/AddressBook or written it down on a piece of paper. How do you revoke it then?

As to blog/microblog posts, the same thing applies. The communication protocol between clients could specific a mechanism to request a deletion, but there's no guarantee that their client would obey. But there's also no guarantee that the other person hasn't already read your post.

Once you send information out into the world, it's very hard to pull it back in. Even on Facebook, if you broadcast information to people, there's no guarantee that they haven't written it down, exported it, screenshotted it before you deleted it or revoked privilege to it.
Ask HN: Please review our site: www.bugalot.com
Hi all,

Bugalot is a javascript error tracking site. You embed a script into your website and it automatically tracks all the js errors that occur.

This has been a weekend project for the last couple of months. It's still very beta and the design is not final (new one coming soon) but we'd appreciate your comments and suggestions on the functionality of the service.

We started this around February and at the time we couldn't find anything similar but in the meantime Exception Hub has launched a same service.

Give it a shot and tell us what you think about it. Any and all comments are appreciated.

Thanks,

Rob & Nik
Even HN needs its share of clowns for public entertainment

Well... you're hired!
Clickable link: http://www.bugalot.com
Headhunters generally don't work for equity you're correct. That doesn't mean that there isn't some market for it though.

The real downside on that is that (as someone who has been one) headhunters have a hard enough time as-is getting their fee occasionally from clients. If working WITH headhunters seems to be a pain in the ass, try being one and keeping the client and prospect in-line with a model that you can actually get paid on is rather difficult.
That's a slippery, slippery slope.
Google Wave – A Paper Tsunami?
About the title, "Blocking I/O: it's not just for pansies".

Whether the title wording is ironic or sincere -- and I'm guessing it's used jokingly -- using it presumes a very specific shared outlook with the reader that is, likely as not, wrong. Certainly wrong in my case.

I'm not claiming the title is homophobic. I claim it's distracting to some portion of readers and serves to introduce the actual content of the linked submission poorly. The submission title does not nearly reflect the attitude or writing in the actual linked post which is, in comparison: specific, technical, and non-abrasive.
I always found the base-10 argument easier to see at a glance, and most people are probably more familiar with decimal notation. This guy writes to try and make math more popular, so I'd imagine that's his motivation.

For Cantor, I would imagine that the formal proof was simpler to write out using the binary representation. Just a guess.
Front-Running is currently a legal tactic in trading. GS seems to be very efficient at it. And the 1/8th point higher you have to pay when you buy a stock isn't that much anyways.
Yes, But What Have You Done?
The Death of Files
I suppose it's possible but S3 is designed for nine 9's wrt to durability. There are > 100 billion objects and I'm not aware of any being lost due to AWS fault.
Relax. It's just a title. Let's talk about the article which (even though from 2008) is actually interesting.
We are not sponsored by any synagogue. (Trust me, the synagogues compete with the Jewish schools for donations.) “Other fundraising” is our fundraising.

I don’t have a breakdown of my particular school’s budget, but a sample budget for a Jewish day school (http://www.peje.org/docs/samplebudget.pdf) estimates that about two-thirds of a school’s expenditures are going to be for personnel, and about a third of the personnel expenditures are going to be for administrative staff. I really don’t think my school spends $500K a year paying someone to shuffle immunization records around.
Engineers won't want to work in startups (especially in NY where rent=2500+1000*num_bedrooms) until they see a lot of other engineers getting rich due to having worked in startups. People follow incentives and respond to stories of others' success. In NY thus far, these success stories are rare.
Also curious to know of any S3 bucket failure stories out there. I would assume this is uncommon, but I also assumed that the EBS failure rate was much lower prior to reading this.
So everyone who criticizes Goldman is stupid? Is that by definition, or is there an intelligent critique out there that hasn't yet been made? What, if anything, would cause you to criticize Goldman? What, if anything would cause you to laugh at Goldman?

These aren't sarcastic rhetorical questions, I really want to know. From where I'm standing, it seems that Wall Street is deeply corrupt, and Goldman's success comes from their unparalleled ability to turn that to their advantage. Reasonable and more knowledgeable people may disagree, and many do (eg, Warren Buffet). But I'm puzzled by those who get angry at the suggestion that Goldman in particular and Wall Street in general are anything less than paragons of virtue.

Surely this is a legitimate topic for discussion. If these guys screw up we all suffer, and there are a lot of people suffering acutely right now. I'm wrong, fine. I'm willing to be educated. But I don't appreciate being dismissed as a moron.
The point is that they are not backing up your data they way they advertise it. The whole point of physical redundancy is to eliminate single point of failure yet from their email it seems that such single point still exist.
Also if adding physical redundancy improves reliability only by 3.5% it means that they have different definition of the term.
What value does GS provide in return for those $25MM?

My underlying question would be: Are they a symptom of a systemic flaw (basically a parasite) or does their role in the financial ecosystem somehow justify that kind of profits?
Have you seen Toy Story 2? It is actually a decent movie. It was originally slated to be a typical Disney direct-to-video sequel. But the Pixar guys didn't want to do substandard work, so they worked hard on the preproduction and managed to convince the Disney execs that it was worthy of a theatrical release.

Four years later, the story repeats itself: Disney's five-movie partnership with Pixar ends and Disney owns all the movie characters, so they decide to make a direct-to-video Toy Story 3 with their in-house studios. Then Eisner leaves, Disney buys Pixar, the Pixar guys are put in charge of Disney Animation Studios, and Toy Story 3 gets shelved so that it can be redone from scratch as a theatrical release by Pixar. Given the history, I expect that it, too, will be a decent film.
I wish that the media would break it's habit of assuming that an upwards movement in the stock market indices acts as anything like an effective judgement of a government program/policy.

Wall Street wasn't able to accurately digest the seriousness of the housing bubble crash until it was too late, what's any different this time around?
No longer amusing to YOU. Plenty amusing to me.
I don't like the proportion of critique vs suggestions. Nielsen critiques a lot, but his suggestions are limited to a few broad strokes. I expected better from a usability guru.
Agreed - there are loads of former banker types, or rich wives of financiers, who decide starting a startup is cool, and go try to hire an engineer for 2% equity and treat them poorly. Their "startups" are often some kind of online magazine where the main technical challenge is themeing Drupal.
10 things Google should change for Android 2.2
A while ago, I was watching an N900 user trying out an iPad. It was interesting to see that he had substantial difficulty figuring out how to move back in nested screen hierarchies. He was actually trying to press on the black border around the screen to go back, because on the N900 all dialogs are designed so that clicking anywhere in the area "behind" the dialog takes you back.

IMHO, that "buttonless back button" is perhaps the best thing about the N900's UI design.
Effectively that turns the whole argument on its head, after all, it's not like the whole world had heard of 'Bloomsbury' before Harry Potter, but now they have. Seems to me as though the author made the reputation of the publishers.
Actually, I'm wrong. It's eleven 9's. http://bit.ly/ageV9D
Strangely enough there is no Amazon URL for this thing.

You could use their Ajax-y page on http://status.aws.amazon.com/ and then manually click on the error icon to see the explanation for EC2 on May 4th / 8th, or you could use their RSS (http://status.aws.amazon.com/rss/EC2.rss ).
"...how is that possible that they only make money?”
It is not individuals but corporations (although some individuals like Steve J. continue to have big impact). Bill Gates stepped down as CEO in 2000 and left FTE in 2008; not an apples to apples comparison between the charts
The convictions will continue until the quality of humour improves.
Forget gifted. Genius = 99% hardwork 1% smart.
This article is also a month old.
Rents are definitely artificially high here. I think it goes beyond the demand for space, and is largely due to the fact that brokers completely own the marketplace and have an incentive to price as high as possible (they take 8-12% commissions). Renters don't have a good way to understand real market prices.

Back to the topic of lack of engineers, I've always thought it'd be a good idea for multiple companies/hackers to get a large space together and share talent to work on lots of ideas simultaneously. It'd go beyond a co-working/incubator style space, and would be a way for young companies to offset the risk of early stage hiring.

Right now in NYC we need lots of companies with good sized exits for the future health of the eco-system, sharing our talent with each other is probably a good way to get to that point.
That's how many were walking through the hallway.
I have to question the universal truth of "there's more than one way to do it". That saying bears truth for algorithmic parts of systems, but how about "business logic", that be all and end all of J2EE systems?

I spent a few hours contemplating some exceptionally unreasonable and hence difficult-to-test "business logic" once upon a time. After kicking it around with co-workers, the project manager decided that maybe "business logic" is the only part of a system with one correct implementation.

I'm not sure that's a true statement all the time, but it sure does make sense a lot of the time.
Discussion already started, go here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334234
I think I'll pass.

I've passed on anything coming out of microsoft since about 2003 or so, and I feel much better for it. No more stacks of MSDN cds, no more 'support events' and so on.

No more viruses, worms, trojans, piles of malware and other nonsense, besides license fees, subscriptions to stay up-to-date, re-installs every 3 to 5 months.

Open source all the way for me these days, and I feel much happier for it.

It's possible that C# is a great language and that I'm missing out on something that would improve my life in a way that I can not currently imagine but there always seems to be a price for that.
Ways To Suck At Programming
More info, earlier submission here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334580
Freedom of speech doesn't cover shouting FIRE! in a crowded theatre.
That's actually... really promising.

I could definitely see using this among my close friends if Posterous ever gets too cumbersome.

The real question, though, is how BuddyPress installations might eventually communicate with each other. A federated mesh of BuddyPress instances, with a good UI for managing relationships between them, is the kind of thing that would be needed to take on Facebook.
It's also unashamedly biased. I'd take it all with a massive dose of salt.