skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's an excellent point, it really is about what you get, as apposed to what you are getting away from. I'm still at the day job myself (with a project on the side). In the end I suppose I'll always be trying to please someone (boss, investor, customer), so I'll just keep working towards having more freedom to do what I want.
From the comments there:

"In it, Senior Attorney Generals Frank Fina and Patrick Blessington asked Judge Richard A. Lewis to hand down "a sentence far stiffer than standard."

They said Mr. Cott's crimes spanned 20 different political campaigns in Pennsylvania, that he has shown no remorse, that he has used an anonymous blog to deflect blame and malign the prosecution, and that he violated the terms of his bail by failing to report that he moved to New York City."

http://www.pittsburghpostgazette.com/pg/10139/1059444-100.st...

That's new since this story was posted yesterday (the original techcrunch story).
> That ceo probably spent all the money on cars and fancy vacations. So you both had parity in the end.

How so? Have spent money having a great time and having not received money are different things.
Your TopHat project looks very interesting
Maybe he was also an early adopter of beta-blockers?
Snippet:

The rule is worked out like this: you calculate the break-even relative interval (RI), and if it's less than five minutes you cache the data. The formula is:

RI = (Data pages per MB / IOPS per disk) x (price of disk / price per MB of RAM)

Went looking for illustrative charts, but only found some tables in a similar 2008 piece at http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1413264 - The Five-Minute Rule 20 Years Later: and How Flash Memory Changes the Rules, by Goetz Graefe

Some charts in the 1987 SIGMOD paper, http://books.google.com/books?id=7a48qSMuVcUC&pg=PA224 - The Five-Minute Rule Ten Years Later, and Other Computer Storage Rules of Thumb, by Jim Gray, Goetz Graefe. With color: ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/tr/tr-97-33.pdf
Awesome, I'm glad this is still alive somewhere. His writing really was great while it lasted.
Who's thrilled about Facebook's privacy crisis? Hollywood
"so we got another younger partner in his firm with seemingly the right pedigree – engineering degree, MBA, lots of boards, etc. But as we would find out the hard way – zero experience as an entrepreneur."

Do most (or even a majority of) venture capitalists have any experience as an entrepreneur? In India there are tonnes of VCs with just MBAs and no entrepreneurial experience at all. They fund mostly outsourcing companies so not much harm done. Still, makes me wonder..
I wouldn't be surprised if this held true for particular subjects that are generally thought of as "hard" as well. My favorite is mathematics. I used to have a really tough time with maths and used to hate it. Then, the smartest friend I have (who coincidentally did his PhD in financial mathematics with Freddy Delbaen back then -- for those who don't know this area, that means he was really good) once made an offhand remark along the lines of "Most people think of mathematicians as 'geniuses' -- if only. You have no idea how much you simply have to learn by heart and how much work it can be." That sort of pushed me over the edge and I started to re-learn mathematics from the ground up, starting with, yes, high-school material, working my way up with MIT OCW courses (http://ocw.mit.edu) and eventually being able to take PhD classes in statistics in the space of about 2-3 years (incl. periods of part- and full-time work). Not bad for a guy who couldn't tell the difference between cos and sine functions when he started. And all because I shed the notion of "math is for talented people" and started to actually work my ass off. It was surprisingly "easy" once I put in the work and I also noticed how shortcuts taken in one part would hurt me down the road later so it really was all about remaining disciplined.
I should of added to the title "major USA cities", but it would be interesting to see this same mapping for cities in other parts of the world. I'm sure the age of the city would play a huge part in how this mapping would look.
Nice design. You might want to revert more conventional design if you are trying to sell your skills/services to companies.
I think the causal link is the other way. Fear doesn't cause failure, impending failure causes fear and It's easy to be confident when it looks like you're going to succeed.
Did you have trouble running the VM?
Man this argument gets really old, particularly when you have to use some old crappy expensive analytics tool because "we don't want to give Google our data", or when corporate IT doesn't allow you to use Google docs (it's the same argument). Just cranky.
For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.
A page straight out of "It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be." Bought that a long time ago and betting it'd make for a good re-read thanks to this reminder.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0714843377
my atm (wells fargo) has quick select for 3 most used actions.

unfortunately, it has with-receipt and no-receipt versions of the same thing wasting a spot.
Royal Bank of Canada has a quick selection option. You configure how much cash you want, from which account, and if you want a printed receipt, then after you've entered your PIN you have a 'My Quick Cash' button.
Or... be careful about who you let see them. Allowing people to piggy back off of your exam answers devalues your own answers.

I'll admit that I have been keeping my ideas as secret as KGB operative but know that this is wrong. Is there a good consensus on how much to share? Should Web 2.0 stuff be kept quiet unless you start to develop? Truly innovative things that can't be easily reproduced in the idea stage?
Are there any online resume-building tools -- would anyone be interested in one?
I'd love to be able to dump all my past experience on a database somewhere, and have it generate various nicely formatted resumes for picking.
I think it would be more accurate to call it a Debian package dependency visualizer. I was expecting something related to linux kernel modules.
Because PG's realistic. Not a whole lot of non-iPhone mobile apps making money (or even gaining much traction) these days.
How about just getting bonus points from developers? That's a strong motivation, I do heaps of stuff to just get some extra bonus points from my wife, same principle. Neither sinister nor altruistic, just plain old what's-best-for-google.

And the way they aligned themselves with the web, what's-best-for-google tends to regularly be good for us too, although not always.
"[Y]ou're willing to play the game."

Although that brings up the question of "which game?" SarBox was the last nail in the coffin of the conventional IPO exit; with very rare "struck by lightening" exceptions that's just not in the cards anymore, and if it is it's something that will only come into play late in the game.

Nowadays a "flip" is most often (only???) a sale to another high tech company, which if they have a clue will want the people as much or more than the technology (which if they have a clue they know is nearly worthless without the people).

So, maybe this is mostly an obsolete thing for us to be worrying about. Sure, if you find yourself in a red hot company like Google or Facebook it'll come up, but it's sufficiently unlikely you probably don't have to wonder about it at all by default.

(This is a rather jarring thing for me, I started working in 1980 in the Boston area and therefor witnessed up close last two decades of the old VC/IPO game plus heard all about the go-go 70s minicomputer days. The fact that's all gone is hard to adjust to.)

Also, to get to this point the original founders may retain enough power and influence that it's less relevant.
Thanks! I guess I'm not trying to talk directly to other companies, the use scenario that I'm hoping for is that other coders would see something useful on the site and then refer me to their company. The other company would then look at the WaldenDesign.com site (where I work)... Do you think that makes sense?
I'm still amazed that a customer-focused bank doesn't run away with the other bank's lunch... (at least here Uruguay/SA)

I guess the barrier of entry is just too damned hard. I know I'm in a defeatist mood whenever I have to do business at a bank (and heaven forbid if it is a state-run bank - those have some convenient "soft" credits but so much bureaucracy that I'm seriously thinking an extra half percentage point can't be too bad in exchange for this bureoucratic hell)
funny story, i'm crazy n00b, but i'd love to jump in and do one, seriously. wanna show me the ropes on how to get started and maybe hold my hand a little bit while i do all the grunt work? :)
Thanks! It's actually something I have been using on client sites for almost 3 years in a simpler form. The company I work for specializes in SEO work, so it was important to have a menu solution that matched those goals.

I'll be working more on the project in the next few weeks, adding a test suite for it amongst other things.
Brad Feld and Fred Wilson are talking about different ways of handling the same challenging situation. They have enough experience not to get causality reversed here.
The Lottery Essay Can explain the Human Nature in Relation 
Writing the lottery essay requires psychological, sociological and other types of knowledge. Understanding the requirements, analyzing the questions and having an in depth knowledge of the subject will provide the students the information they need to write a good essay.
Dammit!
Wait! I haven't finished my coffee yet! There could still be a modicum of win...
Ruby: shallow copy surprise!
I'm actually looking for feedback on this. I know there are quite a few Ruby hackers hanging round HN.

Is there something I'm missing here? Some idiom that lets you side-step this problem? I'm questioning it because this problem/solution seems very much at-odds with the elegance and thoroughness of the rest of the language.
I would have thought that a place like MIT ran their on-campus wireless using encryption, which should make this kind of sniffing/snooping a bit more difficult.

Even our home wlan is encrypted. Weird. Is this by design?
I don't get what it is that you don't get.

The fear he has is that a Steve Jobs world is one in which the overall ecosystem for startups is significantly weaker than it would otherwise be. And the reason for that is that Apple will be a gate-keeper, and will be in a position to just take all of the most profitable ideas. It would be like how Microsoft dominated the world of desktop applications in the 1990s - not fun.

The question he was answering iPhone to was whether there exist, today, better business opportunities in the iPhone space or Android space. If you're going to target one, absolutely there are better profit opportunities in the iPhone space. It is kind of like how in the 1990s, despite Microsoft being a major bully in the Windows ecosystem, marketshare meant that there were still better business opportunities doing desktop applications for Windows than for Linux or Mac.

The two questions have little to do with each other.
Has anyone started the "You Own It" proxy server yet? A proxy server that you use to grab off a copy of everything of interest, ever comment you submit, ever photo you post, etc. Some sort of plugin thing to work with different websites, etc.

Not just a Facebook specific one, either.

I've had it in mind for a while now, surely someone has built it...? Or started?
I know; we just haven't been able to puzzle out what's wrong with it. For now, we have to live with it.

This was a while ago, but IIRC the slowdown was happening at a point in the boot process where logging wasn't helpful at all.
Why do you care about academic performance? Wouldn't your time be better spent on entrepreneurial endeavors?

BTW, it appears that fast thinkers are less likely to be creative people:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527535.500-a-slow-mi...
I don't really get the point of these surveys. All they do is quantify what we already know -- lots of people are using Perl, and most people get paid for that. In theory, if the survey asked what areas people were using Perl in, then grants could be given to shore up modules for the popular areas. But if people want to do that, they will do it anyway... and if nobody wants to do it, only someone very desperate for some spare change will do it, with results that match.

So other than liking to click stuff and look at data, I don't get it. It seems to me that if the Perl community stopped yelling, "no really, we aren't dead", everyone would stop thinking that.
I use on my router for WAN load balancing (2 outgoing links) because it is so much easier with pf than with iptables.
If reading it causes a paradigm shift that results in a sustainable productivity improvement or reduces fear, it's a net win.
Investments in that $100-$1M range are clearly not going to sustain any sort of major "founders pay themselves" use. Unless you need to bring a founder who's e.g. running out of personal resources up to ramen consumption level you're going to be using it for other things.

Here I'm strongly suspecting we're talking an 8 to 9 figure investment, else they wouldn't be able to sustain the "seasoned CEO" in the lifestyle he's grown accustomed to.
Because he wants business models for his startups which don't require (too much) miracles?
I've used it for a number of different purposes. I prefer it over everything else for firewalls and servers of almost any kind.
It would be cool if top hat and icebox had demos
I like the idea, but I'm hoping that the web based version of Balsamiq Mockups accomplishes this exactly.

The interface is so simple and they're a great company, so I'd much rather see them become the 'wireframe sketch' standard than a google docs template!
The Ardiuno is an awesome platform if you're new to the micro-controller world. IIRC, it's based on the ATmega168 and 328 (and 1280 for ArduinoMEGA).

Here are a few clones:

http://sanguino.cc/

http://www.ladyada.net/make/boarduino/

http://www.moderndevice.com/

http://store.fundamentallogic.com/ecom/index.php?main_page=p...

http://www.eauduino.org/

http://news.jeelabs.org/docs/jn4.html

http://dorkbotpdx.org/wiki/dorkboard (with Serial<->USB http://dorkbotpdx.org/wiki/benito)

And more kickass 'duinos:

http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardLilyPad

http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/blackwidow-10-p-613.html?cP...

I've tried building a few of these, and it's OK if you know what you're doing. (Plan to fry a few chips is you're a n00b.) Almost all chips don't have a bootloader yet, so you need to deal with that. For most of the stripped-down models, you also need a USB/Serial converter to load your bits.

Debugging shoddy solder jobs is a pain (I'm terrible at anything surface-mount), so I usually just use an Diecimila for prototyping and deal with custom stripped-down boards later. The chips straight-up are something like $4, so if you're doing volume later on it's worth building your own. The Diecimila has some nice built-in features, like a reset button, onboard LEDs for testing, 12V power jack, female headers for jumper wires, etc.

It's worth keeping a few of them around for rainy Saturdays. "Hey! I wonder if I can make my coffee pot a web server? Can it tweet when the brew is done? Hm..."
Well, in this case, it's just part of consistently sending the signal of "“Who the hell do you think you guys are. You’re just the founders.”

Truth in advertising and all that....
There is little point in trying to encrypt what is effectively public wifi.
Duh. But you can get pretty far on pure IQ. Every male in my family is a useless lazy sack, but we all have science PhDs.
Hence the emergence of open source licenses, no? Someone realized that if you give away your idea, someone else will just go an patent it; by enforcing the idea to stay open regardless of whose hands are holding it.

Is the Arduino not a good example of this (and OSS as well, but that's somewhat obvious)?
Ben Franklin would have understood the plight of Twitter clients
I just finished a course on integral calculus...one of my classmates said he put in 20-30 hrs/week and he ended up dropping the class - he just couldn't understand the problems and he was a terrible test taker. I put in a lot of work in the first month or so then the rest of the course sort of just sailed by. I guess my only point is, YMMV...
As far as I know, yes, it is by design.

MIT's philosophy toward just about everything is famously open.

- You can walk around in just about all of the buildings during the day, and many even at night without a special access card.

- A CS professor here was the one who founded OpenCourseWare, which helped ignite the fire that led to many universities putting their courseware up for free online)

- Course registration is amazingly relaxed, to the point where halfway through the semester it is common to hear a professor say "by the way, if you haven't signed up for this course, you probably need to as the deadline is approaching"

- MIT's network is not behind a NAT box.

In terms of internet access, this culture means that anyone within radio-range of MIT's campus gets free, unprotected WiFi. A very different reception than you get at that other school down the street cough. :)

(Of course, the flip side of this is that you are responsible for your own security).

EDIT: I also remember during grad student orientation, the campus police representative explicitly told the auditorium full of new students: "The Cambridge homeless community is part of the MIT community, too. Just because you don't have a home doesn't mean you are not welcome here, so if you see someone who appears homeless on MIT campus, treat them with the respect they deserve." Approximate quote, since this was 2 years ago, but I was pretty blown away at the culture here from day 1.
I've done some of my own wireless sniffing on campus. I didn't actually realize it's a federal crime to do so. Oops.
We are not consumers
All the friends I actually talk to were autosubscribed :OD

While it was a huge loss for privacy when they actually did it, (and seemed more like not thinking than anything else), once I turned on settings to block people, it was easy, everyone was there, and already using it.
Good point! I was actually planning on setting up github pages for them that would link directly the the code off the master branch. That's definitely something I will get to in the next few days.

Tophat is actually running the menus on the website right now as well...
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2689166/1259396035302.jpg =)
Issues Linux game developers face: a post-mortem from the creators of Osmos
I used to use Prolog a lot on R&D projects at SAIC but since becoming a consultant, few customers have wanted work done in Prolog (it has been about 5 years since anyone has paid me to do Prolog).

Prolog is awesome for some types of problems like graph operations, ad-hoc rule systems, planning, etc.

If you want to play/learn, I would recommend Swi-Prolog. Jan Wielemaker does a great job writing and maintaining Swi-Prolog. The semantic web libraries and other Swi-Prolog libraries are very good stuff!
NoSQL In The Wild: How We Do It at Tekpub
This comment makes an interesting point: http://blog.gingertech.net/2010/05/20/vp8-adobe-is-the-key-t...

"Patents are about _details_ so the mere fact that something does something like something else, isn’t necessarily something at all.

As we’ve pointed out before, many codec patents are exceptionally easy to work around: They specify every little detail because it makes it _much_ easier to get through the examination but doesn’t harm the patent’s ability to read on the final standard because the standard specifics exactly the patented behaviour.

D_S, for all his undeniable H.264 experience isn’t an expert on patents or even the H.264 patents. We can assume that in cases where VP8 looks similar to H.264 those would have been exactly the cases where care was taken to differ in the right places. I’d expect the primary risks for VP8 to be anywhere _but_ there."
I just wanna say my comment here was sincere. I am fine w/being down-voted. But I don't want the author to think I was mocking.

I seriously like this site.
Russia's Slick Internet Repression Makes China's Look Clumsy By Comparison
I don't think this is workable. First off, it means that everyone requires a single, authoratative identity on the web, which search engines and content grabbers can reference. Second, there's nothing in it for the search engines/content grabbers. Any service that gives people sweeping power to delete content is at a disadvantage to those who don't. And third, there are plenty of good reasons why you can't lay claim to everything on the web that involves you. Say, for arguments sake, that we're just talking about photos. Suppose I take a great photo and you're in it. Now I upload that photo. My 2015 photo sharing site uses facial recognition, and it appears on your list of personal data. Now what if you don't like my pic? Should the photo sharing site take it down? What if I don't even know you, but you happened to be walking in front of a public landmark on the day you said you were off sick? In fact, what if I'm a photojournalist?
An Analysis of UK Parliamentary Language: 1935-2010 (lots of graphs)
Yeah, the

def foo(a=None):

if a==None:

a=[]

a.append(123)

Is odd to get used to.
The story behind this is that there was an article in Scientific American in the early nineties featuring Clifford Pickover's procedural computer graphic images of "alien life forms". These consisted mainly of a series of spheres along a path: http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/high.jpg

In the article, he said that these graphics were generated on special hardware, and that such images would be "impossible" on commodity PCs. Naturally, this chafed several people in the demoscene -- who set out to prove him wrong, in real-time.
Unicode was fixed....in the newest version of the language. All of us just need to switch to that unfortunately.
One of the best lines in the AMC series Mad Men is when the senior partner, Bert Cooper, says to Don Draper "Philanthropy is the gateway to power".
I think the situation with web languages and technologies is vaguely like the situation with C++ in one particular way: It isn't that they're really good, it's more that they've been around so long, evolving at glacial pace, and there is such a huge community compelled to use them, that we've collectively figured out how to make them passably effective.

If I were designing a web application platform on purpose, major design criteria might be: 1) data and apps hosted remotely, 2) discoverable apps/services, 3) hypertext-style linking of resources, 4) ability to fully exploit client CPU and GPU power for UI, and for compute where appropriate, 5) consistency with common desktop UI concepts (like drag/drop), 6) flexibility in languages and developer tools, allowing for compiled, statically checked languages for those who like them. With the current web, I think we have 1-3, but not 4-6. (I think I would trade the enforced niceties of HTML/CSS for more flexibility in the UI.)
That's one of the most understated advice. Quite often managers like to see lots of code, or developers have screwed up incentives and get payed by the lines of code. If a manager walks by, their heart gladdens when they see you banging on the keboard like mad -- to them that equals to "work being done". They fail to realize that sometimes that equals to "more un-necessary garbage added to the existing pile of code" that will eventually make the product unstable, brittle and hard to maintain.

Sitting there with a notepad and a pencil thinking about the problem is when I find I actually solve the difficult problems not when I type furiously at a keyboard.
If he struggled that much with integral calc the cause is likely a poor foundation in High-school level mathematics.