skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Power of China's Twitter Clone: 100,000 Followers in 4 Days, 1000 Comments/Tweet
I don't see why what the first part (before the hyphen) has to do with the rest. I'd agree with the first bit, but not because anyone who dinks around a bit online at work is "lazy and unproductive."
I think I like Carol Bartz - didn't know much about her before.

I liked that she admitted that Yahoo does not have any main focus, that they do a lot of things.

I may be a Google (AppEngine, old defunct search APIs, Reader, GMail, Blogger, Wave, etc.) and Amazon (love AWS and do most of my shopping on Amazon) fanboy, but the first thing I go to each morning on the web (after GMail) is my personal Yahoo page. I probably hit my personal page 10 times a day. Yahoo has a good product.
That kind of company is a recurring theme in entrepreneurial pep talks of Waterloo econ professor Larry Smith.

He spins very intriguing tales of recent graduates creating companies in extremely tiny niches (single or double digits of possible worldwide customers) that, while not very exciting, solve problems that companies will gladly pay "big bucks" for. These are business problems where companies are desperately throwing many times more money at less efficient solutions or know they are leaving huge amounts of money on the table by not having a better solution.

He has a few talks where he talks about some success stories that he happens to know about because he's advised them as former students. Nobody knows how many "under the radar" companies like this there are, but I would bet it's far easier to make a fortune from a company that fits this profile than a Google acquisition.
"Installing wind turbines is in the domain of huge energy corporations..."

The large corps. contract a lot of the work out to smaller companies - An old highschool friend of mine works along Hwy.58 (Techachapi/Mojave) corridor in CA working exclusively on wind turbine maintenance. Rather lucrative work.
Another possible solution - having the URL shortened by Twitter when sending to SMS users.
Hmm. Why are you on Facebook if you don't want to be part of it?
I played it for about 15 minutes and really enjoyed it. Tragic.
And what percentage of total work produced do those 4.82 million hours represent?

You can't evaluate if it is a "tragic" cost or not without knowing the other half.

From their writeup, sounds like average time spent on Google for that day went from 33.6 million hours to 38.4 million hours - an increase of 14% more time spent per person on google.com for a single day. This doesn't sound tragic to me. If the average RescueTime user spends 4 and a half minutes on Google each day, an extra 36 seconds isn't going to destroy the economy.
The experiment write-up would have benefited from graphic representation of the results.
You can still play it. They made a permanent place for it here: http://www.google.com/pacman/

According to their blog post its staying there: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/pac-man-rules.html
Announcing AVC Meetups Everywhere
Sucks for advertisers, but sounds like a plus for users. I like their "promoted tweets" concept better anyway.

Go Twitter!
IPad, 56K, or no-flash? Enter here
Thats awesome! Thanks for sharing. I'll give Mono/F# another spin in the next week and will report problems as suggested by you. Again thanks.
oh that's awesome... wish i had known that earlier. Probably should read the instructions. Read about the spacebar in the previous comment but assumed what it meant by flip was rotate 180°
Spotlight On: Sarah Lancaster
Very true. Very, very true.
They should call it the "twax".
No pilot "wants" to eject. There is a high possibility of being injured, usually to the head, neck & back, even with the modern Martin-Baker & BF Goodrich ejections seats.

During a high-risk flight, the possibility of ejecting outside parameters is quite high, such as the recent F-22 crash where the pilot got killed during a high-speed ejection.

There have been pilots who eject once and ended their career due to injuries.
Craig Venter's TED Talk on Synthetic Life
I dunno, I don't think I like the idea of a strictly-advertising-company owning the medium a huge amount of people communicate on. Can you imagine the TOS / privacy policy? Granted, that's what Facebook appears to be becoming... but I'm off that for good.

And I too like how Twitter is handling this. Promoted tweets seem like the right setup for users, as you effectively have to request the ad to get it, but it's easier to find (and you know they're legit).
How many other programming languages have a type system that supports overloading on both parameter types and the desired return type?
I can't say I've noticed that myself. Pages starts instantly on my SSD. Logic, which is a boat of a program, opens along with a project file in about 5 seconds. Word 2008 takes about 5 seconds and also takes an awkward amount of time to close too. Maybe it has something to do with universal binaries? I've always stripped the PPC code out to save some disk space on my (relatively) small SSD. 10.6 ships without the PPC code for all the bundled applications.
Baudline: time-frequency browser for spectral visualization.
"Google chrome, Firefox, and other browsers do not seem to suffer from too much duplications even though they are open source."

We also aren't seeing much development of innovative new browsers (even though we may not need a new browser), aside from the recent chrome browser.

The fact that Internet Explorer is closed source created the need for something new (Firefox). Once all of the browsers are open, it will leave even less of an incentive for a new one to be created. Which might be fine, but browser innovation will stagnate. I hate to see a world where all software was like this.

Even Linux was created as an open alternative to closed, proprietary, Unices of the day. Would you even bother creating your own operating system now? Most people would just take the Linux kernel and branch out from there.

This same principal can also be applied to development jobs. At some point, most businesses won't require engineers any longer (high paying, intelligent software developers) because the difficult parts have already been created, refined, and given out for free. Instead, a code mechanic (low paying, less education) will be all most businesses need. In essence, open source developers are putting themselves out of a future job.

I suppose this is what eventually happens to all industries.
Has Instant Messaging Really Declined?
sorry, if i had one i prolly would have said. don't take it too personally - i just hate the buzzwords and feel obliged to make my statements in this way.

i've always seen project management and lean as variations on common sense and kanban i've never really looked at to know what it is because i've prejudged the whole field it belongs to as a redundant - or for those too lazy to engage their brains.

if forced maybe "Effective, common sense management"? the whole "project" "specialisation" has always seemed redundant to me...

then again buzzwords do sell. so don't listen to me if you want to sell. the masses of businesses are what matter and they are generally the sort to buy things because of buzzwords rather than demonstrable results. :)
I think they fail to realise that Tweeting/Status Updating, etc are forms of IM.
What do you mean by "socially"?

You don't have their e-mail address? Or they don't look at their inbox? Or certain specific activities are done via Facebook, while others may be done via e-mail? And most of all, why? Why did they chose Facebook over e-mail?

More generally, I'd like to know what they use Facebook for, and why.
How much of that is because of how terrible twitter's visibility into older tweets and search functionality is?
This, of course, is time spent on the computer. If 15mins more time on google replaced 15mins of time masticating a sandwich, rescuetime isn't going to know about it.
It's a shame that the company claims that Mark wrote the op-ed piece in the WaPo, when it was clear he did not.

You can tell because he used his company's boilerplate mission from press releases as his opener.

More proof that the leadership doesn't care... talking in those old-fashioned newspapers is a job for PR goon.
Used to be about 20% in starting salary at big firms . . . :-)

From the other side of the table, it's probably a reasonable filter - you had to love CS enough to go on to grad school in the first place, you probably had to do enough hard implementation work (grad OS, advanced compilers, and implementation-focused research - I only knew a couple of students in my cohort would did purely theoretical work, so I always find this concern from employers a little funny - are generally tougher coding than most people do as undergrads). Plus, you might actually be able to read a paper or two from candidates to see if they can communicate advanced ideas in a reasonable way.

I also distinctly viewed the MS in CS as a way to "stand out from the crowd," but I was graduating at a time when there were still tons of CS undergrads hoping to surf the internet boom. These days, the Taulbee surveys seem to say that more CS students are heading to grad school, so with the economy now you're probably seeing the same thought process.

What I don't remember are people (at least at the two schools I knew best) finishing with a MS degree and thinking they were entitled to better gigs than undergrads.

Now, close to 10 years out from finishing my MS, I find that my thought process is quite different than my engineer peers without grad degrees. I'm much more interested in being more efficient, I prefer to stay away from coding that feels like plumbing to me, and I sometimes wonder if all the big payoffs are either in startups or back in research. Where payoff equals mentally challenging, focused effort that stretches you in a very flow-inducing way versus the "industrial software complex" where you often have the same two years of experience over 10 years.

Ignoring all of the above, if you want great hackers (who sometimes have no degree, degrees in english, or even PhDs in CS), you have to make sure you strongly communicate why your company is one that great hackers want to work at.
That's the point, the abstraction is false
For vague values of "native", yes.

They rolled their own interface (which means buttons, events, accessibility tools, text boxes...), dictionary, spell check, grammar check, API, scripting interface, damn near everything. And it integrates extremely poorly with other Mac applications, even screwing up basics.

By that logic, Flash apps are native too. So are Java, GTK (on non-GTK-unixes), etc etc until anything that runs on the machine can be considered "native", unless you're remote-controlling another machine through something like SSH/VNC/Remote Desktop.

I doubt the developers would intentionally slow down the startup. But I also doubt Microsoft would invest their better/best programmers in optimizing it. But isn't that the same thing as intentionally slowing it down, but from the business's standpoint instead of the developers?
This looks like it could be pretty interesting. 37signals feels like something of an outlier to me: they talk a good game, but I don't really get the feeling that I could do something similar, because I don't have a hugely popular blog, nor did I create an extremely popular web framework.
Actually, your link agrees with my explanation:

It points out in the "Static and Dynamic Types" section that what is meant by "type" in static type-systems and what is meant by "type" in dynamic type-systems are two very different concepts. From the perspective of someone interested in static "types", dynamically-typed languages don't have types at all.
I was surprised to see Bakeries and Baked Goods (9). I know someone selling an established commercial bakery in a major metro area. I don't think the margins or growth are all that great. (But I could be wrong.)

As an aside, I have it from a principal in a private equity fund that he's seeing a big up-tick in the number of businesses for sale.
I'm actually surprised that the rev share is so high. Most of the ad networks that I have used/looked into are around a 50/50 split.
Why can Soluto do what Microsoft can’t? They get rid of Windows frustrations
FWIW, the current beta of Office 2011 for Mac is much faster to start than Office 2008 for Mac.
Firebreath - Cross-platform browser plugin framework
My first attempt was probably worse than yours, but after I was mostly done with all the levels, I went back and applied what I had learned to all the earlier levels. I was able to reduce giant, sprawling messes of mostly conveyors to much more compact machines. Of course, the more important part is finding the optimal algorithm.

Up until the last column or two, there's neat solutions to all of them, but some of the later ones really do require a huge part of the level and a nearly unreadable tangle of paths.
Try the congressional committee tasked with investigating Insurance company profits prior to the latest health care bill which was really just insurance regulation.

Low profit margins compared to what exactly? Is it right for any company to make a profit off of the suffering of another human being?
What don't you like about it?

I've been thinking of getting one, or maybe a Kindle, or maybe the Sony equivalent. I've been reasonably impressed by the readability of the Nook every time I've touched one, and that's all I really care about.

Realistically I should probably remain indecisive for another year and there'll be something better available for $99.
The JavaScript RegEx API
1) Hence the broader point that such 'verification' extends far beyond this picture, which I agree would be noteworthy;

2) The lack of a picture doesn't mean the two were never physically close enough to be photographed together. It just means they were never so when a camera was around.

3) It ignores the broader social context in which Google is the funnel through which information exists. If the ministry of truth wants to rewrite history, they'll do so by manipulating what Google results are available. The entire point of the article is how history can be manipulated, and then succumbs to verification via a source that can, in fact, be manipulated. That is, imagine a picture was taken, and you're sitting here thinking, "I really thought those two met." If verification constitutes, "Is it on Google?" then the task of changing history is pretty easy.
85% on a yes/no decision sounds more impressive than it actually is. The majority of startups fail so the baseline is somewhere above 50%. What would be more interesting is if it could calculate expected value at better than chance.
New Type of Database (FluidInfo) Gets High-Profile Funding
Android 2.2 (Froyo) browser’s increased speed negated by Flash 10.1 Beta (video)
Venture Pimp: micromobs lets you create build group conversations
apple iAd pressuring google
I'm not sure I follow you. BSP trees are used for depth-sorting; what's being sorted here?
Good intentions on Wordpress's part, but it might be seriously problematic in view of intervening case-law developments. I did a write-up at http://www.ontechnologylaw.com/2010/05/using-wordpress-coms-....
I think the author must have been channelling my mom from 30 years ago. I eventually won the argument with mom about the value of video games by making a profession out of bending computers to my will. The author should "waste" about 20 minutes watching "Jane McGonigal: How Gaming Can Make a Better World" to understand why Google's Pac-Man might have been an epic win rather than a tragic waste.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_be...
Python is as strongly typed as Scheme; 1+"1" will produce an exception in Python.
i like vim, that's it
One of my favourite books is by Matt Ridley .. it's called 'Nature via Nurture' , and attempts to address the 'genes vs. environment' debate ..

Although recently I came across a brilliant cellular biologist called Bruce Lipton who offers some great insights into human evolution and environment (with a little quantum physics sprinkled in), check him out if you're interested.
HP Making Wrist Computer with Flexible Display
Interesting, but the way the article is presented...
Feels like it is written by Scr33p7 K1ddi3.
How Data is Redefining Business Relationships
I don't think you guys get the joke. They were being sarcastic about the whole "tragedy" they even said so in the first comment.
i don't think lazy coincides with unproductive as often as our society would like us to think. i think most unproductive people are just profoundly uninspired by what they find themselves doing, and the demeaning label of laziness is a tool to keep them doing it.

you convince someone that the problem is some vague but essential character flaw - laziness - and it discourages/distracts them from considering the possibility of addressing their external circumstances.
I thought this was going to be about Django-nonrel

http://www.allbuttonspressed.com/projects/django-nonrel
Copyright arises automatically in the U.S. and much of the rest of the world for "original works of authorship." Legal contracts can qualify. There have been cases where Law Firm A sued Law Firm B for wholesale copying of, say, bond-prospectus documents.
Pandigital Novel color Android eReader for $200
I partially agree and don't see why you were downvoted. If you don't want to browse the web, then the Kindle's screen is far superior for reading. The Kindle needs more speed, better resolution, and a better interface for hopping around in a book, but I always put it in my suitcase when I travel, and given the choice between reading a novel on the Kindle versus reading a novel on a beautiful bright color tablet like the iPad, I would choose the Kindle. A tablet that has an e-ink mode will have a very large advantage in my book.
Nominations open for the Pwnie Awards 2010
O'reilly ebook downloads now working again
Ask HN:  Help me rename my startup
I've been racking my brains for over a month now trying to think of a more general name for my startup: http://www.swfstats.com/

It's currently called SWFStats which was based very specifically on analytics for Flash games but my plans are expanding beyond Flash to any form of connected gaming and beyond just analytics to a platform that can handle various things developers need for games.

Doesn't have to be dictionary words, just after something I can use that can encompass what I do now and whatever I do tomorrow.

Any suggestions?
Right, simply predicting 'no' in every case could be right 80% of the time if you believe someone people's number on startup success.

On that note, I wish we had a better data set of attempted startups and general agreement on when a startup 'starts.'
Well, mine just seemed to finally show up after waiting giddily all weekend. Posting in case any other HN'ers were waiting too.
It seems like there could have been much more interesting information extracted from this dataset than they actually got. Instead we're getting gems like the fact that people who make more money wind up spending more money on food, and "the people who are spending the most money on food overall devote more money to dining out". Families with children spend more money on food than single people.

The analysis goes on to ask interesting questions but not answer them. "how did people in Austin spend $12,447 on food and drink last year, while people in Miami spent half as much? What are they buying in Austin? And what aren't they eating in Miami?" Perhaps because Miami has a lot of old people and old people spend a lot less on food than young people? The data exists to figure out whether this would be sufficient to account for it, but they don't bother doing the analysis.

Oh, and the one graph I really wanted to see was "proportion of food budget spent on going out" vs "income" which I suspect might show some interesting behaviour. But the graph wasn't there.
I don't see how you can tell from that screenshot what the book reading application will be like. The screenshot is clearly showing some kind of home page type view.
Well, the friend with COMPANY, may have NO REAL positions
open. And you may be ALREADY very experienced in technology.
So to break through bureaucracies of job agencies/HR departments, you need to apply some grease.
Yes it is deception, I know, but it is benign and important one. Your politicians deceive you every second, but keep them, do not you?.
Video: John Nunemaker talks about mongoDB
I dunno, I don't think I like the idea of a strictly-advertising-company owning the medium a huge amount of people communicate on.

You mean like gmail?
HP explains why printer ink is so expensive
they aren't exactly a very serious site
IPhone apps name squatter?
I would like to see this data overlayed with an obesity map.
But it's a 7" display instead of 10". So I'd think text resolution would be pretty similar. (Of course, it very well may not be a high-quality type of panel.)
I've probably overstated myself a bit, whilst failing to explain my opinion well because I was writing from an emotional response.

Dinking around online is lunch-time behaviour. If you really have nothing to do, why not take the initiative and do something productive for your employer instead of fooling around on the net? The occasional 5 minutes probably doesn't hurt, but that doesn't make it right either... an hour or two is totally unacceptable.

I'm probably bitter because I spent a fair amount of time in my younger years working low-pay bottom end jobs with lots of manual labour and "physical" engineering type work. There is no dinking around on the internet, and the amount of slacking that is typical in most office roles would result in prompt warnings and a firing, yet somehow easy-peasy office roles are paid more - even if they are similarly low-skill (data-entry, receptionist, office manager etc).

Even so, my "bad" youthful experiences are nothing compared to how, to a very good approximation, the entire human race earns their living.

Hopefully that can explain why my response was so driven by emotion rather than reason, and hence did not make perfect sense?

(I am a programmer now and I work in an office earning £25k - and yes, I do feel guilty about how much I get paid for such an easy job)
DuckDuckGo featured on Lifehacker
Very strange pictures for an article like this, definitely. But I'm not sure I'd call that tilt-shift. It looks like they just held the camera too close to the top.

Not that there's much difference, of course. But I almost universally see tilt-shift photographs having a top and bottom blur; having only one doesn't imply shrinkage as strongly.
I don't really see what's tragic about it. People had a little fun for a day for 1/2 hour or so. Not the end of the world, not tragic at all.
If you're into this article, you might like "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond. I'm reading it on the recommendation of my favorite anthropology professor, and it's great.
When you talk about "the medical world," do you mean popular news reporting on medical topics? Populars news is frequently wrong or sensational (or both) about science news. A small study about fat absorption becomes "What doctors are saying about your diet - more details at 11."

That's not the fault of "the medical world." News orgs are no better prepared to disseminate accurate medical news than they are accurate news about computers and tech.
The Graduation Song ~ Vitamin C
Pretty much, yes, and +1 for a good catch :)

But Google's been rather tried-and-true on issues like this (for most people's opinions), and they were first a crawler, and second an advertiser, even if they make most of their money from it now. They make that money because they made a great product. This implies their motivations are at least somewhat removed from a "lets start an ad platform!" company.
7200 rpm: It seems they forgot about the noise.