skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't understand why we have to make this a binary, zero-sum game. There is a continuum from completely open to completely closed and most companies operate somewhere in the middle. Open software simply allows us to spend less time reinventing everything from the ground up and more time building something new. Where would Apple be now without the BSD userland, GCC, KHTML etc?

The question a smart founder or investor should be asking isn't "Should I build an open or closed system?". It's "What can I build that has the most value?". You'd be crazy not to use as much open software as a foundation as possible and it's good for the health of your business and the industry as a whole to give something back in return.
Integral calculus is easy - it's all about calculation. Where math got hard for me was when the focus shifted from calculation to proof (abstract algebra, number theory, real analysis). I thought I could coast by with the same sort of intuitive understanding I had with calculus, but I was wrong and I didn't have the self discipline that was required to do well.
Goldman Sachs Hands Clients Losses in ‘Recommended Top Trades’
Google Goes Green
The compensation should have been skewed the other way. The founders had proven themselves, the CEO had not. Ergo, the salaries should have worked the other way around.

Besides, the founders were hiring the CEO; his job was to work FOR THEM.

Then again, if you look rationally at how companies work, all management is overhead by the nature of the job. Why should the OVERHEAD staff have the power to fire the people who actually earn the company money? The people who create the products or who bill their time to clients are obviously the people who matter the most to the company, yet those are the same people that most companies consider expendable.

That's obviously backward, and not sustainable -- but it's probably also why the state of IT hasn't actually improved over the years. The best developers are either working to go independent or leave the field entirely. In some cases, both.

That of course means that the companies that treat their staff that badly are ending up with exactly what they deserve: the leftovers. The ones that only got CS degrees because the universities lowered the bar for getting degrees.
Gesture Based Computing Gloves
Is it a case of banks' customers not being who you think they are?
Last year while at the library there was a room to a lab (where the printers were). To get in you could either punch in the code or next to it was a whiteboard with 5 or so problems each of which gave you one digit in the code.
Of the N people in your party scenario, who owns the photos/live recording? How can you retract something that someone else might want to publish, or might not object to being published?
I am terrified that we're going to see a lot of people start using Droid Serif and Droid Sans. These are not hideous fonts, but I find them somewhat graceless and unappealing.
The open source menu on the bottom has a project not mentioned up top, which is slightly odd, and it just links to the front page of GitHub, which is odd.

You should either mention it everywhere, or take it off that menu :-)
Not bad, but it should be implicit. Hell, even the Pizza Pizza IVR has an option to re-order the same thing you ordered last time.
I think iPhone is a better place to make some money. I think the web is a better place to build a permanent company on one application.

If you're up for making a suite of apps though, the appstore is good for that.
CTM (http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html) is a similar treatment, but covers about a dozen programming models (paradigms' trade-offs, semantics) rather than languages. Comparisons between languages can often get bogged down in surface details.
> As a bonus, learning Prolog will help with Erlang, and vice versa. (Erlang was initially a DSL on SICStus Prolog, and many Prolog idioms came along.)

As far as Erlang I have always been put off by the lack of backtracking. They took the best feature from Prolog and threw it out. Everything else is already strange and quite awkward, and those are the parts they kept but threw away backtracking. (I am looking at Elang as a general purpose language here, I know that there is no need for backtracking in a realtime telephony system).

By the way, if you want to experiment with prolog try SWI prolog. It's open, it has an IDE and a bunch of modules, including support for CHR (constrain handling rules).

http://www.swi-prolog.org

Ubuntu has it in its apt repository so you can just install from there.
With proof you have to do a whole host of them first. I remember, filling a book with proof. Eventually, a pattern will emerge and they would be easy. At first, I used to hate them but practise enough times and you would want them to show on the exams.
Yes, but the raison d'être for Prolog is to do declarative/logic programming, which is fundamentally about programming by writing a clear, logical model of the problem, that incidentally happens to be executable / queryable.

"Declarative programming clears the mind." - Sterling & Shapiro, _The Art of Prolog_

Provided you don't abuse the cut operator, a Prolog program will consist of a series of rules which each have a logical meaning in isolation. Reasoning about Prolog code is so different from trying to unravel what's actually happening with several layers of OO polymorphic dispatch, it's not even funny.

"Elegance is not optional." - Richard O'Keefe, _The Craft of Prolog_
What awful slide in the background of that pic! So many words, so little meaning. I can only imagine that this had to be compensated by some pretty compelling delivery.
The projects up top are just the most recent 4... The open source menu will eventually list everything I've created. I'm betting that you're referring to 'ruby-tmdb'. The repo is actually still private (probably until tomorrow afternoon) as the project is still in-progress, but I didn't want to have to edit the menu again tomorrow. Just laziness on my part...
Nivo Zoom – jQuery Image Zoomer
Nivo Zoom is a clean and simple image zooming jQuery plugin from the developers of the popular Nivo Slider. This plugin support for 5 different zoom types and allow us to add HTML caption. The plugin is lightweight (4kb compressed).
interesting thoughts on taking calculated risks
"But the fact remains that if clients knew that the portfolio had been largely designed by Paulson, they would not have bought. Because Paulson had, months before the Goldman deal, created two funds specifically aimed at shorting the subprime market."

Sadly that is probably not true. Every person buying a synthetic CDO knew that on the other end of the wager was someone (usually a hedge fund manager) holding the opposite bet (a credit default swap). Every synthetic CDO was a zero sum wager, and the people buying it knew that.

(I'm pretty sure that all of the CDOs at issue in this case were synthetics, though it doesn't matter too much to the person buying them. There's effectively no difference between a synthetic and a non-synthetic.)

At the time Paulson wasn't any different than any other hedge fund manager, insofar as any synthetic CDO purchaser knew. The people taking they long end of the subprime market at that point were still under the impression that the ratings agencies were at least reasonably close to accurate.

Effectively what the wager came down to was Paulson saying "the rating agencies are wildly incorrect" and his counterparties saying "no they're not".
"they compensate by making it more cumbersome so that the skilled, but not so disciplined, will get bored and not perform as well"

I couldn't have put it better, that's exactly what I feel too! It would be so cool if the educational system were designed to help under-disciplined people to perform to their best rather than weed out the ones who can't adapt.
As Steve said there are good investors and bad one.
It is good to have a website like
TheFunded.com where you can collect information if the VCs you are targeting or talk to is the right one or not.
What I understand from the FAQ and Por que usar pages is that this is only a frontend for Google Search which tries to reduce the amount of energy used because of its black background. This idea is not new, there have been previous sites with a black background google search, like Blackle (http://www.blackle.com/), and even CSS stiles using the Stylish extension for firefox (no need for the extension in Chrome). You can check this article:

http://hubpages.com/hub/How-much-power-do-we-save-if-GOOGLE-...
This is Hacker News; usually I'd agree with you, but HN is a wonderful exception to the rule.
Many HR systems import resume data from various sources. Some job-posting sites have resume-builders to help facilitate this process.

I'll assume instead that your primary consideration is for easily generating a specific flavor of your resume from a single source. A few years ago there was a flurry of tools that worked with an HR-XML spec that did just that. Check out this microformats page that identifies some of these formats, standard or otherwise: http://microformats.org/wiki/resume-formats
And if you posted on this thread after telling yourself you really would code your ass off today...

Seriously, though, sometimes taking short breaks can cause you to be more productive than just slogging through. Not all trips to the internet are procrastination. Sometimes you really do need to just stop coding for a few minutes. Though I imagine there are better ways to recharge your mental batteries than HN. HN just makes you think too much sometimes.
The article criticizes Buffett because he

1) criticized derivatives and now holds "$63B" of them

2) is lobbying congress to "rid the bill of its ‘retrospective effect’ clause" that might effect his financials

3) backs GS/Blankfein and says they did nothing wrong

While at first blush they should raise questions I don't think the author makes any substantive claims against Buffett's reputation.

1) He criticized derivatives because the way their reporting effects earnings and because their profits are partially based on the other side's credit worthyness. I believe a large portion of the derivatives he owns are put options he has sold on equity indices. So he's not exposed to credit worthyness of counterparties because he's already been paid. I'm not sure but probably the derivatives he criticized as too complex and potentially destructive were things like CDOs/CLOs and other financial engineering products. I think Buffett understands put options very well, so that statement doesn't apply here.

2) He's not opposed to having derivatives accounted for differently, only differently in retrospect as well. I think its reasonable to say "I like the new set of rules, but please don't penalize me for acting in accordance with the rules in the past."

3) He does have investments in GS and this probably does effect his judgement, but the author doesn't really try to prove GS did anything wrong, so his backing of them can't really be said to be wrong (yet, though I don't think it will prove to be wrong).
I'm working on a backup web service that might meet your needs. When you say 'and let me manage it' what exactly do you mean? I'd love to hear from you and anyone else on HN: leonhard attt backupwebservice dotttttt com.
The second from the right is Dick Costolo, the COO at Twitter. I think.

http://twitter.com/dickc
Best sharepoint alternative?
I keep having all these people trying to throw money at me to create sharepoint alternatives, but it's just not my game. I get the question so often I''m going to cast an auto email with a list of best options.

The minimum requirement be that companies can run the technology internally with great security and great search capabilities on many document formats.

Although I could just do some internet research, I value this communities opinion/judgment more than free floating outdated internet sales crap.
So if you have suggestions please reply with the reason why you think it's the best (or better than sharepoint).

.... and thank you for helping.
Huffington talks convergence, and “monetizeable free”
Startup Metrics for Pirates (Lean Startup Intensive)
New Social Networking Site Changing The Way Oh, Christ, Forget It | The Onion
Google Releases the Official Google Buzz API
By the time you have a few rounds of VC money the founders are effectively employees like anyone else - except that you happen to own a minority chunk of equity. Which might be worth something one day but has very little power.
Pakistan Bans YouTube
Not sure why he says, they're not your ideas anyway. If that was the case, you wouldn't be hoarding them.
RADIUS WPA2 with a student ID or something and a separate "public" wifi?
This is probably the wrong place to ask this, but why do founders often give up the position of CEO after the startup is established and up and running?
This is obviously a sordid mess, but as one who does not grasp a fraction of the legalities, the worst-case scenarios seem as probable as any other; if I did a blog post on this, it would likely spell doom and destruction for Facebook. There are a lot of potential implications, but which consequences seem inevitable or at least within close reach?
Buffet falls from grace every few years. But this is not a good article. The problem with derivatives and retrospective changes is that this messes with agreements that have already been made. Not only is that not right but it may have consequences that are unforseen. Berkshire and others are correct to insist that they have rights here that should be protected.

I understand that the US Constitution is truly on the way out but it did have this bit :
"No State shall ... pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts..."

I'm pretty sure that used to be taken to mean the federal government wouldn't do it either, but then that can't be reconciled with minimum wage laws either.

Maybe that's all uncertain but I'm confident the article is relatively thoughtless.
Phenomenal. I was skeptical about the software lagging, but the video mentions and proves it is low latency.

I can't wait until desks and peripherals are adapted further for people to stand up while working at a PC. Tired of sittin' on my ass! ;)
"compared with their more impulsive peers, highly self-disciplined eighth graders earned higher GPAs and achievement-test scores, were more likely to gain admission to a selective high school, had fewer school absences, spent more time on their homework, watched less television, and started their homework earlier in the day."

First has a lot to do with what is expected at school (wonder what the data looks for 3rd level education) and the rest is pretty obvious...
Earth to Silicon Valley: Eight Websites You Need To Stop Creating
He was probably using a Prolog with constraint programming extensions; those are pretty tuned for that sort of problem already.
I think the other side can claim that what they should have been sold was a diversified portfolio to insure whereas what they were given was a concentrated portfolio. If you ordered a box of bananas from a grocer and what they delivered was a box of all their rotten bananas that they hand selected, I think you would have a claim that they acted improperly.

That GS brought in an outside agent, ACA, to me suggests that the portfolio construction was supposed to have some oversight to prevent the box of bad bananas scenario. If not, then why was there a third party agent? GS becomes culpable since they made the representation to the sellers of the insurance that there was an independent third party monitoring the construction, when in fact they knew it was really Paulson driving the portfolio construction.
Somewhat funny quote: "Alas, pretty boring."
Nice article! I really enjoy hearing about other people's experiences.

I have nothing per se against Microsoft's hosting except for the expense. I believe that it is much more expensive than AppEngine or AWS. Question: the lock-in factor is likely not that big of an issue since apps could be run on Mono and a leased server, right?

Really, software, writing and deploying web apps is a business and there are two large costs involved: labor costs for writing and maintaining software, and hardware+admin costs for deployment. The question is what is least expensive and fastest to deployment. For me, that is Ruby on Rails for the front end, and as needed, back end processing in Java, or Clojure, or Common Lisp - whatever makes sense for a project.
Early stage Boston startup TroopSwap searching for technology co-founder
Right, there are derivatives and then there are derivatives. They're not by any stretch of the imagination all equally risky.

I think he is taking some of Buffet's words out of context. It seems impossible that Buffet would say he doesn't understand derivatives. I understand them, and unlike him, I don't own companies that pretty much have to use them.

For instance he owns Burlington Northern, a railroad (which he's had a stake in for a long time). Companies whose profits are reliant on fuel costs (railroads, trucking, airlines, retailers with their own distribution system, etc.) almost always use derivatives to hedge against rising oil prices.

I'm guessing Buffet was speaking only about derivatives based on asset-backed securities in the consumer credit sector, which were relatively new and poorly understood and, as he pointed out, incredibly dangerous.
Well, in this case it sounds like the VC was skewing the compensation to the minimum that would achieve his desired short term results, recruiting this CEO (at a big pay cut) and retaining the founders (with no pay raise).

It worked, in that he achieved both objectives and the company went public. The problem from the VC's point of view is the longer term....

This brings out one other point, which for illustration I'd like to turn around to something we're all familiar with: how much do you charge?

If you're to be successful in sales it has nothing to do with e.g. how much are your costs.

In fact, your general approach should be more one of "What is the right price and where does that leave us?"

One of many important lessons to be found in my favorite high tech company development book, Walking the High Tech High Wire (http://www.amazon.com/Walking-High-Tech-High-Wire-Entreprene... or http://www.amazon.com/Walking-Technical-Entrepreneurs-Succes...)
This is a downright shoddy article.

a) An explanation of the derivatives Buffett holds, and the reasons for holding them is provided in his 2008 shareholders letter:

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2008ltr.pdf

It should also be noted that he exited a large number of derivatives contracts that he inherited with General Re prior to the GFC as he felt unable to manage or understand them.

b) Buffett is arguing against retrospective changes WRT derivatives accounting. There's nothing wrong with objecting when people are discussing a retrospective change to the rules that you were operating within.

c) As far as I can tell, the author would pillory anyone who doesn't attack Goldman Sachs. Buffett is entitled to his opinion.
Betty Bartik is my great aunt (my dad's aunt) and it's been fun chatting with her over the years about her work "as" the first computers. I think there's at least one book that was published about their work, but I'm not sure what the title is.

Thanks for posting the link! I'll forward her the article.

Edit: Looks like the article is a few years old now, so I'm sure she's aware of it. BTW, she and her fellow female computers periodically travel around for speaking engagements.
I would definitely recommend checking out his string quartets. I saw the JACK Quartet perform them a couple of months ago. It was insane.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_adso67GUd4 (ST-4/1,080262)
>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.

On one Calculus test I had, I didn't study or do any of the homework and pulled a ~90% score. When talking to someone who got a perfect 100%, he casually informed me that he forgot how to integrate between tests. I was shocked to hear this, but apparently it's the norm.
Request HN: TechCrunch Disrupt rooming?
Hey y'all,

I'm demoing my baby (Zazu, it was on the front page a day or so ago) for TechCrunch Disrupt on Monday, and I'm planning on heading over to NYC (from Boston) on Friday afternoon to catch the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon before TCD actually starts.

I've been trying to land a room on AirBnB for the past week, but people have either not responded or denied my request, so I was wondering if anybody who was planning on staying in the area for Friday and Saturday night would be willing to share a room (or a floor) for me to crash on. I'd be willing to pitch in for the cost.

Thanks,
Marc (speek or mheld, HN or #startups respectively)
marc [at] getzazu [dot] com
Looking at your source code in Firefox, you have a couple missing > in your code:

<h3

and

</body
> trivially written imperatively or functionally as combinatorial or permutational recursive searches with pruning

In other words: an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Prolog.

I agree that Prolog would probably fare better as an embedded language like Lua, though - it's best suited to things like rules engines and parsers, rather than whole applications.
Heh - there's many, many reasons.

In my case we merged with a competitor, and I believed the competitors' CEO was better at key aspects of his job (fundraising, providing motivating leadership) than I was.
Interesting. Isn't this kind of exactly what Paul Graham's been talking about for years?
I guess one reason would be they have the idea that if you are worried about your activity being tracked that you probably shouldn't be doing it over the public on campus wireless.
People can and do remember kindnesses and gracious acts from those who do them out of sincerity

Some people just don't realise how many doors this opens.
Communal Quotation -- Next Big Thing?
I just add whatever rules I need for my elements. I don't get this all fuss about CSS Resets, and to have them in separate file is not… very wise, let's say.
Anticipating a downvote on this one, but someone has to say it . . .

Almost as an aside, he mentions "Luckily the company did go public". That's not an aside, that's the punchline.

An alternative way of summarizing the anecdote would be:

"I had an encounter with a dickish VC, but with his help I had an exit for tens of millions of dollars, so I'm not holding any grudges."
Jane Siberry: Minimalist celebrity
> I really miss a "just give me an ascii version and ignore any errors, because I really don't care in this case" option...

You can use options to either ignore or replace invalid characters.

>>> unicode('\x80abc', errors='strict')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x80 in position 0:
ordinal not in range(128)
>>> unicode('\x80abc', errors='replace')
u'\ufffdabc'
>>> unicode('\x80abc', errors='ignore')
u'abc'
It looks awful for me in his blog, using Firefox 3.6.3 .

However, it renders decently on the Google site, I don't see it like how you show it on twitpic.
Thanks! I actually comitted a change this morning that fixes the <body> tag, but I missed the other one. I'll run everything through a validator and clean things up. I was in a bit of a rush to get everything done yesterday!
The Psychologist’s View of UX Design
I am not sure about Wave. I was a beta user, then got accounts for family and friends, but the uptake seems really slow. My enthusiasm level is good, but:

As a practical matter, the only money I have made on Wave was writing one how-to article on Wave Robot development. None of my consulting customers have expressed any interest in custom Wave development.