skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems like a fabulously awful marketing message. Every time they say it, they concede that Google offered superior search quality up until now. If they're going to compete on features, like "entertainment search" or pretty front pages, they should neutralize the concern about results quality, not turn it into the entire horse race.
I'm right with you when it comes to dealing with people on an individual basis.

I think his approach makes more sense if he has to weed through 1000 resumes submitted by total strangers, and since he doesn't have the time to zoom in too much on all 1000 of them, he would like some heuristic for narrowing them down to say only 100 or so. Applying a stereotype or thinking in general terms can be a useful filter to achieve that result.

But yes, it's going to also filter out some people who would have been a great fit. This is another argument in favor of the 37Signals approach, because the Big Dumb Companies can disproportionately suck up the Good School types whereas the Small Smart Startups can disproportionately suck up the "Gets Things Done But Went To Bad Schools Or None At All" types. And they complement each other in the hiring ecosystem. It all works out in the end! :)

And yes, I am speaking in broad brush stokes here, and there are exceptions for every rule.
I guess so. I must be missing how this thing works.
> I'm mildly shocked that someone gets the title of CTO these days and doesn't have home internet access.

To me it's like asking if you should go ahead and get running water and electricity:-)
An apartment. Don't know the neighbors.

That may be a good compromise though. Thanks for the suggestion.
You should be able to get a month-to-month contract by paying an extra $10-$15/mo.
Being the one that wrote this article and press release, maybe I can help people understanding the issue.

Basically, AOL send us a mail last summer asking us to ask for an API key for their new API, and the license was just fuckingly amazingly blocking for everything related to open source. More detail can be asked, if needed.

So anyway, 1.0.0 was just out, so it was quite impossible to comply, since people would be able to use the shoutcast plugin from 1.0.0 in all 1.0.x versions of VLC, since we keep modules API/ABI during a whole cycle. Therefore useless...

So, we waited for the 1.1.0 release to remove the module. And make a fuss about it. Of course, we could have talked to them before, but of course, nothing would have happened then, since big corporation only care about bad press... And moreover, the license was so fking blocking that we didn't even see where the point was.

Finally, we have a complete extensions framework which means that now people can write their own scripts in lua to do exactly the same, without asking us :D

I hope this explains a bit more, don't hesitate to contact me if you want a bit more than a "funny" press release...
That is part of his strategy, by publishing the ideas in his blog the ideas are now in the public domain and therefore not patentable. IBM used to publish a quarterly magazine with details of inventions they didn't think worthy of patenting so that others then could not patent them:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Technical_Disclosure_Bullet...
Moving all adult sites to the .xxx tld might help cut down on the false positives from content filters. But it sure could turn into a legislative nightmare.
Thanks. $10 for 100MB, $60 for 5GB is not a bad deal!
They had to have known about this problem. They just decided to sell it anyhow knowing people would buy it, regardless.
The problem is how close my data is to being a web page now.

I feel like all that private data is one click away from being public. Anyone passing by my computer can right click and change a folder to a web page, when they get back to their PC, download everything.

At least before there was somewhat of a barrier, though narrow, it was there.

Do the "linked" files at least get a new bold icon with a globe on it or something so I know it's public. Do I get an email when a folder is made public? Something? What if a malicious script is run on my computer that just makes everything public in my Dropbox folder?
App Creep and the Case for the Mobile Browser
Hey it puts all the bad stuff in one place right...
I'd like a feature where I can hit one button to grant a +1 vote to everything said by a particular user within a given thread, without even necessarily reading it beforehand. It would save me a lot of time regarding tptacek today. :)
Novel Uses Gaming Tech to Make Business Simulations for Companies
What has open source software to do with consulting? What kind of consulting can you do if you are a developer for the Gimp?
It's implied because unless you live in poverty or are 85 years or older, it's kind of weird to not have the internet at home, whether or not you're the CTO of a tech company.
We have iPhones (which the company pays for), and with iOS4, tethering is only $20 more / month.

Though the idea of giving AT&T any more money makes me grumpy, that may be an explorable option.
Methane in Gulf high enough to deplete oxygen and create a dead zone
Obama to Medvedev: Throw away red phones for Twitter
Wow, Steve Jobs even stole the black turtleneck look from Adele Goldberg!
Posterous has balls, good for them
I think you should want to be accessible at home. You're part of a startup -- it's a lifestyle. And it's hard. How much would it cost your company if something died at 5:01PM, and you couldn't fix it for 16 hours? Would you feel perfectly fine in telling them, "sorry, I wasn't on duty so I fixed it when I got in"?

And 100% the company should pay for it. 110%, actually.
BTW when I first moved to NYC, I used to do this with the tethering hack and it works pretty well.
Going back in time: A peek in to Cairo and how Microsoft plans Windows (1993)
Foreign function calls are a good thing to support. R does this well and lots of R routines already call C or Fortran libraries.

Domain specific languages are good (and fun). Interacting with open source developers can be an awesome expersience. I agree.

I just don't see R as a platform that can integrate tightly with other business systems. It's a user oriented tool. If there are use cases out there that disprove this. It would be interesting to hear about. Especially as we move into the era of "big data".
I have no credit history, not even student loans. I can't even get $1000 dollar car loan.
World Will Feel the Drag of Europe’s Austerity
CTIA CEO on Tomi Ahonen’s “outrageous & factually incorrect statements”
The killing fields: chimpanzees wage war for new territory
I totally agree. Unless you're a business with an established coolness-factor, you're stuck with contacts and trawling through resumes.
it seems that he actually types his posts on a typewriter and scans
Can't you use credit cards?
If that were true - and the author of this silly sad little finger-wagging essay were right about the horrible hidden meaning of Allie's hilarious cartoons - then Dilbert itself should have heralded the end of economy, jobs, and the world altogether!

Please, please develop a sense of humor. Please.

Humans have been stupid and irresponsible all throughout history - only now we can admit it. And laugh at it. And grow up.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the war room.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=999999999999999-9999999...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(5+MBps)*(2+hours)
But I think both the blog, and leveraging it, and Rails, and leveraging that, are both exactly a part of what they've been telling people: here's how you can bootstrap, it's what we did, and it could work for you too. Releasing Rails was a way to capitalize on some internal work they did anyway. The audience for one product can be directed to another one, and vice versa. One big happy growing snowball effect.
Is it really, really so bad to wait a couple days or weeks longer to get your precious fucking iPhone?

I hate queuing in general, but this is the kind of line-waiting that literally makes no sense at all to me.
What if you're a "pretty good" developer, or a "great" developer? Why is there only ever a market for "awesome" developers?
Historically, as with feudal society, hasn't the government itself been a major source of elite abusers? And today, see the military industrial complex, corporatism, or the prison industrial complex (e.g. California prison guard unions).

In my opinion, placing your faith in either elites or government is a mistake. Rather, the goal is to create a decentralized system of accountability, whereby the interplay of forces punish and deter foul play. Government is a player in that, so are the elites, so are we.
It's a web service that only marketers running certain ads on a single ad platform would need, I know there's not that many people doing things this way.

At the same time, since my target audience was so well defined, I could quickly build a service that would do exactly what they need compared to broader, non specialized services.
It's like the iPhone (or the Mac, for that matter). No one knew they wanted a better search, until an obviously superior search comes along.

So I wouldn't say it's hopeless for Bing at all. There are so many ways that search could be different from Google's current results...
Um, I'm loving the Apps. Have you only been using the Ovi store? The real good apps are in maemo-extras.

Unlike the iPhone, n900 apps are not just gimmicky website remakes or games, they're actually incredibly powerful and useful.

Here's an interesting summary about it: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3764/two-omap-3430-phones-noki...
Well, that's something you may want to work on fixing, but probably not for this project. (Secured credit card is pretty much where you have to start for that)

As for the website, how much capital are you talking about and why do you need it for the iPhone app specifically?
The problems seem to arise from covering the seams so as to say where the frame pieces are connected. If the seam is not covered or touched by hand, there should be no drop in the network. Seems like the antenna's shorting out when the seam is covered by hand.

A small piece of scotch tape should do the job as far as avoiding this problem goes until one can get hold of a cover
Shafi is a mathematician/computer scientist, and Jepsen and Ellsworth are not programmers - they are engineers!

Go engineers! Our wrists hurt less!
Yes, without a doubt. Shit will happen and you need to be able to get on it immediately. Odds are getting to the office would take too long. I definitely understand the need for downtime. It's crucial. I'd try to find some way to close off the computer, so you only access it when YOU need it.
There's one in every thread.
In war of words, blogging platform Posterous takes preposterous swipe at Tumblr
Thanks, I didn't know about his background (I had checked his profile/web pages but didn't see anything about the HFT stuff). The hilarious (perhaps stubborn) thing is that I still don't weight his information very highly.
Okay, I realise we are reeling with the whole "What? This person doesn't want Internet at home??", but let's forget about the internet thing.

The issue is, as I understand it, that you don't want to be on call 24/7. So the decision tree seems fairly simple:

A. Do you need someone on call 24/7 (i.e. is the difference between 97% and 100% uptime significant in your business)

B. Can somebody else be your out-of-ours support person?

If the answer is Yes and No, you are stuck. Get the Internet already.

If you have trouble evaluating A, go to your users. Ask "would you like feature X or better uptime?" (Never ask an open question like "would you like more uptime", as that doesn't allow you to establish its value - what idiot would say no?)

If your users require better uptime AND you cannot find someone to provide it AND switching off at home is important to your sanity, you need another job.
New blog engine idea
This is my first "post" here and i wish not a last. Also please don't blame me for my english.
In 2009 i start to learn Rails and this is not surprise -> i start to write my blog engine. it looks like a simple blog with basic functionality (posts/custom-fields/tags/categories/users/roles)
And some idea come to my mind.
Lets imagine what you have friend with cross interests, like ruby or any others.
And you want to keep your readers about this man and his posts about ruby. So, you send invite to his blog and get back answer. If your request will be accepted -> your readers will see new posts from your friend. You can configure : full posts or only first part or only link like twitter.
This will create a relationships between many blogs.
It's like track-back in wp, but track-back is only tech side of this. Because this is Friendly blogging.
So, what you think?
'Why?' is almost certainly industries and culture attracting young migration differently by gender. New York has more media, entertainment, fashion, art. Also, NYC has more rigid and easy-to-read hierarchies of male success -- in finance, law, big corporations, media fame -- for women looking to land conventional 'big game'.
yeah, if my website happened to be in django, I'd still be happy to hire great developers who haven't happened to work with django before. is this the new java certified?
If you guys like using R for statistics, you should definitely try S/S-PLUS ;-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_%28programming_language%29
> If you look at some of the stats people are posting, it's the
> compression that takes the most time, not the decompression

5 vs. 11 seconds. Worse than 2x slower decompression:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1458697

If you have to wait minutes to download the files it doesn't matter, but if you already have the file locally it is very annoying.

Also if this is used extensively on projects with a large server deployment this matters even more related to latency and energy consumption. That's why Google has their own compression algorithms derived from BMDiff and LZW (Zippy.) Think about it. Speed matters.
Ron Wayne - The Man Who Sold 10% of Apple for $800
I live in NYC and can think of three reasons.

(1) There are a lot of colleges and non-engineering schools traditionally skew in favor of women

(2) NYC is very gay friendly

(3) The women here are exceptionally beautiful, setting the standards very high, messing up market efficiency
I'd label it natural selection in an artificial situation.

Artificial selection would be, as you said, explicitly done by humans (ie, selectively killing / breeding to get the desired traits).

How else to put it... humans often choose by traits, regardless of their efficiency. Nature chooses by individuals / efficiency, often regardless of a specific trait.
Money back or a working device. That’s what you should get, not buying some crappy case.
I guess my biggest fear would be to find a "fanboy". Is there some kind of screening process for that?

I love django just as much as the next guy but no technology is the end all.
The reasons for migration to cities are always economic. There are more jobs "for women" in NYC.
This experiment was exposed on Richard Dawkins' "The Greatest Show on Earth", highly recommended read for those interested in learning more on evolution.
They’ll go through admin approval before going live, to prevent abuse, and then they’ll improve the text parser for everyone.
how about something simpler: guppies with A/B/C/1/2/3 on them, to help in those important decision-making processes. Just chuck in a predator, and choose the last one, because it's clearly the best! You can even tell your shareholders that your decisions are made not only with nature in mind, but by nature itself!
Between this article and the men's one, Ada Lovelace definitely wins the best dressed contest.
I suspect the YCombinator usage is iffy. YCombinator don't give advice on visas, but rather suggest you speak to YC alumni who've done it. While I'm sure there are many reasons why they take that approach, I wouldn't be surprised if the legality was a big reason.

Saying that many developers both for startups and for other industries like finance do go to the US and work 2-3 months without any issue. It's not clearly allowed, but nor is it clearly disallowed.

The reason people suggest speaking to an attorney is that if you screw it up, not only will you get deported but you can be banned from re-entry not only to that country but many other countries. There's nothing like "denied entry" being stamped on your passport to get you stopped at every border crossing you cross for the rest of your life.
It's a lot easier to do something if you have social support and cultural validation.
So basically you majored in arts and crafts at Harvard (and you're surprised BSing poli sci papers wasn't difficult?), wrote a bunch of blog posts and tweets, have an annoying 'young upstart' linkedin page, but don't know a linked list for a lincoln log, and are going into a non-technical entry level position for a random start-up?
Single page: http://www.xconomy.com/national/2010/06/24/fixing-the-broken...
Can you go into a little more detail on the "The iOS app would require investment in some more serious hardware. I don't need alot, I just need cover server cost." part. I am a little unsure about the server <-> iOS app connection.
I just installed Firefox 3.6.4 on my Mac Mini (Snow Leopard) and then updated flash. In doing so, Firefox crashes each time I try to open it :(

Going to use Chrome though I prefer to use Firefox. Any others experience this? Is there a fix - thnx
You don't want to talk to an attorney in this case because then it will be obvious that you are actually trying to skirt the law, rather than being a tourist.

The trick is to act like an idiot. Wear a baseball hat. The people working at the border are idiots and they will empathize with people like them. If you act like the typical annoying know-it-all computer nerd they will deny you out of spite.
You're the CTO of a company with half a million users during a make it or break it profitability period of the next few months and you're wondering if you need to be able to login to work from home? Unless you're able to get reliable access using a neighbor's connection, or are able to be in the office within 5 minutes, then yes. You need a home connection.

By the way, TimeWarner in NYC doesn't lock you in with a contract, so you can go month to month.
Its also that a lot of things that have been discovered have fallen out of use because they are no longer patentable and thus do not get any investment from drug companies.
Out of curiousity, can you run this tarball through paq (say, paq8hp12)?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAQ
Sencha Touch - Mobile App Framework
Pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

I like it, in the same way as the Domino's ads that admit their pizza used to suck.
The source articles:

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2010/06/us-vs-t...

http://www.ctia.org/blog/index.cfm/2010/6/24/Wow-Where-to-Be...
So you're saying it's completely possible for anyone to create the next rails?

The issue isn't that I disbelieve they did awesome things so they're successful. Sure - they did good stuff, and got some luck. The question is, can it be replicated by others, and is their advice useful to people looking to build companies.

Their advice is SO narrow. It's basically "how to build 37signals". So for me, it's not really very useful unless I invent a time machine, and decide I want to build 37signals before they do.
Different field, application name instead of application URL.
Pretty cool little framework, still in beta and viewed the demos on my Android phone. Didn't work as well as I'd hoped, but this is still in beta. =(
Depends on what you mean by "framework". I would interpret that as "the language in which you write your application", and in that case a language that treats text and HTML as different datatypes does provide more security.

Rails' conflation of these types guarantees that whatever the default for escaping, there will be bugs in applications written in/on rails.
Happens to me but only in areas with a weak signal (NYC).

In strong signal I never lose a bar. At home, which is usually a dead zone - I was surprised to see so many bars with the new phone. But if I do cradle it with my left hand, the bars disappear completely within a few minutes.

But I cannot replicate it reliably elsewhere.
In terms of demographics, SF is certainly not bad - it is evenly split from ages 20 to 27. It starts becoming more male at 30+ (about 10:9 M:F), but, when factoring in that SF has a large male gay population (and significantly smaller lesbian one), it should be about even for heterosexual men/women.

New York is certainly skewed female though, about 12:11 F:M for 20-30.

Sources:
http://www.city-data.com/housing/houses-San-Francisco-Califo...
http://www.city-data.com/housing/houses-New-York-New-York.ht...
>> I'd label it natural selection in an artificial situation.

I think that's a good way of phrasing it.

>> Artificial selection would be, as you said, explicitly done by humans (ie, selectively killing / breeding to get the desired traits).

Like that Russian fox domestication experiment.
Top 4 Free Voice Recognition Android Apps
I upvoted it because, on top of being interesting, it fights the passively accepted wisdom that "newsworthy" is synonymous with "worthy".
How to Strike a Match (string matching algorithm)
Roughly $10,000 would get the server I need for 2 years barring any major surge in users or traffic. The reason why I need a server is because I'm going to be transcoding video. If it is a commodity server then it still needs to be a big one.
He's the walking one man reason a lot of people would like to change patent law to be "first to file".
From the q) console, type backslash-enter, and you'll be at the k console.

q is just a very simple syntactic sugar layer on top of k4.
There is client-side XSLT already. The problem is that transformed template is usually same size or smaller than your source data.

Really expensive algorithms aren't that much better to offset cost of sending template logic to the client.

You could probably save some processing time by integrating compression directly into server-side templating - take advantage of the fact that some parts never change and keep them pre-compressed or at least cache some statistics about them to aid compression.
Take a picture of your wifes cat every day for 4 years and then get back to us.
Wish list (books and bookshelves)
Why? (Genuinely curious; your comment is just a throwaway line, but you probably wouldn’t have said it if you didn’t have some real reasons.)
This is the second post on this site I've seen here and the second that I can't understand the point of. How much do we learn from this 600-word article that we wouldn't from the sentence "Posterous is running a marketing campaign telling Ning and Tumblr users that it is a superior replacement for those services and they should move to Posterous — I applaud their boldness"?

The writing style makes me think he wants to be like 37signals, but if so, I really miss their brevity.
You hit on the key word right there in your 1st sentence: precious.

It's precious to some people. Goes beyond rational or objective value. Gets into emotional experiences, and heck even just having fun, getting a thrill, the excitement. That's why they feel they cannot wait, or choose not to wait.

There's also precious in the Gollum sense:

"What has the nasty Bagginses done with my preciouses?"
How is this any different from any other high demand product?
Microsoft is in the ecosystem business. The product they provide their customers is an entire software and development ecosystem. They don't have to be best-of-class in every category, but they need to be competitive.
Puppet Labs and Adobe release open source Puppet code for managing Hadoop