skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not exactly. We created Tropo as a way of reaching a different group of developers than our VoiceXML products are used by.

We noticed that lots of developers were writing VoiceXML that was basically a couple of XML tags surrounding huge blocks of JavaScript. Or using PHP to create their VoiceXML documents. We also found that a lot of smaller projects and developers didn't need the 100% uptime SLAs and dedicated capacity.

So we created Tropo to let developers write applications natively in JavaScript, PHP, and other web languages and skip the voiceXML if they choose. It's delivered as a pay as you go cloud service running in the same carrier class datacenters as our enterprise products. And we eliminated all the things that have made telephony services hard to buy like contracts and guaranteed minimums. Just pay for what you use (and developers don't pay anything, Tropo is free for dev use).
Building Fragmentlabs.com
It looks like the vote is just there to give people something to click on -- no real world consequences. They have an entirely separate vote for the "Top 150", probably equally riggable. (Finally we will know who is better: Aristotle or Shigeru Miyamoto!)
My thinking here is to simplify and clarify the question.

The downvotes make me wonder if you disagree with my premise "These two questions could be simpler/clearer" or my attempt at a solution.

Care to tell me which?
School Loans Consolidation
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1361473
isn't this what X does?
I think a big part of wanting to start my own company is so that I can call the shots, or at least have some say in how things will be run. I'd rather bootstrap and build it slow and steady than have people push me around and treat me like dirt. If I wanted that I'd just keep working for other people.
Um, Air, Silverlight, Java? A prediction of equal insight, "The sun will rise tomorrow."
No sessions.
Multiple Sessions with One Terminal Connection Using Screen
This article doesn't say it, but "developers will dish up 1.9 percent to 2.9 percent of the sale, plus 30 cents based on PayPal's tiered pricing structure for e-commerce, or a 5 percent plus 5 cents per each transaction fee for micropayments." (source: http://www.cnet.com/8301-19736_1-20005327-251.html)
Now, once we get there, can we ditch the brainfuck-quality intermediate layer and just go from GWT or whatever to native code?

But... isn't that called a native Java app?
Samsung Corby TV & Samsung Metro TV Mobile in India
does this exclude board and food?

My impression was that it did -- that typically Chinese workers get food and housing in addition to their cash pay -- but I can't find the blog post that told me so, so maybe I'm wrong. I thought it was Bunnie Huang's series on Chinese manufacturing, but I can't find the reference in there.

I live down the street from Lowell, Massachusetts, which in the early 19th century was the Shenzhen of New England. Based on what I know of the history of industrial America, this article sounds really familiar, right down to the company dorms where extremely young workers eat company food and sleep on company beds. This is how factory towns work. AFAIK it's how they have always worked.
America has an ongoing corporate love affair with the "seasoned ceo." It's visible in the way that seasoned ceos hop from company to company leaving a wake of failures behind them. It's championed by advisory boards, venture capitalists and business schools. How this culture came to be I'll never know. I can only say that nearly every seasoned ceo and advisory board I have encountered lack the imagination, resourcefulness and depth of insight to grow a very small company.
Do we really need another content aggregator? It basically is popurls only slightly different. I'd love to suggest things to you, but it's just another aggregator. Sorry, man, I know you've worked hard on it, but spend your energies creating something new, or incredibly better.
"Law of Inverse Focus" - "The more items on a priority list, the less change of implementation" - Tim Berry in "Hurdle: The Book on Business Planning"
"A great attitude is not the result of success; success is the result of a great attitude" Earl Nightingale
"Luck favors the backbone, not the wishbone." - Doyle Brunson
Good luck with the site!
I wonder if it also happens to do with the fact that the more friends you have, the less likely that you'll be able to communicate with all of them often enough to maintain the relationship.

The cited example max of around 150, for some people, might mean they talk to each once or twice a year, assuming they make an effort to talk to at least one person each day, and they're actively making sure to talk to people that haven't yet talked to. This is an unrealistic effort, so more likely is that a smaller subselection is very active (30-40?), with many people being missed.

Thus, if you had 1000 friends, how many of them will even get spoken to a 1 year period?

I'd guess that people tend to have no more than 150 friends/relationships, because of this inability to communicate frequently enough with all of them.
Internet Retailer Survey Numbers are IN
ByDesign Upgrade Means SAP is Serious About SaaS
Pennsylvania A.G. Tom Corbett Subpoenas Twitter To Identify His Critics
I'm more a fan of phrasing things as "freedom to X" rather than "freedom from X", at least as it regards entrepreneurship. Day jobs put food on the table and a roof over the head, and they're an honorable occupational choice, so I won't rag on them too badly.

That said, having "freedom to be selective in whose advice I take to heart" is way up there on the things I like about this job. Taking money would mean having to be a wee bit less selective.
I understand what you're saying. My point is that I don't even use Word for the things Word is supposed to be good at, let alone the features that Word doesn't even try to provide.
i hope so and i think that's the kind of convergence he's talking about, being able to compile GWT to either target.
Bynamite releases "Friends Only" button fix to Facebook privacy
Google is not giving a message, they are listening for the message that the developers are sending to them. That is the reason they gave for having separate but overlapping development stacks.
I posted this article because these 14 actors likely went into these auditions with little idea of what they were getting into. We've seen a wild ride of character development on and off the set and all of this was encapsulated within this venture that has become a sensation.

This parallels personal experiences (aside from the "becoming a sensation" part!) of being part of a startup.
Jevons paradox, Moore's law and utility computing
Quiet confidence comes naturally to me. Knowing when to speak aggressively is the challenge. I don't think I'm the best leader -- yet.
I stopped filling it in when I got to this question. Ambiguity is a killer in questionaires like this.
Given Palm being another company with deep pockets, it may not say all that much. Elite companies don't like having legal battles because most of them are Pyrrhic victories and should only be fought over major matters.
Don't Covet Your Ideas
"The striking thing is that this is a subpoena to provide evidence in a criminal investigation."
This made me curious to check his actual work. It seems like math and music is not always a winning combination:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZazYFchLRI (Metastasis)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yge7GNl5p_k (Psappha)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XroZgeGOdys (Terretektorh)
are you manually testing, on your production environments ?
Out of the comments, I really liked the link to Seth Godin's post on the lizard brain http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/01/quieting-the...
And if you are here reading this after telling yourself you really would code your ass off today, you already lost.
He came to CMU in the 80's and I got to see him "perform" one of his works - more like a live mix. Shortly after that I bought an album of his at a used record store - I couldn't believe I found it, he seemed very obscure to me.

Anyway, if any of you have my album, I want it back. Serious.
Two thoughts:

1. "Seasoned" CEOs with ridiculous packages are a little like wearing a dark suit to work. Everyone knows it doesn't matter, but it's a way of signaling that you're willing to play the game. That doesn't matter a whit when you're trying to sell products to customers, but it matters a great deal when your game plan is to create a certain illusion that someone else can flip to a third party. This is known as "Banking on the Greater Fool Theory." It's a game, and the other players want to know you're playing along.

2. You are just the founder. The VC's model is that they take your company, put their money into it, and then they decide how to spend their money. What's in it for them to spend their money on you personally? Be sure you have an amazingly persuasive argument before asking them to take their money and give you some of it. Never think of it as your company compensating you for value you put into it. Sorry, but even though those are the words everyone uses, that's not what is actually going on.

Sorry for the gloom and doom, I'm off to have my first coffee of the day. Here's an old chuckle, I hope it makes up for my mouthful of lemons:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10054
Considering that it still requires a significant amount of code that the Prolog solution would not require, and that code will have to be tested and debugged, I don't consider it "trivial" in any way I use the word. If we were talking theory, maybe, but we're talking implementation.

Consider that we know, and have known for some time, proper ways to manage dynamic memory. We still consider doing it correctly in practice not trivial and consider automatic garbage collection a productivity win.
Where Imagination and Technology Collide
Pakistan, in fury over Draw Muhammad day, shuts down Facebook, YouTube
Anyone on HN deploying on OpenBSD? Any thoughts?
The FACT Party of Canada
Although, looking at the guy who invented the "cash point machine" (ATM) and didn't make any money off of it, because he shared the idea with a banking executive, is a sheer example of why it might be a good idea NOT to share it.
These billionaires went from rags to richest
Without the swearing, this show will suck. Wait, I'm sure it would suck either way. Anybody remember the Geico Caveman show folly?
I think you're using the word "America" more than a little too broadly.

The inability to "grow a very small company" is hardly limited to small companies. E.g. look at the HP board starting a bit before they hired Carly. Or read Optical Illusions, a book on the failed spinoff of Lucent. AT&T insisted on putting a "seasoned CEO" of a diesel engine company in charge and the board was cut from much the same gray haired cloth.

They knew how to handle the "being a public company" bit of things (talent which inside AT&T wasn't jumping to Lucent) but they were totally unable to provide adult supervision here it really counted. (I could go on, and am particularly interested in this having worked for Lucent in 2001; when I started out they had 106,000 employees, when I left they were targeting 35,000....)
Not really (at least not unless X has changed a lot since the last time I had much low level dealings with it) - NeWS allowed the client application to sent chunks of code to the display server, not just commands to display things. And not just chunks of any old code, but a full PostScript environment with all that it implies.

There was also a shell (psh) that allowed you to log in directly to a display server and interact with display objects. I remember logging into a colleagues NeWS server process (we had security turned off for some reason) and rotating one of his windows by 20 degrees just by running a single PostScript command.
The purpose is not clear immediately. I had to glance over everything and scroll before I realised it was a content aggregation. An introduction on the homepage would be nice.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Everybody-Draw-Mohammed-Day/12...
8 Websites You Need to Stop Building
and founding startups around...
Wolfram Alpha: The First Year
Warren Buffett’s Fall From Grace
Bingo.

Not that I am all that sure what that would be.
Those of us who are old enough to remember having to work to get to the bank before it closed may appreciate this more.
Three cool tools for restoring your Facebook privacy
thanks for your great feedback lukeqsee. Do we really need another content aggregator? I don't know, I probably don't need one, I can just speak for myself, now http://www.mcsquare.me is not a content aggregator, it's a content curator as Steve rubel will say. Some details, it's not really a slightly different popurls, it has some similar things with popurls, I think you should spent a couple of minutes there to see or just scroll the landing page.Some keywords here:
-podcasts
-vodcast
-selected quality rss feeds
-subscribe to feeds
-share content with a couple of clicks
anyway, play around a bit and let me know if you have additional suggestions

Thanks
Pmarchive - Any thoughts?
Landing a TV show on CBS is what you've identified as a useful case of Twitter?
I've got a home router running on OpenBSD, for a mix of practical and educational purposes.

I've found pf to be particularly nice - it's much easier to work with than iptables for me.

Like all the BSDs, it has man pages for everything, which is an extremely nice aspect.

The main thing that I don't like about OpenBSD is the increased update hassle as compared to, for example, Debian.

I'd probably use OpenBSD everywhere if there was some reasonable equivalent of what you'd do on Debian with "aptitude update && aptitude upgrade".
Never get between a Teamster and his drayage pay. It's fun paying $1000 to move stuff 200 feet isn't it?
I tend to use it for basic services (firewall, dns, e-mail) that I want to start with a decently secured base. It is actually pretty quick to install a server if you keep decent track of the config files and keep the ports handy.
It's a license issue.

Anyway, Apache 2.x is in ports nowadays; it hasn't been patched for security to the extent that the system Apache has been, but it's not a compile-your-own scenario.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1364132
Thanks Braindead for the feedback, I'll tweak the title, and maybe make something for the logo. I was hoping, it's simple and selfexplaining.
DC407 reporting in. :) Where's tptacek when we need him?
Paint by numbers - Address numbering schemes for major cities
This does not surprise me at all. Anyone with average intelligence can get good grades in high school - it's just a matter of how much time you're willing to devote to getting them.

The trade-off comes in deciding whether you'd rather get good grades or spend time learning other things on your own. It comes down to how much you trust the educational system you're in to fully make use of your time and intelligence.

I think it's a bad thing that, in general, grades to not track IQ. Hard work is important, but only when the effort does work on your intelligence (similar to the physical definition of work). One can spend hours on a paper or a PowerPoint and have done nothing to further their intelligence; and yet these assignments are what students are typically graded on.
Yes when someone did the math last time around Foxconn's suicide rate ended up being lower than China's by about 60% IIRC
FDR & Frank Herbert nailed this idea best.
I'm not surprised.

For me school has always been about discipline and dedication and not about skill. The school adapts itself to a lower difficulty so that more will pass and they compensate by making it more cumbersome so that the skilled, but not so disciplined, will get bored and not perform as well.

This was also my personal experience. I was pretty good at math but I never got any challanges so I just didn't do anything, but luckily I aced the tests and the only homeworks we got where to have complete the chapters. This translated to other courses where I was good, but I got bored and not motivated so I got a lot worse grades than I could've had if I was dedicated.

I managed to motivate myself later on to get good grades, other would call them great, but I know I could've had straight A grades if I just weren't so lazy and skipped a lot of hours.

Furthermore it doesn't help (doesn't show in grades) if you know a subject really well. Often the workaholics, or a bit nicer: those with more discipline than me, would just study like hell before a test and get a great score, where I wouldn't but I knew the subject well enough so I would get a great score too. I'm a bit upset with this because I doubt that they could remember anything from those tests but I felt I could remember them for months.
Because many more people have Linux experience than BSD experience - there is no real other reason.
Well. China's suicide rate is 13 per 100,000 (1999 figures)[1].

So, in a plant of 400,000 over a four month period they should expect 17 suicides. A rate of 7, then, seems "good".

Bunk article.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_Peoples_Republic...

EDIT: Wolfram Alpha claims estimated figures for 2002 were 21 per 100,000. But i am not sure how much to believe it. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=china+suicide
A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
What Schools Are Learning From Money Managers
I remember working on my first site and just only doing 2hrs a day. I try avoiding using my willpower when I can.

I talk about the experience here:
http://chegra.posterous.com/consistently-underperforming
Apple isn't their only customer.
Can Groupon Survive All Its Imitators?
This depends on how much money you already have lying around and what you decide in conjunction with your investors - but in general, you should have these discussions with your investors in advance, before you take their money.

One tiny data point - my co-founder and I were personally strapped for cash when we raised seed. We paid ourselves $70K which for me was about half of my market rate at the time. After a Series A, we paid ourselves $100K, which our investors still said was 'below market'. After a Series B, I was no longer CEO, but I got paid market.

In general, don't be a martyr. You're raising money to pay salaries, and that should include yours.
You could have 'if' as a function, but it would mean you'd have to encase any non-literal condition in a function:

(if (zero? x)
0
#(dec x))

To me, this seems a rather counter-intuitive step with very little benefit. People rarely need to use "if" as a function, so having "if" as a macro optimizes for the common case.
"Ad-hoc is generally good, but its done in a disorganized way which is what I don't like about it."

I think each piece does it's job well, and better than if someone tried to somehow consolidate multiple web languages into one.

HTTP has proven itself robust and versatile, especially with the wide spread adoption of REST development strategies. It also allows you free choice of language to implement on the server. Before the popularity of web development took off, language choice was largely circumscribed by the environment to which you wanted to deploy (the current controversy over iPhone OS hearkens back to those days).

That's true of JavaScript in the browser today, but Javascript has proven flexible enough to allow for many different ways of programming in the browser (Cappuccino, jQuery, etc.). And simply by the size of its installed base, it is inspiring innovations in dynamic language performance that remind me of what happened with Java and byte-code virtual machines.

HTML and CSS split the job of content form and appearance nicely, and the speed of HTML5 adoption by competing browsers has been impressive, in my opinion. I think that the CSS approach of separating styling from the content is superior in many ways to traditional desktop development.
There's a reason why UDP was invented.

And that reason was not sending time-insensitive text messages.
We put this together a little while back as a way to easily access all the best stuff from blog.pmarca.com.

We really think this is some of the best writing about startups on the web and deserved to be pulled out of the wayback machine and cleaned up a bit.

Hopefully it will be of help to you. Let me know if you have any ideas about how we could make it better.
And wear sunscreen...
Ask HN: Anyone have a Google prediction API invite and willing to share
I know a lot of people on HN have to be itching to try it, like me. Hopefully we can help each other out.
New Social Networking Site Changing The Way Oh, Christ, Forget It
Ask HN: Feedback on a personal site for a coder.
Hey all!
I spent yesterday re-building my personal site and I would love to get some feedback on it. The goal of the website is to showcase my recent projects and to raise my profile online, hopefully with the end effect of bringing in more traffic to my open source projects and brining in more consulting work for the company I work for.

Any thoughts/suggestions welcomed. Thanks!
http://thingsaaronmade.com/
If your username is the same on reddit as here, you don't appear to have ever been banned. If that's not the case, email me and we'll try and figure it out.
Clickable link:

http://thingsaaronmade.com/
"...and cash machines have been largely the same ever since."

Cash machines are on of the things I desperately want innovation and customization. If I go to an ATM more than twice and get the same amount of money, I want that as a quick select option. Same with language selection. The reason this isn't happening (as told by bank employees) is the regulation and the way the infrastructure is set up. But some storage coupled with one-way encryption on the machine itself (no protocols or data-transfer problems) should be possible, no?

Also, I'd like big red warning stickers on ATM's that run Windows NT or 98 still, so I can avoid them at all cost ;)
80legs is looking for interns or contract workers
Yes. Being pedantic, he didn't really change my life since I was born well after ATMs were widespread and have never known a world without them.
The engadget article has been written by a real journalist. The dailytech article instead has been written by a person who doesn't know that in "modern" China 100% of factories are like Foxconn.

It's just another pathetic way to attack Apple. "Only Escape From _Hellish Apple iPhone Factory_ Was Suicide". Oh come on. Foxconn is the largest manufacturer of electronics and computer components worldwide and they don't make just iDevices. According to Wikipedia Foxconn make these products:

1) Mac mini, iPod, iPad, and the iPhone for Apple
2) Intel-branded motherboards for Intel
3) various orders for Dell and Hewlett-Packard
4) motherboards for Zoostorm
5) PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3 for Sony
6) Wii for Nintendo
7) Xbox 360 for Microsoft
8) cell phones for Motorola
9) Amazon Kindle
10) Cisco equipment

It's a news only cause it's cool to attack Apple. I bet you to find a single electronics product around you that isn't "Made in China". And we all know that work conditions in China are terrible and what has happened in the last 30 years.

It's not a 2010 news.
Indeed, although it's more than just a "bad experience".

It says something fundimental about the VC, his attitudes towards the people he funds, e.g. how much he respects them, which is not very much.

Note the very important detail that this was a (very?) successful startup. Now imagine being a founder in one funded by this VC during a bad period (something much more likely outside of the dot.com bubble in which this happened).

You don't want to be there and Mr. Blank's anti-reference will help those who listen to him.
This is the CSS reset I normally use:

/* reset block elements */
blockquote, dir, div, dl, form, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, ol, p, pre, table, ul {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
font-size: 1em;
}
Flash and the five-minute rule (J.Gray, SSD, costs)
Ballmer: Microsoft wasted time on Vista
The doctor's reconstruction of what happened to the survivor's brain is, at most, shaky. But the overall story is great.