skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe you'd want to be an angel :) I'm a co-founder at a company that is growing very fast and we are looking for some investors. The company is incorporated in Hong Kong so it's very hard to get VC. If you'd like to hear more, add me on Skype (o-lalonde) (sorry for the shameless plug)
Art Deco Lamps: A Zest to Interior « Lighting Universe
Hypersonic aircraft shatters aviation records
With regards FizzBuzz, my follow-up goes a bit like this:

Now suppose the modulo test is really expensive. Suppose we're doing something complicated with large records on disk and we want to do this is that's true, something else if the other is true, etc, etc, just as in FizzBuzz.

How would you restructure your code so it's still obvious to a maintainer what it's doing, but so that it avoids doing more modulo operations than necessary.

You see, all these trivial exercises can be used as starting points for deeper conversations about aspects of coding.
I was in a similar situation recently. The best thing I did was to find a VERY GOOD investment advisor who handles my finance. By very good, I don't mean Madoff good, I mean somebody who doesn't promise the moon and really knows what he's doing.

The problem is that 99% of these people are jackasses and have no clue what they're doing. Ask rich people around you who they use and interview a few of them. Only go with someone you feel 100% comfortable with.

I would also advise you not put all your eggs in the same basket. And put some money aside for your next startup!
I never said it helps Google only that it hurts Apple. The fact that google can hurt Apple so much without a large direct profit motive is pretty telling about Apple's weakness IMHO.
Ask HN: Where do you find freelance developers
I've been running a small rails development shop for the past 6 or so years and the past year we have seen an explosion in new business. I've been building our network of freelance designers and front end guys but been having a really hard time finding freelance rails developers with enough free cycles to commit to a fixed amount of hours/week or entire projects. I know there are a lot of other individuals in my position out there so where do you go when you need freelance developers?
It's also a site frequented by people working salaried jobs and moderately successful freelancers who will never, ever see more than perhaps $100,000 in their bank accounts at any one moment for their entire lives.

Thus, we may be thinking of it in terms of "how can I use this money to invest such that I can live off of the interest for the rest of my life, getting the equivalent of a decent salary but without the actual work"? If I got millions of dollars, this would be the first thing I would be thinking about, not about how to risk it all just so I can be another greedy douchebag unhappy with their single-digit millions.
i just got called a soft sack of shit.
It seems to me that somebody with not much of a clue has read some rather bad sci-fi novels, and now wants to make it a reality -- with not much of a clue as to what "it" really is.
Well what's wrong with it is it's a VM. This is an embedded device with limited resources. Using a VM is a fundamentally bad idea. You can try to convince yourself that this isn't the case, but it is. What's worse is this has led to google's team developing the SDK around Java. Which alienates most of the worlds best programmers.

And I am not saying you can't use dlavik if you want. By all means if you want to use a VM that's fine. But if developers want to do awesome things with the android taking advantage of the device fully, the way to do that quickly, easily, and painlessly for the devs is to open up native development.

As it is, the SDK is horrendous to work with. The eclipse integration sucks, the exposed pieces of the os and it's hardware resources while getting better is still pretty bad. Fixing things like media playback issues is impossible. I could add ogg support tomorrow with native code, and it would run faster eating less battery than what they currently have for mp3 playback. But now that can't happen unless I jailbreak. I can't push useful apps on the app store.

I want to write apps for my android, but with the SDK the way it is now... it would be a waste of my time to do so. And that's the point.
Founders should not get worked up about titles, though they often do need them as a matter of formality (e.g., the corporate law requires it) or as a matter of public positioning (e.g., third parties want a contract signed by the CEO) or as a matter of necessity (someone has to be the point person to sign contracts, government forms, etc.).

The unhealthy variation is where founders let titles get to their heads and screw up their perspective on who they are and what they are doing (the point of this article).

While the bad cases do happen, I would not eschew titles altogether, as they do play a helpful and utilitarian role in the early-stage companies and can even reflect the reality that some founders truly do have stand-out leadership and strategic-thinking qualities so as to merit the title CEO.

So, use the titles if you have to; just don't over-emphasize them at the start, or lose sight of what they mean, as this can and does lead to problems.
I'd recommend Ben Graham's "The Intelligent Investor". One doesn't have to buy individual stocks, or follow the strategy proposed in the book, but books like these will keep you from doing something dumb like, say, buying into the S&P 500 when its P/E is >30, and give you some perspective on and a valuable defense mechanism against all the stupid investment advice out there.
A large part of meditation practices involve learning to train one's attention and focus. So yes, you can definitely learn to have the brain "switch" modes.
ScreenSteps Live combines a hosted documentation service with a desktop client for quickly creating screenshot based documentation. It also integrates very nicely with Zendesk. You can see an example here:

http://help.screensteps.com

Or, here is another example site we set up:

http://ipad.screensteps.com

Very simple to use and very effective. You can read a case study here:

http://www.bluemangolearning.com/screensteps/case_studies/se...
Berners-Lee deconstructs a bag of chips
About 5 weeks ago I saw contractors installing 4G equipment on an existing Sprint tower near LAX. LA is supposed to get 4G this year too. If 4G is just 3mbps, it's not too compelling for me, because EVDO rev A on my phone and MiFi averages about 1.2mbps most places in LA.

The hotspot feature would be nice but again, at $30 more per month it's not worth it. I have a WiFi router app for my Windows Mobile phone, but I'd rather use my MiFi than kill the battery in my phone by tethering.
"Use the manuals from your TV, microwave, vacuum cleaner, and so on that have the instructions printed in English, French, and Spanish to relate the two "dead" languages to a language you understand (English). The idea is that these manuals are your Rosetta Stone."

WARNING: I have repeatedly found the translations of houseware manuals to be thoroughly broken. I often read the English part even though my native language is French because English is, if not the original language, at least well-supported. The French version has pathetic grammar and lacks many accents and has some in wrong places, with bad grammar.
I really loved the way Derek Sivers solved a similar problem to yours. Have a look here: http://sivers.org/trust
Don't go to a financial advisor, at least not without doing some research first. Many of them are paid on commission for funneling money in certain places, and many more are just bad.

Generally, someone smart enough to build a $5 million company should be smart enough to manage his own money.
Bartlett on Simon:
http://www.albartlett.org/articles/art1998jan.html
"Maybe it's for farms and the like"

I think that's a valid statement. It's not a new law, and based on the article, there certainly are a number of additional rules that go with it.

It would be interesting to see how this would impact the start-up community in a state w/o a law like this, who then adds a similar law, but with say, a 5 year timeframe instead of 10.
Just wait until industry & manufacturing learns how to use the thing. Then it will change the game.
This is a great article, but it would be much better if they highlighted products that were either:

a) Not super-duper niche, or
b) Somewhat interesting

In my opinion, a large percentage of these products were missing legs before the developers even started. Be it the idea was ridiculously boring, or it had zero opportunity to make any significant revenue.

I'd prefer to see failed software products which definitely should have taken off, but didn't due to reason X or reason Y.

For example, Company A didn't look for funding for reason X, but then their burn rate got the best of them and the company failed. Or, Amazing Product B was growing really fast, but didn't learn to scale properly in time, so they lost 90% of their customer base when all of their servers crashed for two weeks.

Stories like that would be MUCH more memorable than a guy who failed to turn a profit from chimney sweep software.
I was actually thinking redis would handle roster duties. It's got native queries that are a good fit to that sort of thing, and it's got replication in case one instance isn't enough for the load.

There's a guy with a web chat system using Comet on node.js who claims 100K simultaneous users on one server, with fairly modest memory usage. Of course that's http. Is xmpp that much heavier?

(You've convinced me the problem is more difficult than I thought, btw.)
Impossible Bacon Pie
Lessons learned from an Omaha attendee of TechStars for a Day
Back in 2000, Java VMs were still lagging behind Smalltalk VMs, especially in real-world performance.
Sounds freakin tasty to me.
High monthly fees and add-on charges like the hotspot will be big for consumers, but business users who get these devices through work won't feel the pinch directly.
So 6 months before they release their new phone OS, Microsoft is going to announce that they are Supporting the iPhone with their superior (personal opinion here) development environment, thus giving up one of the (very?) few areas that WP7 has an advantage...

I'm going to go out on a limb as say, probably not.
That's the phrase I've been looking for! casual computing!
Oddly enough I think some kinds of foreign learners end up _more_ worried about some aspects of written english than native speakers. Things like they're/there/their, affect/effect, it's/its etc are more likely to deceive someone who learned english orally than someone who did it by the web/as a second language.

At least, as a foreigner, it never ceases to amaze me that these things are even issues at all.
Twitter Feeds
Facebook has kept taking two steps forward and one step backwards for the last years. The direction has stayed the same however. On the Washington Post article Mark said: "Sometimes we move too fast", which is totally different than saying "we went to a wrong direction".
It's not about being arrogant. Unless you have never done any real programming apart from simply calling library functions, the original problem is about as interesting as asking "Write a program to add 47 and 88 together".

I think the issue is that many programmers have never done real programming. They just chain library calls together. It's like comparing a furniture maker who starts with a tree, to a furniture maker who buys parts from IKEA and assembles them.

To be a really good programmer, you need to be really really at ease with bits bytes, moving stuff around, and getting your hands dirty with real programming.
I read every single word anyway and more than often enough have to relies on my personal memory to mettle out arguments. I also don't skims through information.

I also eliminated all sort of information feeds except hacker news and a few economic resource. Emails, web statistics, etc, are not worth checking out often since they don't have much actionable insight or interesting insight.

I have a big craving for super long articles and essay just like this wired's story. I want more just like it. (Which is also why people enjoy Kalzumeus, Steve Yegge,T-A-W, and other writers of super long essay)
I was homeless at the age of 14 and this is quite true. I like the fact that you've mentioned the cigarette as currency. In many cases I've been able to trade a cigarette for food and clothing. At the same time, like money, that cigarette brought troubles at times.

Thanks for the good writeup.
I wouldn't consider putting 95% of your wealth in a single place to be particularly non-risky. Certified or not, recent events have demonstrated that diversification is a must nowadays.
A lot of BS in this article, but one idea that I did find very interesting:

"""
The big question here is: does Apple have the balls to revolutionize the web and return the world’s journalism and entertainment to a paid premium model (like magazines and books and newspapers and HBO) rather than an adware garbage model?
"""

Apple becoming a platform for micropayments for great content. Problem with this is that Google + Android could do the same thing.
been there, done that. not crazy.

OTOH, I disagree with the author that cigarettes are less of a problem for the homeless.
Ballmer to announce VS 2010 will compile native Mac/iPhone apps at WWDC
"If Facebook really wants to get profitable it needs to get smaller by kicking-off users who don’t make it money. Then it has to be be really nice to the ones they keep."

As far as I can see, this contradicts most of what he was talking about previously. If you kick the people off of Facebook who don't make them much money, you'll be kicking off the people who don't play Farmville or Mafia Wars, and you will be left with an even worse signal to noise ratio.

Despite that, I thought it was an interesting article.
I read the front-page and then new, and I rarely hit the More button on either of those pages to dig any deeper.
> Visual Studio [...] is, pretty much, just better than XCode.

How so? (Genuinely curious, I have too little experience with either platform to judge.)
Behind The Burger: The Sad Reality of Ronald McDonald
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
I doubt it'll be a fullblown apocalypse, but I think there'll be a period of unrest, after which civilization will soon reestablish itself. If you manage to invest 50K of your money in something tangible that is considered to be of value in that period of unrest, you'll have a much easier time surviving it.

For us, 50K is enough to survive for at least three years, without requiring any kind of austerity. I certainly don't call that 'nothing.
I suspect that our system is (unintentionally) rigged so that only the top 20% are set-up for happiness. I suspect that most social systems are set up in such a way, such that the majority have to strive for something.
There is an awesome disassembly of the code available: http://www.romhacking.net/docs/344/ . Almost every line is commented, so it's possible to follow along without knowing too much 6502.

I took a very quick look at it. If you search for 'L_GroundArea1', you'll find the level data for area 3-3. Notice the end-of-data marker is $fd. I then searched for this value, and found the 'ProcessAreaData' subroutine compares against it. By the look of it, this routine decodes new level tiles, except if $fd is found, in which case it just leaves the current tile in the buffer.
No. This is insanity.

There's the growing theme that Apple and Microsoft are pals in their fight against Google. This is positively insane. Apple is absolutely devastating Microsoft's core foundation in a way that some shitty online spreadsheet hasn't.

Not to mention that this is the antithesis of pretty much everything that Jobs recently said about Adobe.

Apple doesn't need to woo developers, or expand their development platform. They have a lot of top notch apps, an overflowing app store, and everyone is rushing the door to get their chance at having their app denied. Maybe in a few years, if Android or WM7 really takes off, this will be a concern, but not now.
I like the part where he mentions the android tablets. Frankly I love the idea of a tablet computer but I just can't bring myself to use the iPad. If only a good android tablet was out right now, I'd give up the rammen noodles for one. (I'll just steal some tomatoes from the neighbor for food ;p)
'Top kill' method 'slows BP oil leak' in Gulf of Mexico
You better hope that Notion Ink also delivers on the EXPERIENCE as well. Look at what everyone else is saying in this thread; the iPad is a hit because of the experience of using it, the attention to detail, not the feature set.

If it doesn't deliver on experience people will not buy it in the first place (because no one will be talking about it) or they will return it. I don't care how many features you pack into a device, if I don't smile while using it it's a failure.
AND MSFT is Back on Top of AAPL...how long will they stay neck and neck?
What's so "great" about a political idea no one cares about?
No idea what "extraordinary" means to you, but the scenarios reported in Peter Singer's recent book on military robotics, Wired for War, represent some potentially huge shifts. They may not "improve our lives" though.
FriendFeed is part of Facebook though?

http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009/08/friendfeed-accepts-facebo...

You might be able to take a user's data to establish their profile, they consented by using your application after all. But I don't think you can export their friend list and use it to invite them to your new social network.

Either way, I think Facebook could find something in their ToS to shut you down if they feel like you're stealing their users away. There was a recent article about a tool from Power Ventures that allowed you to login to multiple social networks and aggregate the messages, friends lists and what not. Facebook seemed to claim it was a violation of the ToS because they were accessing account data using "automated means."

http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2010/05/03
I was in this exact situation a few years ago. Email me if you want to discuss. It depends on your goals and risk tolerance.
BP's 'Top Kill' method 'stops oil leak'
So the only difference between this and a $200 netbook is that netbook can stand up on it's own on a table?
Or you could just ask "Do you know what a lookup table is", and "Can you write 15 entries into an array and cycle through them" ;)

I agree it's a good starting point, but surely it's still just getting rid of the ridiculously bad programmers rather than anything else.
So "Postmodernism" is really a conservative idea?
The Intelligent Investor is good, however, it's a bit dated. It's from an age when values could be found by carefully checking the companies books (and or paper files) and finding it owned a utility that had a book value worth more than the stock of the owning company.

Even Graham has said that for most people a low cost index fund is the way to go. Competing against a computerized/connected/inside information Wall Street is very hard and because of transaction costs (higher to the individual than the institution) winning stock trading strategies are non-trivial.

However, Claude Shannon (famous computer science guy) was a pretty good investor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion

Fortune's Formula http://www.amazon.com/Fortunes-Formula-Scientific-Betting-Ca... details some of Shannon's methods and covers some other interesting stories like LTCM, Mathematician Edward O. Thorp's black jack schemes and later his creation of the one of the first "computerized" hedge fund.
When I first got my iPhone, I had to charge the battery daily for a month because I just couldn't get over it.

Now it lasts days and I use it more like a phone and a casual gaming device while I'm bored.

Bloggers should no better. It's too early to make statements about the impact of the iPad on computing. Let's see where we are in 6 months.

I'm not saying it will go one way or the other, but I imagine the hype will double with the 3G, then in a year we'll start seeing true reviews of how the iPad is used. I'm personally holding out for 3G.

EDIT: Somehow I missed that 3G is available, so I give it 6 months :)
Lawyers don't know the first thing about running startups but a good startup lawyer will be able to think strategically right along with the founders - that is, will give advice, not in a ham-handed way that focuses purely on legal risks but rather in a way that in itself helps put those risks in perspective for the founding team so that they can see at a glance what the likelihood and potential severity of each is and how each relates to the potential benefits of the deal.

This fine piece points out that the founders should be doing this, and that is true, but the lawyers themselves should also be doing it. Otherwise, they spend all their time giving very unhelpful advice about why things can never get done.
Hmm. My memory must be faulty, but I don't remember the first one having the final xor and stosb. I do remember looking at your solution and thinking that you'd forgotten it, that's why I expressed an interest in seeing the original.

Still, likely my memory is at fault.
I'm not rich but I've begun to give the homeless in SF quite a bit of my money. I used to just give them "spare change" and cigarettes, but you should see their face light up when you hand them a $5 bill + loose change. Try it with an open mind, you might find that it's the best $5 you'll ever spend that day.

I used to think that I'd only make the problem worse by giving them money, but my perspective has changed. At the current rate of our economic collapse, it won't be long before we join their ranks.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?
Google Avinash Kaushik. Watch his YouTube videos, read his blog, etc.

From personal experience, I really enjoy using event tracking within Google Analytics to understand how users are interacting with my site.
YellowPages.ca now offers Videos for your Canuck Website
In vitro meat
Well there's that and they only need to break 1 of them, adding more types doesn't really do anything when you can refresh except to slow things down by a bit. :P
With standard C style my solution is 12 LOC.
This story is all over the net at the moment. For example:

http://blogs.computerworld.com/16201/apple_makes_iphone_dev_...

I don't know if it's true or not but there's certainly smoke. Perhaps aimed at taking the thorn out of the section 3.3.1 changes relating to third-party tools?

I actually understand Steve's point about cross-platform GUIs being the lowest common denominator (just look at Java Swing apps) but it's disappointing that change also hurt MonoTouch, which was a 1:1 iPhone API mapping and not an intermediate layer like the Flash compiler was/is.
Yeh, this is not a new problem. In the 80's there was a lot of "discussion" over who had exactly what jurisdiction on the internet.#

It's not really got much better since.
From a guy who's done it also:

http://blogmaverick.com/2006/01/02/my-investment-advice-for-...

"So what to do if you want to invest your money ? What to do if you want to end this year with more than you started with ?

Simple, avoid risk.

Risk is what Wall Street lies about every day. Risk is what they try to sweep under the covers knowing that we all are addicted to the dream of financial freedom. Risk is the poison that is masked by the commercials."
Steve Blank: Why Lawyers Don’t Run Startups
I agree they can 'live together' through some kind of deliberate training (like meditation) - but also with the right tools (for example http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom)