skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Q: Why do startups need so much money?
A: Salaries (imagine paying 2k x month x person)

Doesn't $24k/yr seem far too low to get quality talent?
Requiem for an Armchair
well very rarely is an idea worth anything.. its the execution.
How to Restore Lost Pictures from Virus Infected Storage Devices?
Portable storage devices bring us much convenience, but at the same time the risks co-exist. Virus attacks the devices all the time. The article provides step-by-step guide to restore lost pictures from virus infected storage devices.
Exactly.... I actually found Skype's way of handling this to be far more fair and less predatory than most - not only were they generous with the expiration date, but they insisted you only had to log in and place a single call (spend a penny or so) to keep it going another 6 months, or whatever.... it's just keeping dead liabilities from accumulating... and skype was NICE about it, sending me all those notifications.
There were a couple of clones, but none took off really. The most prolific one seems to be newmogul.com by nickb, focused on business and economics. Nickb has all but disappeared since, and Newmogul is no more, but some of the patrons moved on to http://markenomics.com.

HN is written in PG's own dialect of lisp, http://arclanguage.org and source code for vanilla version of the site is included with arc distribution. There's no reason not to hack together a clone and get a taste of the language.
I have to say, anyone who thinks that Facebook has passed its usefulness is not a college student--and if they are they don't have a lot of friends in varied disciplines. Facebook is the social staple of college social life in general and Greek life in particular.
Christian Louboutin Sandals
If you make a ton of revenue and pay it all out in dividends, that's fine.

If you make a ton of revenue, and then lose it, then people get unhappy.
Man, you do not want to come to the inland West. It's supposedly worst in Utah, but we have it in eastern Washington too--a disgusting little invention called "fry sauce" which is nothing more than a combination of ketchup and mayonnaise.
And if you're a startup CEO, you keep a really big stack of envelopes for continual reorganization and starting-again :D
I honestly don't know what they were thinking with the Zune. What's amusing is that by all accounts it's a really nice portable media player. Microsoft basically finally made a nice portable media player just after the point where growth stopped in portable media players.

Courier I find interesting. I was one of the people who thought the demo looked really interesting. It totally spoke to me as a device that if it operated the way it did in the video (which is a big if), I'd have had a real use for. But I don't know if that means it would have actually been successful as a product. I think if Microsoft thought they could build it, and that it would be successful, they'd have done so. The fact that they scrapped it (or did whatever it is you do with a product concept video that you never actually said was going to be a product) shows me that they don't understand that market, or don't think it exists sufficiently.

I think part of the problem is the way Microsoft Research is structured. According to Bill Buxton (who is kind of my dream "wish he was my uncle"), Microsoft Research is basically tasked with incubating long-term technologies.

In this video, he talks about how some of the stuff he's been working on over the past decade is now starting to get used in shipping projects: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/LarryLarsen/CES-2010-NUI-with...

While I think that's awesome for Microsoft to be that forward-looking, I think they also need a more short-term skunkworks.

Maybe not as radical as Google's "20% time", but I think something that shortens the amount of time between "concept and prototype".

Windows Phone 7 seems like a pretty good idea. It's a fairly novel approach to interface design; but it didn't just spring up. Microsoft basically plodded through ten years of bad mobile strategy and pissed away their technology lead until even they couldn't pretend that they were headed in the right direction.

If you contrast that with Palm, who also developed and launched a completely new platform in a relatively short period of time, I think it's obvious that Microsoft works in glacial time. Then again, Palm's gamble hasn't really paid off either.

I think Microsoft couldn't possibly bet too big on mobile. I know it's trendy, and I'm certainly not being profound, but I don't think it's ludicrous to consider it the largest growth market in computing for the next decade. I think the problem (which the original article points out, is that Google has pretty much screwed their existing business model by giving away Android).
It is humungous, to be sure.

The only reason skype is the king right now is because nobody has motivation to switch to anything else. Skype works, without hassle. It's a good product.

The moment it ceases to be a good product, though, there is nothing holding them in their marketplace. The world can hop onto a new piece of p2p VOIP software in the blink of an eye.
Remember that this list is how many people click google search results to get to the site
Are you in US? If so, I'm not sure you've ever tried it - what we have marketed and sold as mayonnaise here is something very different (and indeed, quite disturbing) substance: the color, texture and, obviously, the taste is quite different. I used to think that mustard is absent in US as well, but then I found that it's actually sold as "English mustard" but I haven't found real mayonnaise yet...
Fries with ketchup and mayo are delicious and pretty standard in Southern Europe.
I think the level of college you go to is important.
The Author even says places like MIT teach you more theory and mathematical aspects of CS. That is also true of Berkeley and Stanford (I can't attest for any schools other than that).

I think the higher universities with older programs would be more inclined to teach theoretical than younger programs just starting during the dot com boom or during the past few years.
I'm not sure how much of Natal is patentable by Microsoft, as the tech isn't theirs (at least according to Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Natal#cite_note-MsPress...).

I'd also be willing to bet that the sales won't be that breathtaking (a $150 device that'll need some time for titles to take advantage of it).

If it were launching as a part of their next console, maybe it would be enough of a differentiator to move units (which isn't something the 360 has had trouble doing).
I just hope for all of our sakes that this is the final nail in the coffin of industry self-regulation. It does not work when it is against your interests to be safe; after all, we love to take risks.

I also hope that America begins to realize that large corporations rarely have the interests of the population in mind. There needs to be checks and balances here.
I am a crack addict
Does anybody know approximately where our solar system is in that picture?

It's about 75% from the center of the galaxy, but would it be on the left side or the right side?

(I know I won't be able to SEE it, but it just sort of feels good to be able to look at a picture like this and imagine a "YOU ARE HERE" arrow.)
touche..
Mapping Internet Worlds
Something someone somewhere on HN is already thinking or might be interested in doing. Really, isn't it about time that we get a consensus view across the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority?
That's because the West is further inland, away from the cooling ocean breeze, and gets bloody hot compared to the city.
West Philadelphia born and raised?

The article would be much stronger if there was some quantitative backing of the assertion that east sides are poorer.
This is true in most cities. Charlotte is the only major city I know of that has the south side of town as its most desirable area.
Excellent. So let's talk about regulating all these dot com companies...
Underscore Driven Development
Not too smug; the word is lazy. Smugness is a cover for lack of imagination and drive.

And it's human nature. Most want to turn the crank, the same as they did yesterday, collect their pellet, and strut around the barnyard. Nothing wrong with that as a life plan, but it's not the way to innovate or change your business.
Business Sense from 50 Cent
> I also hope that America begins to realize that large corporations rarely have the interests of the population in mind

Agreed. I also hope that America begins to realize that government and politicians rarely have the interests of the population in mind.
I don't think she should win this lawsuit but it does make me think google could add a new feature describing the safety level of a route.
Name a dot-com with $1bn+ in liability and we can talk about regulating it.
Ask HN: What's missing in a CS degree?
There seems to be lots of post both recent and before discussing the inadequacies of a CS degree. Could anyone elaborate on how to fill up this gap for better preparation in the real world? What would a person who wants to start a start up need to learn on his or her own? Also, what about open source contribution. I realize most answers would probably follow along the lines of "work on your own projects." but I would like more detailed advices based on your personal experiences. How much work is there left when just out of school? What did you do to fill that gap?
Fund a thousand startups and make it clear that they can cannibalize whatever they want.

And make it easy for MS employees to get in on the action.
> As for your sequencing recommendation, I think it's better to learn foundational CS with something like SICP/6.001 and then reifying it with C (this CMU course looks damned good: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~213/index.html). I think it's easier to make your mental tool box bigger if you can do it this way.

Thanks for pointing out SICP/learning a non-imperative language. It's very important to learn a functional programming language and Scheme is the best choice because a) it's the language SICP (one of the best computer science books) uses b) it's "pure-enough" (you still have set! if you need it, but tail call elimination is a part of the language specification) as a functional language and doesn't introduce too many other (important, but unrelated) ideas (unlike Haskell or ML which have strict typing and unlike Scala or F# which have OO).

I would, however, disagree with you that it should be the first language: it should be taught before "blub damage" takes place (e.g., before students think only in terms of OO) but it's good to be familiar with programming and data structure to some extent (it helps to understand cons cells as pairs of pointers). C is a great language to precede Scheme: it doesn't force the OO paradigm and teaches students to differentiate between the value of the object and the address of the object (thinking in terms of multiple levels of indirection).

The reason I argue against teaching SICP to complete newbies is because otherwise students tend to think of functional programming as some sort of an academic exercise and not as an approach to solve the problem. I am basing this on actual observations of students that I know at UC Berkeley and at my own school (where a Haskell based course served the same role). Unfortunately in general I find that students don't appreciate the value they get out of a non-"Blub school" ("why am I messing with pointers and recursion instead of writing GUI apps") until much later in their career ("oh, I know how to reduce the state to take advantage of all the cores!").

(1) I use "Blub school" rather than Spolsky's "Java school", as teaching C#, Python or Ruby as sole languages would have the same effect (it's trivial to learn all of these languages once you already know C and Scheme, it's an uphill battle do the reverse).
Again with perl being hard to understand. Bad perl is hard to understand, but good perl is nearly unmatched for idiomatic clarity of expression. It's the only language I know where the style guidelines are less of "line up your braces like this so you don't lose one" and more of "put the essential or surprising thing at the beginning of the line so the code is easy to skim." It's the language that got me thinking in terms of clarity of expression in the first place.

It's a power you can use for lazy rather than good, and I'll admit the results of that are ugly.

But I find the persistent criticism confusing. Either people are confusing "looks ugly" with "hard to decode" or there's a lot more bad perl code out there than I think that is.

Or perhaps perl code is like fish. When it's good, it's good, but when it starts to go bad, it really goes.
random link dump: Beijing air pollution statistics by district
http://www.bjepb.gov.cn/air2008/Air.aspx
Well here's an extra data point: It's definitely true of Montreal. The poor live in the north and east ends whereas the rich live in the "West Island" (the west side of the island where all the suburbs are) and Westmount (which is roughly the west/southwest side of Mount Royal).

Most of the majorly polluting industry is just off the east side of downtown Montreal.
While I can't speak specifically to the Horizon, almost every major disaster is the result of multiple major events chained together.

To illustrate this point I recommend watching the documentaries Mayday, Air crash investigation, and Seconds from disaster.
>It's not just Lisp. Language advocates are the snake oil salesmen among computer scientists.

It's true. (-: I submitted the paper mostly because it's a condensed "how-to" for optimizing Common Lisp code. I think the name of the paper itself is really, really sketchy.
His bias shows clearly in my view. He complains about large scale epidemiological studies (in the links you provided) and then uses what seems like a relatively small study to back up his claims (in the parent story).

Large scale epidemiological studies may have problems but they are enough to tip the burden of proof towards those who would disagree with them. It is certainly better than relying on some notions of the diet that our primitive ancestors may have had - especially considering that our current circumstances are very different and our life spans are already greater. To me this is a case of naturalistic fallacy.
Its greatest virtue is that it makes writing math pretty easy. I would love to see more software support including LaTeX-formatted math in comments and blog posts and such.
MS has started several labs groups that fit in between long-term academic research and product groups. For example, I work in Office Labs (www.officelabs.com). Our goals are something along what you describe in the Office / IW space.
The Coming War: ARM versus x86
Ima be rich! Where my kayak at?

http://geographicjourney.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/google-goe...
Troll or not, that was amazing. If not for a few things, it would sound completely legit. Can someone disprove the use of mayonnaise as hair conditioner?
I love mayo. But I love the movie Undercover Brother where The Man uses Denise Richards to seduce Undercover Brother into enjoying "white people food" like mayo. I had no idea!
I see. It's all those other people that need to be regulated. Got it.
Sorry if there were any times when the site was down. I was updating the theme while this was posted. Thanks!
There is no safety issue here, it's a stupidity issue. She could have used the walkway I commented about instead she decided to walk on what is obviously a highway.
Strangely enough, this is actually true. One of my ex-girlfriends used to use mayo as a conditioner every now and then.

Although, I still don't buy mayo as a bedroom lubricant...
No, just the ones who have the ability to destroy vast amounts of resources they don't own.
I find this promising. Although, I can't honestly think of a Microsoft product with less of a need for radical new ideas than Office (Unless replacing PowerPoint is on the agenda).

Looking at the site you mentioned it definitely seems like you guys are working on cool stuff; I just hope this sort of thing is going on within other product groups.
Against oil spills? Yeah, the .com I work for will not cause an oil spill.

Data security, that's a different manner. Yes, companies should be secure if they claim to be, especially if they store data about their customers. Litigation and bad press, in these cases, seem to cover things well, since there tends to be more competition in the .com space. Fortunately most .com's do not need to keep sensitive information. Some do however. Sucks for them.

In the case of a player in an oligopoly for a critical industry (Energy), it's a bit different. In safety-critical industries, there is strong regulation. Why not in industries which can wreak severe environmental havoc?

The environmental damage BP caused may be worth more than the company itself. Like Exxon, I don't see them having to pay the full cost.
To be more general, then: nobody really gets the reality of other countries until they've left theirs - but since America makes most of the world's blockbuster movies, everybody has an "America of the mind" that is an internally consistent model. I hasten to add that Americans have the same model - even though we live here and see reality all the time.

Europeans and the Japanese, for instance, think that society naturally agrees that education is a good thing. After all, educated people have created everything worthwhile in life, right? Doctors are educated, government administrators are educated, engineers are educated - stands to reason! Americans, on average, mistrust educated people, to such an extent that education can actually be a liability for anyone proposing public policy.

And yet this is not reflected in movies, where scientists or engineers may be goofy, but they're always respected. So the America of the mind is profoundly out of synch with real America, in ways that flummox anyone who tries to live here in the blithe assumption that America is a first-world nation.

That's just one example off the top of my head. This is in no way discriminating against Europeans - everybody thinks America is movie-America. It's just that it really, really isn't.
" For me, it was more than just male bonding and mayonnaise in my sweltering hot basement. That was probably the best summer of their lives."

I don't know whether this is serious, trolling, or a damn good sense of humor.
Wow. I had half a corona[1] between my fingers, nursing nicotine withdrawal with its scent, then I see this.

FUCK THAT!

Now I have so much renewed will power, thanks to submitter and the IAMA guy.

Edit:

Did I get downvoted because someone thought "corona" meant the mexican beer? sigh.
This effect seems to be the opposite in Austin. If I'm interpreting the map correctly, the winds blow SW, and most of the affluent/rich areas are out there. The counterpoint is that west austin has more geographical features such as hills, lakes and rivers to offset it.
This is a pretty straw-mannish argument. It's clear to me that if a company is big enough that its irresponsible actions can cause this much harm, it should be regulated. (I note you haven't actually named a dot-com with more than a billion in liability.)

Capitalism is not a suicide pact.
Personally I find "Ranch" more disgusting but my anecdotal food trend observations suggest that I'm in a minority in the USA.
>> an entire new city, was built by unskilled laborers working for dollars a day.

> Let's see if it's still standing a couple decades from now.

I didn't realise that it was solely teams of skilled engineers and artisans doing the riveting on Empire State back in 1930.
I just finished a 2 year course on Physics from a high school that was algebra based. I'll attest that algebra based Physics is the biggest waste of time ever. The worst part, if you know some calculus, is that you can glimpse what is happening behind the scenes of the formulas they give you. All I really learned from the course was a shortcut for doing the homework problems: make your givens somehow come out to the units required by the solution; double or halve in special cases. I just hope that mindset won't get in the way when I take a real physics course.
Unlocking your hotel room with your smartphone? OpenWays is an app for that.
I have been hearing that senators do listen to their constituents, especially if there is a massive email/letter campaign. Yes, this is at best inefficient.

I just hope there's a discussion for more of a direct democracy. We have the technology...

Of course we also need more transparency.
Repetition is the best way to get the message into the heads of viewers. For example, if I asked you about a specific ad that ran on "60 Minutes" on CBS tonight (assuming you watched it), you might have trouble recollecting it since it was but one of many. But if it was on Hulu, which repeats the same ad over and over at each break, it would probably stick in your head longer.
In fact, their liability is explicitly capped at a mere $75 million by law.
Is the DB engine really inherently faster than the scripting language?

http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/3/23/digg-4000-performa...

Not saying necessarily that the DB engine is less efficient, but rather that it is serves as a limiting factor and anything you can offload onto other servers is a good solution (for highly-visited websites).
I see nothing here that explains why dot coms should not be regulated.
I would argue that people in advertising are not smug or (abnormally) lazy. They are scared.

For every great advertising campaign that ends up all over twitter/facebook/etc, there are 10 that bring consumer complaints, shame, and a negative image. People are scared to try new things because their client might get mad and fire them.

To understand why this mentality exists, you need to get the 'media landscape.'

The Client - Whoever is paying for the advertising. This could be Pepsi, Coke, or Trojan. Generally the actual person is a high-powered marketing exec with a VP+ title.

The Media Agency - A middle-man group that manages the 'campaign' on behalf of the client. They recruit the different groups involved, pay them a bit, and run all the numbers for the client. In the end, they are judged on 1-2 'metrics' that the client cares about. This could be 'Performance' (# of ads clicked vs. ads viewed), 'Engagement' (# of times people click the play button in a video player, for example), or 'Share of Voice' (percentage of a website's views in a given time period that the brand owns).

The Media Agency boss is generally a 40-something advertising hotshot. He is hands off on nearly everything once his company signs an exclusive deal with the brand.

The Media Agency worker is generally a 20-23 year old who couldn't decide on a major in college so they went with 'international business.' They don't really use the internet much and are judged solely on the metrics mentioned above.

In the end, advertising deals are closed based on:
-Buying the agency a stripper or tickets to a hockey game
-Being friends with someone at the agency
-Being a website that someone at the agency visits every day

I can go into a ton more detail on things like the ridiculous 'RFP Process,' Creative Agencies, and other stupid advertising things if the interest is there.

p.s. I've worked in online advertising for the past 3 years and have no idea wtf the word 'media' means.
The oil spill goes on the list of recent events in which the government isolated an industry from downside and encouraged risk-taking. BP's legal liability is capped at $75 million by Federal law.

In the case in which an industry makes lots of money and/or that money is concentrated in the hands of a relatively small handful of players, the nearly inevitable result is regulatory capture. All the regulations in the world don't help when the legislature rubber-stamps laws written and endorsed by the industry. And enforcement is worthless when the regulators do not have sufficient experience to truly determine culpability.
No, you do NOT need an API key to use their AJAX CDN.