skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Someone fired from all their jobs is probably going to be a menace later in some form or fashion.
>Someone who ended all their relationships on bad terms is going to end on bad terms with you.

This was an important lesson for me recently. I had a friend I was spending quite a lot of time with, and was discussing starting businesses with. One day it dawned on me that there was not one job, friendship or relationship this person had not ended, usually badly. Then I realised that I was just about their only current friend, which made me realise this person eventually fell out with all their friends. Seeing the writing on the wall I staged a gradual withdrawal, and remain friendly but not friends.
A botnet can dig through improperly-sanitized binary data in RAM/swap to find cipher keys. 500 CPU-years per day can do a lot of computation.
What language are your source files in?

Python, Ruby, Scheme, Lua, and CoffeeScript should all be supported (but it doesn't play nice with /* */ style JS, just //).

All code comments that are on their own line should become documentation on the left, for example:

# This should become docs
def this_is_the(code):
...

Take a look at the raw file on github, and compare it to the generated file: http://github.com/fitzgen/pocco/blob/master/pocco
I think it's pretty obvious that Kin is ignorant of the current landscape but Windows Phone 7 is at least cognizant of it. The chances for success are still slim, but they're at least a little better.
What's funny (sad) is whoever maintains the official Kin twitter account was unaware as of an hour before the news broke: http://www.twitter.com/kin/status/17438337303

I bet thats going to be one interesting event in San Antonio tomorrow
TopCoder, where you can challenge others and win prizes: http://www.topcoder.com/

SPOJ: http://www.spoj.pl/
I agree with every single point in this comment. pclark: you read my mind.
Job Search sans Resume's, add social media
If Microsoft deliver WinPhone 7 as planned, the market share it gains will most likely be taken from Android.
I have to say, this is utter garbage. Or, it's an interesting concept poorly thought out and implemented.

You get "a point" for having a significant other or a serious relationship? Well, what if your significant other (like my wife) is a very smart person you can bounce ideas off of, and makes enough money on their own to pay all your basic bills and living expenses (also canceling out your +1 for a mortgage drag point)?

And you get 1 point for every 5 years after 20? Maybe make 30 the baseline there, but really that whole calculation is just off. When I'm hiring someone at a startup I tend to cringe at the 25-and-under crowd with startup stars in their eyes and no experience. THEY are drag on the organization because the majority of them don't know how to work independently and don't know what the company is supposed to look like in 5 years, so they lack a lot of vision and understanding (sorry if this offends anyone reading this, but I've always advocated that people get some real-company experience BEFORE joining a startup).

I can see how the kids thing might cramp things a bit (in theory I guess, I don't have any kids, so no real experience there).

I also wouldn't recommend that someone rush into their next venture after something else winds down or blows up (as the author of this article did). That seems like a great formula for making poor decisions, fighting some invisible ticking clock.

Ugh. I hope nobody actually takes this article too much to heart.
darn. best of luck! if you ever get something that can be done remotely and ideally involves C/Python embedded dev, feel free to ping me
Well, there is failing, and then there is failing. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy Danger and create the Kin, and they are cancelling it only a few weeks after release. This is beyond embarassing for a company with the size and history of Microsoft. The people who managed this project had absolutely no clue what they were doing. Many, many heads should roll over this.
It's all about how you do it.

I think the consensus is to fail small and fail often.

Actually, scratch that, it should be: prototype often, so to keep failures small and easy to rebound from.

Regardless, you do not want to spend countless hours and dollars bringing a product to market only to realize it was a failure 3 weeks later. That's a rookie "big company with lots of money" mistake that Microsoft should have outgrown decades ago.

To quote Jason Fried on failure: "You might know what won’t work, but you still don’t know what will work. That’s not much of a lesson."

After all their success, Microsoft should know better.
Mozilla's Firefox Sync client submitted to Apple App Store
Some times it pays better to be the big fish in a small pond (find niche markets that you can dominate.)

Be careful with the "we only need 1% of the market to make millions." You can fool yourself into thinking getting that 1% will be easy. Depending on the product, the sales channel is different. Focus on how many customers you can get to the top of your sales funnel. You loose a certain % of customers along the funnel and you end up with a certain number of paying customers. Even if the market is 5 million people, if you only get 100 in your sales funnel, then that is an issue.

If you are going with Adwords, there are pretty standard conversion rates you can follow to figure out how many customers you need to look at your product in order to earn X dollars a month.

If you have expensive product that requires a salesperson, then find out how many deals can get done in a day/month/year. Even if the market is big, but sales are slow, it doesn't matter in the end.
To be fair to MS, a lot of the device's failure is on the carrier side - they're charging grown-up smartphone plan pricing for what amounts of a kid device. This was doomed from this fact alone - regardless of how great or shitty the phone itself turned out.

The real failure here is having gone and built this whole shebang without securing the pricing side first.
Outstanding issue. I've really enjoyed this zine of yours, it's really well put together. I agree that maybe you should charge more and add a subscription model, we want you to get something out of it as well :)
I bet there's more to this than just a product failure. Why admit defeat so quickly and publicly? Even if the product itself was doomed to be a failure the timing is really suspicious. Why not just ignore the Kin for the next few months and quietly kill it only when WM7 is on the market? It's almost like they were looking for an excuse to kill the project and a few weeks of bad sales was a good enough reason.
Does it? How exactly do you determine Tesla is cheap (or expensive)?

The business is set to lose $120M this year and according to the prospectus for the stock that I'm flipping through - they are basically betting their future on the $60K model working out.

I'm not saying Tesla isn't a buy, but what I am saying is that the company is next to impossible to value. So when the author says it is good to wait till the company has proven itself a bit - I think he means when we can get an inkling of what kind of money they will earn which is probably after the $60K model comes out.

Being able to value what you're buying is what gets you from speculating to investing.
Great breakdown.

I tried something simpler once, trying to map str.format() to a binary operator in Py3k.

http://github.com/jcsalterego/py3k-atsign

Needless to say it didn't pass the python-ideas (or was that python-dev?) mailing list trial, mostly because it produced ambiguities that plagued the % operator, which prompted this new str method in the first place.
The problem is that these questions really should be tailored to the company's details because that's how the decisions are made. YC sets up C corps so they can easily issue shares to VC. They would probably retain the cash as a part of the agreements with the VC to spend on growing the business. If that's not your plan, then alternative organization might make sense and will eliminate some of your tax fears. Also, if you have more of a lifestyle type business, then distributions would make sense. Do you start to see how the intent and details change the advice? Talking to someone when you are setting something new up or having a major change makes sense. That said, don't worry too much about the taxes. If you are so worried about not giving the government a cut that you don't make money, then you lost the point. What is it specifically that you want to know here? Details are what you need to give to get the advice you are looking for.
It's deeper than that. Taking time off, clearing your head, and enjoying other parts of life can allow your mind to relax and will often lead to better overall productivity.

Everybody has this idea that for a startup to be successful EVERYBODY must be thinking/working only on that business for the 4 hours a day that they are not asleep. I do not believe that argument.
Chronon, an actual Time Travelling Debugger for Java
Hard to know if this is the carrier's fault, or Microsoft's for making a phone that consumes enough bandwidth etc. that carriers need to charge high rates to recoup their costs, without providing enough value to the end customer to justify the rates from his/her perspective.
They want you to use Quickbooks (or any other software they request) because they don't want to have a learning curve. It's your business, so find someone that is willing to work with you. Besides a few laws in physics, everything is negotiable.
The 'official' youtube video announcing this is great as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnCHCcveteA
One of the best corporate statements I've ever seen :)
Wesabe Shuts Down
Awesome++! I've already got the Duemilanove board so this will give me a reason to but the BT shield. The possibilities are endless. Also add Processing (http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Interfacing/Processing) and sky's the limit.
Agreed here, too. Been dollar cost averaging into F for the last few months.

I chuckle at amateur investors who too-seriously try to time the market or perform technical analysis. I just bought it because I'm young, have an abundance of dispoable income, my most recent cars have been sports sedans (Volvo then BMW) and I find much of the Ford product lineup supremely attractive.
I disagree completely.

With the always-connected social features they want on the phone, there is really no alternative plan pricing.

Their failure was in capturing market, or more precisely, the lack thereof. There was simply no market for a half-smartphone like the kin, that wasn't really good at being a simple "dumbphone", and not even as "smart" as a last generation iphone which costs about the same.

With the iPhone 3GS going for $99, and a handy selection of decent featurephones available for free depending on carrier sales, anyone with half a brain would know there is no market for something like the kin. At least not now of all times.
The article's author overstates the meaning of these results. (1) It doesn't take into account financial aid (e.g., the average actual price paid by students), and merely reflects the sticker price. This likely means that the top schools, which are quite generous with their financial aid, are being undervalued... BUT (2) On the other hand, it has no ability to disentangle correlation from causation. Viz, perhaps those who got into those colleges would have done quite well even had they decided not to apply there. This "study" has no ability to answer that question, and therefore has no real ability to evaluate ROI - the main thing they claim to have evaluated.

Don't get me wrong, these numbers are fascinating, but the claims made in the article about what these numbers demonstrate are completely fallacious.
And the MS management should have known this had failure written all over it. Most of the people I know in the office have teenage kids that want an iPhone more than anything in the world, and their parents are not going to buy it for them. Why would any sane business plan include "we're going to market this to teenagers who'll have to beg their parents for the money to buy it"?
And they also get faster with every release.

A very high quality product, indeed.
Gossip suggests that the people in charge of the WP7 team were never happy with the Kin project existing at all. They always wanted it killed and absorbed into WP7 - the Kin's poor reception just convinced top management to finally grant them their wish.
There is Code Quarterly, which I think is coming Real Soon Now.
There is nothing wrong with trying and failing; instead, the problem a lot of us saw with Kin was focus.

From the limited samples we've seen, Windows Phone 7 seemed like a fairly competent response to the iPhone and Android. Whether MS can sell mobile os licenses in an age where Android is available to OEMs for free is an open question, but they seemed to be intensely focused on making it work.

And then Kin was announced seemingly out of nowhere. Suddenly MS had two, nonrelated mobile strategies. That Kin directly competed with the same OEMs that are the customers of the other mobile OS made the move seem even stranger.

This same story played out in the online music store business. Microsoft released the Zune and Zune Store in direct competition with their vendor-agnostic solution. The two platforms were mishandled to the point where the DRM on the mp3 files were incompatible. By splitting the focus on the company, they couldn't articulate a clear strategy and ended up ceding the market to Apple.

An op-ed from a former MS executive described the company as a collection of little kingdoms, constantly battling among each other, to the point where the only impression is one of chaos. Their mobile strategy is turning into the perfect example.
Rails 3- Building a Blog - Part 2: CRUD Show and Create
In MySQL, you can set the SQL mode to make it just as strict as Postgres.

How much are you inclined to trust this mode which was bolted on as an afterthought, though?

I'm maintaining a bunch of MySQL installs for customers and the amount of random failures I've seen even with InnoDB and strict mode during backup/restore and upgrades is just not funny.

Obscure second guesses during even a minor version upgrade are the rule rather than the exception. 'mysql_upgrade' hardly ever worked right for me at first try. A straightforward dump/restore is not an option either because they change the schema of the system tables all the time (which, to add insult to injury, are still MyISAM).

Then you also frequently bump into gems like the following:

Incompatible change: As of MySQL 5.5.3, the server includes dtoa, a library for conversion between strings and numbers by David M. Gay. In MySQL, this library provides the basis for improved conversion between string or DECIMAL values and approximate-value (FLOAT/DOUBLE) numbers.

Because the conversions produced by this library differ in some cases from previous results, the potential exists for incompatibilities in applications that rely on previous results. For example, applications that depend on a specific exact result from previous conversions might need adjustment to accommodate additional precision.
(From: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/upgrading-from-previo...)

Oh, and don't get me started on what they call "replication", which will happily, silently desync or corrupt data in various situations.

So well, yeah. Perhaps strict mode indeed works right in all cases. Perhaps.
No you have missed the point, and out of all the comments, I can't let this mistake go. You make the decisions to do what you want to do, and those decisions -- what you do, your decisions -- is the essence of your existence.

Every minute you make new choices, do new things, and those choices and actions are your life. The things you do, the decisions and actions you take, even if nothing more than decisions to be happy under miserable circumstances, constitute your life. You own them, and by continuing to take ownership and dancing above the chasm, you live fully.

We must imagine Sisyphus happy.
I'm sure the remaining employees appreciate your keeping the company afloat.
Perhaps you were not the proximate cause...
Bryan Allen, creator of "The Lightning Catchers" image used:

"Please excuse the watermark. It won't appear on your poster. Stealing this picture had become sport for many. Illegal copies have appeared on no less than a bootleg Pink Floyd CD and even an FBI web page. Go figure. Does one sue the FBI or just smile and move on?"

http://www.bryan-allen.com/Posters/TheLightningCatchersPoste...
Since there was never a third-party developer platform associated with Kin, they can kill it without pissing off developers as much as killing off Windows or the Xbox would.
Yep, this is really cool. I don't remember what it was called, but didn't Sun do something like this, where the JVM basically interfaced directly with Xen?

I see exokernels as the future, but I'm slightly biased, as I'm involved with one...
Unfortunately, a client/server model still does not solve all of our concurrency problems. The problem is that the algorithm we're running--contributing a handful to text responses to the same repository--is very simple. But more complicated algorithms--say, if you're Google for instance, looking for a few words in billions of documents--need significantly more expertise to be correct (and perform well on top of that!).

It's certainly feasible to imagine that single-threaded performance will improve to the point that parallelism will no longer be "necessary" (although many people have observed that, with Moore's Law no longer yielding the performance improvements it did just a few years ago, this may be too far out). However, applications arise and expand to fill whatever performance we have available. By achieving parallel performance gains, we'll enable things that weren't possible before, no matter how good single-threaded performance is. Also important is the distinction between parallelism and concurrency: many domains need multiple threads for reasons that have nothing to do with performance! A database server, for instance, needs to service many requests concurrently; it can't function correctly in a "single-threaded" world.
> It's better that companies take high quality BSD/MIT licensed code instead of reinventing the wheel by creating their own crappy implementation.

This is why all of my friends and I distribute code under a BSD compatible license rather than the GPL. Well said.
"Related Questions": tokenize => random hash/project (tokens) => TD-IDF => KD-tree lookup

"automatically infer tag": tokenize / shingle q&a, ORDER token+bigrams BY TF-IDF(token + bigrams)

In both cases a global IDF estimate can be held in memory using a Counting Bloom Filter (or a traditional solr index).
A long bet is not speculation. Nobody knows whether Tesla is going to fail or not. But since it's an IPO you can 'bet' that is the best price to buy in the long term.

And for me speculation is buying BP's stock.
So how does the "5 points for every 5 years above 20" stack up against the fact that most successful founders are in their 30s?

Seems like a 20-year-old's idealised conceptions of founding start-ups.
Or change your feature extractors :)
It's not disingenuous. When I was speaking "proprietary" I wasn't referring to Cygnus but rather to RedHat and other complete system distribution firms. Internally, they maintain a great deal of infrastructure to smooth the assembly of complete distributions. They maintain that proprietary infrastructure to have a competitive advantage. They decline to assist public projects with that assembly of a complete system.

That is there right, under law and free software licensing terms. Nevertheless, it is a wrong in the sense that they are refusing to help the community who has so benefited them, and actively attempting to keep the larger community from self-organizing to eliminate the need for that closely held infrastructure. These firms sing a song about the benefits of community cooperation but they do not practice what they preach. They take free labor from others. They give back labor in areas that are strategic to them. But they withhold labor that would actually advance software freedom in substantial ways.
Ask HN: Can you recommend a good free CRM?
My company has been looking for a good CRM solution, preferably hosted and haven't been very happy with the ones that we've seen.

Does anybody know of a good one, free or low-cost, that we can start out with?
This is an interesting point, though what we have with Android is something slightly different in that there's a certain degree of individual vendor responsibility to provide updates for your device as needed. Thus vendors will compete on a few different fronts:

* Hardware. I.e. design, reliability, technical specifications
* Commitment. E.g. providing firmware updates
* Marketing.
* Icing. By this I mean the vendor's "above and beyond" software offerings, such as a more polished UI, add on software packages, etc.

I have to admit that I find Android exciting as an economical experiment. I am not, however, an Android device user. For me Apple's relentless attention to detail has kept me captive (for now).
How about 1 point for every 50k you've made in salary so far.
Have you considered that it is probably valid perl? ;)
Very cool presentation.
Canonical did the same thing with Launchpad for five years before finally releasing the whole thing, including the build system (which was expected to be kept proprietary).
I'm guessing that back when the project started it wasn't terribly clear what their main phone OS would even be. Given how uncertain things were, they probably figured letting a couple different teams try a couple different approaches would give them a better chance of stumbling on something that worked.
"A Game By Its Cover" Competition on TIGSource
I've been using http://karmacrm.com and I like it so far. A little minimal on functionality, but good for now (and for free). Not yet sure how I'll feel when they try to convert me to a paid account(which they've disclosed up front is on the way sometime soon).
Yeah, but it's a cute way to kill time while awaiting Knuth's announcement.
Looks like it might be a nice app. I wonder if Chrome will ever be released for iOS?

I've been using a 3rd-party web browser on iPad called "Atomic Web" and it is pretty nice. Of course it uses the WebKit engine to render, but it has ad-block, real tabs, privacy mode, and can do user-agent switching to make mobile websites render properly. For 99 cents it's a worthy purchase.
VA hospital may have infected 1,800 veterans with HIV
Not quite. Most stocks don't have 50x potential. (I'm not saying that Tesla does.)
The author's characterization of leadership sounds to me a lot like clinical depression. This isn't altogether surprising to me, as I keep stumbling upon pieces of research or philosophy suggesting that depression has an evolutionary purpose. I think the essential property is that a depressive isn't able to ignore important problems the way a normal, functional person is able to, especially long-term problems. The hitch is being able to address those problems, rather than being overwhelmed by them.
I really don't think news.arc is a good medium for something like this -- you might as well have hosted it using an Enterprise CRM.
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/ or http://www.nasa.gov/news/index.html
> If you are a small business or a freelancer you have a lot of small projects each into a separate repository.

You should check http://RepositoryHosting.com . 6/mo buys you unlimited repositories and users, git/hg/svn, SSL, etc.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=885481 for a good selection
Wow, what a grand vision. Who wouldn't like every application to be like emacs?

When I am done building my ferris style open source web and video game empire, I'll be focusing on stuff like that.
I love this, thanks! I do miss the epub version that was available with issue #1. I'm happy to even pay for it.