skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know several people in $300K+/yr treadmill jobs. I wouldn't trade places with them for all the world.

I like to think that if I found myself with their salary I would have my priorities in a different order, but there's no guarantee of that. My own sense of avarice and comfort has changed a lot since my 20's.
New iPad XL to offer Flash capability
Which also raises the question whether there should be a similarly venerable(and compensated) position reserved for researchers who don't teach?

Being a staff scientist at a national lab is about as close as you can get to this in the US. Compared to being a professor you'll get similar money (sometimes more), less prestige, more time for research and slightly more annoying bureaucracy. There's upsides and downsides of each.
Hmm.. is it Tuesday the 25th or Monday the 24th?
I think that most people around here are interested in a business that has very low start up costs, and very cheap scalability.

Even if it were possible for a guy in a basement to buy a ferry, I'm not sure that I'd want to ride it =P.

That said, it is interesting to remember how blinkered we can be by thinking only in terms of tech-friendly businesses.
It's more fun to create something novel that many people use and appreciate (e.g., an iPhone game).

Much better than research prototypes that go no where beyond a publication or two.
Show HN: Lists are the next big social content
"For some reason our species is drawn to numbered lists" - Quote from "Inbound Marketing" by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah.

Most blog articles have a list in them but they are "locked" in an unstructured format instead of being allowed to evolve as people consume them.

The idea is to make lists social with Twitter as the main communication platform. Here's my minimum viable product - twtpick.in. Check out this list that Kevin Rose crowd sourced via Twitter - Top iPad Apps - twtpick.in/1l.

What do you think?

P.S. I am also looking for a co-founder.
Xet.Me
Well put simply it's a free service for everyone to use which shortens web addresses and is especially good at shrinking them long addresses we love to hate!
Incidentally, if whoever's been downvoting my comments in this thread (1) did it because they think those comments are of poor quality rather than to make some meta-point or meta-joke about voting, and (2) feels like explaining what they thought was wrong, then I'm all ears.
I'll admit, I kind of chuckled reading this;it's neat to see a company inject humor into what could be a poisonous situation for their brand.
This nicely sums up a bunch of reasons why I decided not to do a postdoc, and instead joined my first startup after finishing my PhD. I'm sure it works for some people, but I just couldn't see myself being happy with it.
Well put simply it's a free service for everyone to use which shortens web addresses and is especially good at shrinking them long addresses we love to hate!
> The people I know who do work in machine learning work in straight-up C, not Haskell, as the author suggests.

Is their work in applying ML theory, or creating more of it? ML almost always involves large datasets in practical use, but when you're trying to come up with a new method for ensuring correctness in some edge-case, you would be testing it with hypothetical extreme inputs, not feeding it mounds of data that won't trigger the problem. Haskell works well to model computer science research problems—that is, research into CS, not using CS to research other domains. Once your model has "solidified", you should by all means optimize it in C before running it on real-world data.
Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution
Aphex Twin does a lot of interesting stuff. I recall watching an interview with him where he claimed that not only does he make all his music using software, but he actually has written some programs which compose the music for him. Can't remember where I saw that though.
> better is actually a con because it will invoke a competitive response.

Be stealthy, young startup, and non-threatening.

SINGLE-PAGE VIEW http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2010/04/28/how-to-predict-whe...
Banning in-stream ads right out seems a bit drastic. They could instead develop standards for in-stream ads that prevent confusion.
1.5 Trillion or so texts in the US in 2009.
96.8 Billion in the UK in 2009.
neither does freebsd.
Sure.

I successfully built, tested and deployed a site for a client using nothing but Bespin after my development machine tanked. Obviously there was some adjusting to do, having different quirks than I was used to.

As a code editor, it's lacking a lot of things like effective keyboard-shortcuts. There are a few gestures that are already in place, and I like the ability to quickly save with a right-click which brings up a wheel of options. The last time I used it was maybe Feb so I'm sure there have been a lot of changes to this.

As a file manager, I think this is where Bespin shines brightest. The ability to fetch and put files from remote servers is brilliantly executed; though lacking-I'd like to be able to unpackage web directories that I grab from my FTP server, but the fact alone that this exists given the form of Bespin (web based) was a huge deal for me. A lot of the file management options are replicated both in a GUI file tree and a CLI dialog box. Again, this is probably the strongest features of Bespin.

Long story short: yes it does have quite a ways to go, but with the progress that's been made so far, I think when Mozilla releases RC1 it will probably be a damn good contender for code editing.

/note: I have not used the collaboration features, so obviously no comment is made on that.
Horizontal Image (Web Magazine)
Bruce Sterling has a short story which also explores the effects cheap fabrication could have - The Kiosk. It's narrated by the StarShipSofa folks here:

http://www.starshipsofa.com/20100113/aural-delights-no-116-b...
In NL that does not happen officially, but if you're looking for some fast service when there is a game on then better forget it and try again in a few days.

The amount of 'sick leave' around those days is also well above average.
1) Environmental Consulting, 2) Translation and Interpretation Services, 3) Home Health Care, 4) Mobile App Design, 5) Ferryboats and Inland Water Transportation, 6) Tea and Healthy Beverages, 7) Fun, Games, and Hobbies, 8) Exam Preparation and Tutoring, 9) Bakeries and Baked Goods, 10) Self-Storage Leasing, 11) Handmade and Vintage Goods Online, 12) Medicinal Marijuana Retailing, 13) Self-Published Video Games, 14) Blood, Plasma, and Sperm Banks, 15) Water Supply and Irrigation Systems, 15) Safety and Quality Testing
I would hate to see what the super/food/farmer's markets are like leading up to a Mexican World Cup game... People must really have to stock up.
Which also raises the question whether there should be a similarly venerable(and compensated) position reserved for researchers who don't teach?

an academic research lab sponsored by a big company (note that this is not the same as a corporate R&D division) ... in the 1970's, this was epitomized by Xerox PARC and AT&T Bell Labs. today, Microsoft Research is currently the leader in this category.
More realistically the "inefficiency" item #1 is that the "old guy" doesn't get any of the available jobs in his preferred industry and has to settle for a job well outside or below his area of expertise at significantly less pay. This is not a small inefficiency for him.
This was just googles stealth entry in to the gaming market.

Wait until next week, when you'll see donkey kong on the homepage and no searchbox.
* They’ll probably even charge separately for Visual Voicemail. *

Let me be one to mention that this very likely wont be the only thing Verizon locks you out of for no particular reason. I'm unable to find the link currently, but a prime example of why I'll never sign up to Verizon again is just this. A user who owned a Motorola Droid downloaded Skype, and planned to use it over WiFi in areas where he'd incur roaming fees, or had bad reception.

Verizon actually managed to find a way to disable the voice feature of Skype, restricting it only to use in areas with network coverage.

That's not an isolated example.
A handful of universities have Research Professor positions. At Carnegie Mellon, it's basically the same as a normal Professor (tenured, similar prestige, etc.), except that you don't normally teach, and in return, you're expected to fund a portion of your own salary out of the grants you bring in. (If you don't bring in grants some year, you can fall back on teaching to earn your keep, so research profs do occasionally teach.)
How about Amazon?

When you visit their site, do you think of rain forests or Xena?
ok, i'll bite ;)

if everyone thought the way that you did, then we'd still be programming by submitting our punch cards to some gigantic centralized machine. think about how much basic academic research occurred before the invention of something like the iPhone became possible
I might be a member of this shadow group.
Let me repeat that separately just so it stands out, it makes the point more eloquently than this whole thread:

> If you google for 'duck search', DDG is the first result.
Ask HN: Best source for discovery of new startups?
What is the best source to discover new startups?

Techcrunch, etc only feature prominent ones.

Crunchbase is more broad.

Any other suggestions?
%s/hacker/cracker/g
Pandigital’s Strange Android Tablet
Hackers can do it too.
This does vary based on the field and kind of school. It's definitely accurate for being a professor at a top-tier research university in the sciences or engineering. A prof job at those kinds of places could accurately be titled "research manager": the main job requirements are managing and bringing in funding for a fairly large research lab of 5-10 grad students and possibly some research scientists and postdocs.

But you can shift the balance of the various components if you go to different kinds of schools. To take the opposite end of the spectrum, if you're the CS prof at a small liberal-arts college, your job will involve a lot more teaching and mentoring undergrads, and a lot less grant-writing and research-lab management. It's unfortunately not true that there's a happy medium to fit every kind of temperament, but there are some options at least.
They are using Christensen's definition so "worse" means "worse by the standards of the market they are entering."

Those standards will vary widely according to what market you're talking about. For instance in the 70s and 80s, disk drives were judged entirely on size. So a smaller size of disk was necessarily worse. And this resulted in waves of companies wiped out. In mobile devices today, people care more about portability, ruggedness, and power consumption. So a smaller disk may actually be better. Therefore whether a smaller drive is better or worse depends entirely on the context set by the market it is entering.

In the examples you are thinking of, simpler frequently does equate to worse. If the existing companies have sales pitches that are geared towards lists of checkboxes on feature sets, then I guarantee that simpler equates to worse. And yes, this is an advantage for the startup. (Assuming that it can make itself lean enough to live on the scraps at the bottom of the market.)

The underlying dynamic is that existing companies find it hard to compete at the low end of their market for a variety of reasons. One of which is that companies tend to develop infrastructures that depend on having certain profit margins. Relative to how the company is structured, the bottom of the market is always unprofitable. Conversely companies always find the top end of their market very enticing.

However technology tends to improve at a faster rate than the market's needs increase. So the crappy cheap solution naturally grows up into a sufficient solution. The providers of the cheap solution happily eat up the market, and at every step the incumbents have a hard time defending it. And so incumbents get driven out of the top of the market.

This dynamic is frequently recognized while it is happening, but for deep organizational reasons it is really, really hard to change.
Does anyone have the file in question mirrored somewhere? It's hosting seems down from here
I boot my machine maybe once or twice a month. All other times, it wakes up from sleep or hibernate (which this drive won't help, of course). Most people, especially mac users, are the same way. Rebooting died with the 90s.

As for starting apps, they start when I log in, and most initialization is CPU-bound, not IO-bound. If you do it differently than this, a software or workflow fix seems like a better idea than a very expensive drive.
Key Dem lawmakers call for rewrite of 1996 Telecom Act
I think there's a lot to be learned from buddhism but I don't think the statements in this video add up to much. Why does the notion of space as information promote a more compassionate outlook? Is Rupert Sheldrake is the best person to cite as a buddhist scientist? Is he even a buddhist? Just playing devils advocate here ;)
I would disagree with (1). For a start, the industry, at the moment, heavily relies on government subsidies to stay in business. Those subsidies are either in the form of rebates for purchases, rebates in the form of artificially high electricity buyback prices, or more favourable tax treatment or other perks (electric cars & city parking, for example)

While the political winds are blowing in your favour it might be plain sailing, but any business that does not have a fundamental basis in return on investment without subsidy is highly risky. With the endless talk of reining in government spending in countries all around the world, any industry relying on government subsidies to keep it afloat has a large risk factor of cuts to those subsidies resulting from a switch in government.

Exceptions to this are probably in personalised, high end sales and consulting to wealthy businesses and individuals who want the technology for the wow factor. Because a self-sustaining office or house will continue to be something that people desire when cost is no longer a factor. This trend will change slowly and be well-signalled by the next 'shiny new thing' that these people want.

Politicians are the worst kind of business partner. Keen to take the credit and revenues, and then run like the wind when it's no longer a vote winner and leave you with the leftovers.
The new Hotmail gives Gmail a run for its money
Interesting item here is how apparently newspapers with fairly large circulation see absolutely no problem in taking the content from other people and their websites but go absolutely hysterical when someone so much as deeplinks to an article on theirs.
> To be more specific, when I want to transform a collection given by a Java library in a functional manner, I usually ended up with one or two localized import statements - to avoid e.g. scala.collection.mutable leaking into my other methods - and additional calls to convert the Java collection into a Scala specific and back again.

I think the other poster was right about this being more of a library issue than a language issue. In my experience it was rare to do more than wrap Java collections to or from an Iterable[]; that could be done easily without having to bring full mutable collections into the namespace.

Also, it might be part of the cost of working with "enterprise" Java, but it was actually really rare for me to work with a vanilla Java collection rather than some library's implementation of its own damn 'typesafe' iterator, like this: http://xerces.apache.org/xerces-j/apiDocs/org/w3c/dom/NodeLi.... It was super-nice to toss together my own wrappers of some library or another's semi-standard iteration API and have a ton of functionality come along via the magic of mixins; and get it all automatically applied for the cost of a single import statement via implicits.

> match { case x: List[Foo] => ... case x: List[Bar] => ... }

I suppose such a thing is made impossible via erasure, it's true. I haven't encountered a need for it -- maybe because the problem there is erasure + dynamic/runtime typing, rather than erasure on its own. Also it's something that's coming for Scala, it sounds like. (I haven't paid as much attention as I should to its ongoing development..)

> Why do you have the preference for Scala?

Part of it's just the intuitive feel: When I code in Scala, I'm writing in Scala -- it might be a fairly huge language, but it is its own thing. Coding in F# feels like bouncing back and forth between C# and O'Caml, depending on how functional you're feeling at the moment -- here's a C#-ish clause; there's an O'caml-esque one.

As an example, I don't believe you can use both inheritance and discriminated unions in F#. In Scala you can and it's actually quite useful.

Another example is that in F# you can omit type declarations on function arguments until you start using OO, then they become mandatory and infect your code. On the one hand the extra inference is nice but on the other it really drives home that you are coding in two languages, not one.

Besides that intuitive part, I think that Scala's module/class-level type system, although complicated, helps tremendously for writing big, complex, programs. Traits/mixins, flexibility in type constraints, and allowing types as members of other types add up to a really powerful ability to modularize without sacrificing. At least for me, a lot of my older O'Caml projects made fairly heavy use of functors. F# didn't bother to try to support the idea and only supports plain-vanilla C# interfaces. Scala embraced them, extended it, and made them much better.
MongoHub - MongoDB GUI for Mac OS
Seriously? You'd rather implement Tetris in Obj-C than make a fundamental, provable improvement to an important algorithm? We have very different ideas of fun.
I'll send him an email. Thanks.
(site broken under FF here, there's a missing </script> tag. works with safari!)
There are plenty of necessary things in life that aren't exciting to do. There's nothing wrong with pointing it out unless you're trying to get more people to unwittingly do those things without fully understanding their choice.

EDIT: I'm not trying to say that pure science is universally unexciting. Few things are. But generally, more people seem to be interested in consumer products than pure science research.
It can be sheer performance; going by the innovator's dilemma, in general it is whatever attributes are higher-ranked by the market (ie. customers). This makes sense, because that is what incumbents naturally worry about, and what they compete on. So if your startup is worse on those attributes, you don't threaten them, and they leave you alone.

So what's the point of your startup, if you're worse for customers? You're better for other people, who aren't customers of the incumbents, and who rank the attributes differently. There's lots of examples.

The coup de grâce is when both you and the incumbent improve over time, but the incumbent becomes better than it needs to be for its existing customers on those attributes, and your startup becomes good enough, but you also have those other attributes - then the incumbent's existing customers switch to you, and incumbent dies. It doesn't always go that way, but it does happen, and that's the pattern studied in the innovator's dilemma.

Incidentally, electric vehicles were popular at the dawn of the car; even edison was developing batteries for them. They've been overtaking the petrol car for a long time. But they have made inroads in other markets, such as those disability wheelchair carts (I'm not sure exactly why they're a better fit for electric, but they are certainly not a focus of incumbent car manufacturers - and maybe that's the important thing).

sorry, I can't help explaining this whenever it comes up, whether it's needed or not. It's such a cool observation.
Original story without the splash page:

http://prominentsecurity.com/?p=119

It also says that the flaw has been patched:

"*Update (5/22/10): After reporting the flaw to Facebook Wednesday afternoon, I have confirmed as of Friday afternoon that the flaw has been successfully patched. Facebook now strictly enforces the existence of the “post_form_id” CSRF protection token in the request."
Sorry - Tuesday the 25th.

If a mod happens to see this and wants to edit the submission, it would be appreciated.
A large part of your performance as a PM is measured on how much BS you are capable of generating in order to manage perceptions - which is natural since you do not have authority over engineers. This is one instance of that.

Obviously, teams differ so you might have a different experience.
A Tetris clone would not be novel though.

I would rather build novel games based on my ideas for the iPhone than do basic research.
I think they meant the twitter timeline and not the timeline in a user interface. This article pretty much just says what the twitter blog post says, but after reading it several times it sounds clear to me what they meant.

http://www.socaltech.com/twitter_takes_aim_at_ad_ly_bans_in_...
For anyone who didn't see bcx's question, this is Tuesday the 25th, not Monday the 24th.
Given the appallingly low quality of most baked goods in the USA, I think there is a lot of headroom for growth in fresh bakery stores. Done well, it's got every chance of becoming the next 'starbucks'. Who would have said 20 years ago that premium priced coffee would be a growth industry?

In European countries, even the smallest two-horse town supports a local bakery, and most small french towns will have several. It's part of the lifestyle to buy bread fresh each day and eating processed factory produced bread is just not done. Anyone who has eaten a fresh baguette from a french bakery will know what I'm talking about.

You could say the same about coffee in the USA today - who will pass up a freshly brewed cup over some processed instant coffee, even though the price is 20 times higher for that latte? The cupcake craze might be the first leg in a takeup of small bakeries offering freshly baked goods which become woven into people's daily lives.
I still find even RRS pretty expensive to handle my backup needs. It probably still has excessive redundancy and too fast IO. I run a family server to backup media and documents. The data there is already a consolidated/versioned backup of other locations put on a RAID5 array. With these two levels of redundancy already in place all I want is a cheap per GB storage online I can rsync to.

With only photographs/video/music collections of 4 people I've filled 1TB very fast and will have to swap bigger drives in very shortly. To backup even 1TB in RRS means 1200$ a year. With that money I can just buy a second server, put it on an existing commercial DSL connection somewhere else and run a daily rsync.

Anyone know of any solution like tarsnap/rsync.net that is an order of magnitude cheaper? Most of the backup services require proprietary clients that I hesitate to rely on, and I doubt their "unlimited storage" claims aren't just like "unlimited bandwidth" claims.
Which is, when you think about it, not a good idea. If 'sprintf' is defined, then 'printf' ought to be simply 'putStr . sprintf'.
site extremely slow - takes ages to load and surf around :(
Also, if you were to see the trees that are cut from these farms for the purpose of making paper products, you'd be much more inclined to call them "brush" than trees.

When people say "recycle to save the trees" they have redwoods pictured in their minds, they should probably be thinking more along the lines of the stuff you clear away to have an earth-day sing and a tree planting.
Let me ask you a few simple question:

Do you have a blog ?

Url please ?

How much money does it make ?

How much time do you spend on keeping it up-to-date ?

How much time did you spend building ?

How much time did you spend gaining your SEO skills?

How long has it been running ?

With those figures we can work out exactly what your hourly rate was, can you provide this ?