skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately, IE9 isn't shipping with Windows 7 Mobile so the 'media query module' won't be effective until they get IE9 on Win7mo.

I think one of the biggest issues with IE (and why we see so many old IE browsers) is that for a while, they weren't updating browsers regularly.

It looks like they may have turned a corner on this, as it seems IE8 & IE9 are coming out at a decent rate.

Though that could be because the technologies are changing so quickly and IE is just trying to keep up.
Why rely on HN's anecdotal advice when you can use scientific evidence?

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/snake-oil-supplem...
Is there a way to generate a url for a particular query? I have a homepage with a bunch of search boxes.

Incidentally, anyone know if there is a way to generate a url for a Twitter search? The one I had been using stopped working recently.
Ask HN: Which web API's would you like to be easier to use?
Which web API's would you like to be easier to use? What do you find painful about them?

I've noticed some common patterns in the things that I wish were already implemented for me when I've worked with web API's, so I'm thinking it might be useful to get these into a library or service so everyone wouldn't need to reimplement them every time.

For example, I always want to log every request sent and response received from the API (at least for a day or two), and how long each call took, since a remote API can always do something undocumented or have some transient problem, and I want to be able to figure out what happened. Not rocket science, but annoying to have to do every time.

And the process flow involving API calls often involve multiple steps (for example, we make a call, they return immediately with "ok, request received successfully", but then later they call one of our web hooks with the actual response). So providing some abstraction around the process could be useful, such as a providing a closure of the data used across the multiple steps and perhaps reifying the concept of a "step" would be useful.

Such effort would ideally start with some particular API to ground the implementation in reality: an API that is both painful to use and one that people care about.

And, in response to the comments of people who want or are building easier to use interfaces to existing API's, yes, I do want to hear about those. The part I'm thinking the most about right now wouldn't provide such an interface directly, but it might prove useful to someone who was implementing such an interface.
I'd like to request details on Connection Machines' hiring practices. (Or do you prefer people to privately email?) I've read some things about them, but there's usually more lore than reality in post-mortems.

I've worked mainly in startups and think that startups rarely approach their potential. The managers often comfort themselves with delusions, and the employees for their part often passively take the work they're handed.
Adopt a program of RSI prevention, whether you have it or not.
At this point, I don't even want IE to be improved. Microsoft has immense resources at its disposal, and I would prefer to see that effort devoted towards truly new problems in computing.

Simply put, we finally have a number of incredibly good web browsers, and most of them run on Windows. Microsoft should embrace one of these, and stop wasting time and money (both its own, and that of developers who continue to have to test IE). Even a great IE is still yet another IE, that must be supported or not, and this effect multiplies across all the web pages in the world. A new IE contributes nothing useful at this point, that wouldn't be achieved by having Windows Update auto-install a Firefox, a Chrome or a Safari.
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To be a world class investor you need to start out with a huge bankroll. Horatio Alger stories are more prevalent with entrepreneurs. However, the list you gave doesn't really match up with your description. None of those people are "immigrants," Li Ka-Shing was from a wealthy family, Dell was the son of a stockbroker and orthodontist, etc.
Ah, it would have been easier if you'd started out saying "beyond the foreseeable state of the art" or "impossible". Then we could have discussed that issue.

However your appeal to authority (that authority being yourself) does not falsify what Drexler has said about this or his evidence.
You seem quite confident that the 140-character limit is an auxiliary novelty, whereas I think it's rather central to Twitter's success. There are any number of other similar services (LiveJournal, Wordpress, Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr) that do not enforce any such limit, yet everybody's all over Twitter.

And which metrics show that limiting updates to 140 characters is bad behavior? URL shortening sucks, for sure, but that doesn't mean the limit on prose isn't useful or attractive to users.
He wasn't saying that you fire people to show you've got balls. He was saying that teams will think less of you as a manager if you don't fire bad people. And he's right about that.
Absolutely true. I'm really surprised at the attitude of the article, it almost seems as though firing is seen as a replacement for a good interview process, and to shore up a lack of authority by instilling fear or showing 'guts'.
He doesn't mention bad people in the bit I'm referring to, he literally says:

"Your team thinks you suck if you don't have the chutzpah to fire."

And that just makes no sense.

Firing bad people is in the other bit above, where it says:

"No, firing bad people improves the culture because it sets standards, and proves consequences.
One bad apple does ruin the bunch."

Hiring bad people is what ruins the culture, firing them improves it back to what it was before you hired them, if you're lucky. Most times will never go back to what it was before.
This also means that you can operate on these data structures with multiple threads. Depending on the number of CPUs you have and the problem domain, you could very well operate more quickly (and safely!) on your data then with mutable data structures.
"I have my homepage set to http://google.com/advanced_search?num=100. "

Cool tip, i'm going to try this for a while.
They use the 'conceirge' app as an example
https://concierge.apple.com/WebObjects/Concierge.woa/68/wo/o....

I wonder if Gianduia is a developer tool or a media plugin? I suspect the first.

If it is a media plug-in, we'd likely call it Giardia.
any guesses as to what 3d printer he's using?
That's the wrong question. The question is not, "Will you be able to make money on the iPad?", it's "Will anyone ever make a couple hundred million per year (like Zynga has on Facebook) on the iPad?" In that sense, Facebook is the clear winner.
How can we know if this method of choosing colours results in colours 'aesthetically better' than, say, generating rgb values by flipping a coin?
Review my project: www.tellaround.com
Tell Around allows you to tweet people around a given geographic location (generally your current location).

It finds people around the point you gave either via Twitter, Foursquare or Gowalla, and sends them a twitter @reply with your message (using your twitter account). You can either send your message through the website, or by sending a geolocalized tweet to @tellaround.
What I meant was for dumping every different kind of connector and use a universal connector for everything. I am not talking about the usefulness or not of ethernet or wifi, both have their places, but I've used usb-to-ethernet adapters and they work well. It is all about the plug size, not the architecture.

Take a look at your mackbook on the side, the two biggest holes are for the modem and ethernet ports. Time to downsize them, not to get rid of them.

So, how difficult is it for manufacturers to get together and join efforts to find solutions for the benefit of all? wait, I have to stop daydreaming about utopia again.

PS.

What I meant again, if you can plug a mouse, printer, camera, mic, etc into a usb port, why not a monitor, ethernet or any other rogue device? I want answers like 'displays use flux-capacitors u dumbass' or 'ethernet uses quantum waves u fucktard therefore blah blah' or is it just manufacturers being dickheads?

USB was meant to be universal.
Actually, the money will end up getting rerouted to Deutsche Bank and other German banks. Germany has promoted consumption within the EU. It is the number 1 (or number 2) exporter in the world and most of its exports go to other EU countries. If Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, England, etc. go down guess who suffers too. There is an imbalance in the system and it needs correcting or else Germany will suffer along with the rest of these countries.
I thought payment APIs were especially a pain (that's why I'm working on http://payfacade.com).
clickable url : http://www.tellaround.com
In short:

Like a men's club, one blackball from any employee and you weren't hired. I think this is documented, and I don't know how long they continued the policy (see below, I passed that test).

Early on at least they took forever to hire. E.g. I did a serious interview with them (my interview with Danny Hillis, who was part of my social circle, started with an aggressive "Why aren't you in school!??" (the answer was money)). They got back to me more than a month after that interview, by which time I'd accepted a much less desirable job (sysadmin for their Lisp Machines).

I was told they failed the second time to fill this job and that three full calendar years later (!!!) they hired a classmate of mine in their third try (I pretty much knew the entire talent pool available at the time).

We can be quite certain that damaged their productivity early on; my experience was at the very beginning of 1984 and I'm not sure they failed to hire anyone for this slot in the meantime.

In one well sourced account, they asked for a reference from an applicant's current employer (of course without clearing this with him first). Except for that case, I've never heard of anyone doing that, ever.

While they were the coolest place to work at in Boston, I can see how they might in part have suffered a "death by lethal reputation" (there are many additional and well documented reasons in the public record, of course).
I think almost everyone I know in the IT industry underestimate how important it is to get enough sleep.
Hiring and firing bad people manifests itself as additional chaos to the others who are trying to get their work done.
For those in the trenches, those doing the firing will have
already lost credibility for hiring the bad people in the first place.
It's not like guns are hard to get, in the US at least. I'm sure you can buy a bunch for the price of that 3D printer...
Take a fish oil supplement and a multivitamin.

Eat as little as you can get away with allowing you to control your weight (up or down!), and do everything you can to reduce your stress levels.
CouchDB is pretty stable. The BBC are using it live, so it's safe for production use.
And if you'd started out by saying "I think that full-on atomistic assembly nanotechnology isn't being taken sufficiently seriously by the scientific community" rather than "nanotechnology research has been suppressed for the past 25 years" then you'd have had a more sensible argument.
Cool! How is it compared to the Beagle Board? Cheaper is good of course, but hos much difference in processing powerful connections?
Yes, our politicians love their taxes. Unfortunately for us a very high portion goes to nationalized militarism. We are getting the bang for our buck but it's in form of a military power and not in the form of taking care of each other.

My hope is that the Pentagon will get its budget slashed.
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Tim Ferris also has a diet designed for losing weight: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/04/06/how-to-lose-...

SEX. Lots of it. reduce your stress and practice good fitness emotionally and physically. I read something interesting this morning that stress can cause increases in abdominal fat, which is the worst type of fat in terms of it's long term health detriment. http://stress.about.com/od/stresshealth/a/cortisol.htm

Have a healthy attitude, stay positive, and remember KEEP FIT AND HAVE FUN!!!
A pink email and a guard escorting you out of the building do a great job reducing heart attacks or a bullet between your eyes. You still have to park your mercedes out of sight that day tho.
first 5 days $2K per day (iPhone application) - education
If you buy it from apple.com, Apple will apply state sales tax for your state of residence (if Apple has a physical store in your state). Local sales taxes are your responsibility.
To be fair, that doesn't imply that Mr. Someone is merely claiming so out of self-interest. If he started a company to compete with the technology, he must really believe it's going to die.

Which means you can't simply dismiss his statements; you have to look into them and judge them on their merits.

It's a bad sign for HN that this facile dismissal has (as of this writing) twice as many points as this much deeper but also critical analysis:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1332039
Are there any handsets in use out there that support SMS and don't support Concatenated SMS? This is a serious question.
I'm in the same situation with FIOS in the heart of Seattle, but the mayor has personally told me that it has nothing to do with regulatory hurdles. The city would love to have Verizon compete with Comcast and has tried to work with them on making it happen. They aren't interested though.
I think that's bad advice. Going to a doctor and getting prescription meds should be the last resort. Some of the stimulants prescribed for ADHD are dangerous, highly addictive, and can increase risk for heart attacks, high blood pressure, strokes, et al.
I have a few iPhone apps in the store. All together they average around $8 a day. Was a lot more back when I released them Oct 2008.
Then again, the OO paradigms I learned (which did not include any Smalltalk ones) were both very hard (to get right) and I now think they are also very wrong.

Based on this and your other comments, I'd like to hear more about how you came to this conclusion. This isn't the right thread for it, though... perhaps, if you're interested in writing about it, you could make a new post?
In the US, Apple calculates sales tax based on your location and displays it before you buy.
The choice between SQL/NoSQL should be made based on the features of each and what you need, and it's definitely not an exclusive choice. Remeber: NoSQL == "Not Only SQL" Use all tools where they make sense.

Construction workers use both nails and screws, even though they do much the same thing. It's just a question of what's appropriate for a given task.

Finally, if it's only a question of performance, I'd suggest tabling that question until it's a real issue. Scale when you need to, not before. Only once you have a "real" system with scaling stress can you actually see what needs to be optimized. Before that, it's all theory.
I was told to take vitamin b complex by a doctor because my finger tips were going numb (I thought it was something worse). I don't think it helped my focus.
It depends on the circumstance. In a small startup, it's going to be a given that a certain fraction of the people you bring on are inappropriate for the company, and that you can't predict this in advance. Fire them, before they do too much damage to the codebase, morale, et cetera. In a larger company, firing is much more of a last resort, because people can always be moved around, and because if the only problem is that they aren't producing, it's probably because they weren't mentored and this can be rectified-- large companies usually have enough time and resources that they shouldn't need to fire many people, except when things are so bad that layoffs are necessary.
Or have the link phrase count towards the limit, but not the actual link itself.
The FB developer APIs do make a nice platform. I did a little work a year ago on a customer's Rails app to make it play nice with FB.

That said, I woud hate to base my business just on one platform that I did not control. It seems safer to develop useful web apps and/or game web apps that can integrate with FB, perhaps act as Wave components, and run on the developers own servers.
A long read, but well worth it.
Try one. If it's not doing what you want, try the other way. It's more important to start on something than to obsess over these things :)
Do you happen to know what the rates are for ad-supported apps? Not really sure of what options there are, I've seen Google-branded ads in Android apps though. How do they compare to web advertising?
Some plain foods have zzero vat. More luxurous food is taxed. This is important when you think of jaffa cakes, are they a biscuit or a cake? If they are a buscuit, then they don't have vat, if cake, then the price goes up
quote from Peter:

There are 2 things you should ask yourself. First is the scale comparable – the recipes from Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, are not good for like 99.9% of the applications because they are not even remotely close in size and so capacity requirements. Second if this “smart thing” was truly thought out architecture choice in beginning or it was the choice within code base constrains they had, and so you might not have.

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/03/01/kiss-kiss-kis...
Apple always charges more for EU customers, usually replacing the $ for a €. When €1 = $1.50, I don't believe it's the tax, and instead feel like I'm getting screwed.
haha, that's a good way to brighten up a day.
Has Zynga really made a couple of hundred million a year? Have they even been going for a year?

I don't see any reason why nobody could make a couple of hundred million a year on iPod/iPad/iPhone apps, especially as the huge existing installed base of iPods (over 260 million sold) will probably eventually churn into app-capable devices like the current iPod Touch.
That is a pretty dishonest headline you're using to summarize this article.
While I support most of the man's political stances, Obama's take on the iPad and console culture is perhaps a smidge hypocritical, given that he is, after all, a known Blackberry addict.
I suspect this is going to be a long thread ;)

Probably not, unless someone else jumps in, since I actually agree with you and am merely exercising skepticism to solidify my conclusion. [1]

As a rule I ask companies where I do technical due dilligence how long it takes them to get a new hire up to speed

At the risk of quibbling, this strikes me as a couple steps removed from anecdotal. I expect a degree of subjectivity, but without direct observation, it's merely hearsay (not entirely unlike some interviewing techniques, but I digress).

On average, assuming a linear increase in productivity over the time that you hire someone to the time that they are as productive as the 'old hands'

That's a big assumption, and one I would suggest is false for experienced technical people, especially non-programmers.

I detect an additional, implicit assumption, that a new hire's productivity will ever reach (and/or not surpass) that of the veterans around them. Similarly, you're assuming that they will, at some point, cease to be a drain on the team.

Employing someone with a wife, kids and a mortgage

I don't think it's any of an employer's concern what an employee's personal/family situation is, nor appropriate to base hiring/firing decisions on it. Fortunately, the labor laws in my jurisdiction support such a view quite strongly.

and then throwing them out in the callous way the poster suggests, after hiring them capriciously is really bad for your business' reputation as well as for your employees.

This may be true, but you haven't pointed out where capriciousness or callousness (beyond a separation of business and personal) is advocated, either by the OP or the OC.

[1] I hesitate to use the term "Devil's advocate," as it carries a connotation of absence of engagement or conviction.
You kind of have to go with the tech you know best, otherwise getting started is going to take too long. If you already know a SQL database system, go with that. If you don't know an RDBMS or a NoSQL system, it might be worth learning the NoSQL thing.

The reason is, if you're successful, the cost of migrating later on is going to be larger than you expect. You're going to be spending a lot of time doing a lot of back-end work that users never see. Once you are dealing with huge amounts of data, it takes hours and possibly days for data migrations and conversions to even run. You screw up a data import that took 4 hours... 4 hours is now killed and you have to do it over again. The more data you have, the more potential time these types of issues will absorb.
Marketing idea:  intentionally buggy open source.
You could always start with MySQL then migrate quite easily to clustrix since they support the MySQL API. They're expensive, but you may find that by the time you need to scale to that degree you can easily afford them.

http://www.clustrix.com/
For me, half of the advantage of NoSQL is that it's much quicker and easier to build with, because you don't have to worry about schemas.

I'd go the opposite - start with NoSQL, and migrate to SQL if you need some more formalized relationships.
For Ruby, using datamapper can allow you to (for example) use both a relational database and MongoDB together. You could also have a migration strategy based on datamapper.

That said, I would suggest picking two data stores like PostgreSQL and MongoDB and write some code examples, play around with data models for your app. If you spend several hours doing this then you can make a better decision.

BTW I have tried most of the NoSQL data stores and MongoDB is probably the easiest to use from a developer's point of view. I have used bindings for Ruby and Clojure and being able to store things like Ruby or Clojure maps directly in a documents is great. That said, PostgreSQL with built in text indexing support, etc., etc. is also a great tool. I think that if you become fluent with PG and MongoDB then that is sufficient for a wide range of problems. For my development, I toss RDF data stores into the mix, but that might just complicate things for you.

Anyway, pick one of each, have fun playing with each one before making a big commitment.
Wow, do I know his feeling. I call it 'Coke/Pepsi' binary thinking. The notion that the World is essentially binary, instead of a multi-dimensional varied landscape of gradients.
It's the headline the article uses as well.
Great storyline.
Jurist som bloggar om juridik.
Apple Files For “iTunes Live” Trademark
Color Theory for Designers: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/28/color-theory-for-...
He doesn't mention bad people in the bit I'm referring to, he literally says:
"Your team thinks you suck if you don't have the chutzpah to fire."
And that just makes no sense.

If reading the bit out of context makes no sense, perhaps a different reading, such as suggested by parent comment(s) is indicated.
Industry Canada Announces Rural Broadband Funding
A pen for an iPad?
It seems his argument is that information inundation lets stupid ideas live longer than they might otherwise, which is actually pretty wise. It's not necessary to pin it on iPods and XBoxes, but the idea that we need to learn healthy ways to survive information bombardment is neither new nor unwieldy.

The historical comparisons are interesting, but I suppose it's one of those questions where technology is available but human nature and morality are lagging.