skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the author goes too far in saying that LinkedIn is squandering its position. I don't think that any company is under obligation to expand in bold new (headline-grabbing) directions just for the sake of doing so.

Personally, the interesting thing about LinkedIn is this: in the good old days, company org charts were considered top secret for fear that the leaders would be targeted by headhunters. Now that's all in the open. Similarly, job descriptions can be mined to give clues as to company strategy.

I haven't looked closely at the extras that LinkedIn offers, but for the casual user such as myself, it's true that not much has changed. But that's fine.

The other thing about LinkedIn is that it will always be similar to the rate-my-(professor,landlord,etc.) sites, in that it's extremely useful when you're making (or considering) a big decision, but most of the time doesn't need regular interaction.
It is however surprising just how big mistakes Wave and Buzz have been (IMHO).
Clearly HN needs a better jobs marketplace. Look at all the talent!
> Just like Jerf pointed out, it's the paradigm that matters more than the language.

Note however, that languages are extremely good at making us use their prefered paradigm.
It's certainly worth mentioning, but... I've made an angel investment, not as friends or family, and I'm not an accredited investor. Be up-front about it to the company, naturally, but we talked to several companies, and it's not uncommon for them to be willing to consider it.
Because that's how hard drives work. You move and copy - often very large files nowadays - and fragments of data are left behind, muddying up the system. The question is how the system deals with it.

I actually believe that Windows 7 represents a real improvement on how memory and fragmentation are managed. Vista wasn't bad, either. They both do pretty well.
Yeah, you can't do any tuning in .NET whatsoever... right.
> I think the downfall of some of these languages is that they get wrapped up in being "functional" rather than focusing on solving a particular class of problem. They abandon convention and common sense for complex type systems and functional purity.

He's obviously not really looked at Clojure, then. The design philosophy of Clojure can be summarized as "functional programming is great; people also need to get stuff done."
I assume Google created more jobs in the rise from 501 to >20,000 employees than they did in the 2-500 period.

I have heard statistics that a lot of the creation of jobs occurs with small business. Also, that a lot of the job losses occur at small businesses. The net jobs created are reflected in the bls statistics that show increase in employment among different kinds of businesses.
When the social web has a well defined and widely adopted standard, then Facebook will become just another social site. In short, we need an accepted standard like HTML or RSS for social updates.

I would like to use Buzz/Twitter/Identica/whatever to post one update. And then all my social connections will be immediately notified of the update regardless of what client or website they prefer to use.
Beware: you say "concurrent", but SPJ was talking about "parallel". Not exactly the same.
What's shady about those?
The actual regulations are that the company owes you slightly more in terms of unaudited financials as an unaccredited investor, and there's a maximum total (something like 20 or 30?) number of unaccredited investors they can have.

Companies try to avoid it -- who wants one extra burden as a startup, even a small burden? But it's not as onerous as you might think.
This never works out well. Maybe you have some ideas for what will let average people finally "get it?"
Just a feeling really...
Google has finally pushed Android 2.2 Froyo to its "abandoned" Nexus One handset
Nice site and interesting app. It seems like more of a mockup organization system than a tool for creating mockups (like Balsamiq or Mockingbird), which was my initial thought looking at the name. Perhaps you can interface with them somehow?

I'm not big on the product name though as my first thought was "oh cool mockups" which then turned to "oh wait it's a typo / misspelling of mockups". It's further confusing because you spell "mockups" correctly throughout your site. You also run the risk of a competitor buying mockups.com and building their own mockup software (logical development option).

You've put together a great tool and well designed site, don't sell it short with a typo'ed product name.
Reevoo Secures Series B Round To Expand Into Europe
Top Reasons Your Security Program Sucks
Yes, especially after reading Anathem.

Then I realize that my refrigerator is full of delicious things, and that my friends mostly live in Western society.
"Concurrent" is the word he uses repeatedly. What distinction do you make between "parallel" and "concurrent"?
I am a teenager, and Facebook has not been cool ever since the police use it as a way prosecute underage drinking.
Do we know how long this has been up?

If it was something as significant as P{=,!=}NP, I really doubt he would have been able to keep this hidden for any length of time.
Yes, that has happened to be me a lot of times since I do a lot of support work. The high-level, low-level symptoms, the trigger of the problem, the root cause of the issue and the facts/opinion of the support problem all get jumbled up. I have tried in the past to articulate the issue at hand and seperate the facts, symptoms, opinions, end-user experience, but nothing helps better then to try to find the answer from someone else..and then realzing what you should/could have done extra before they even utter a word...
If people start getting racked with real-world consequences because of things they put on Facebook, like lost work opportunities, legal ramifications, harm to their reputation, and so forth to a point where the average person (non-techies) becomes concerned about privacy to the point of avoiding social networks like Facebook entirely then Facebook's growth model is going to be in jeopardy. As for what will replace Facebook in the event that this happens - probably closed networks along the lines of LinkedIn.

I'd say it'll take a few years of things going the way they are now before the public at large starts taking their privacy a little more seriously.
The iphone 4 death grip fail should be fixed with iOS4.0.1
IPhone 4 Battery Life Not So Good After All
Sure you can afford hobbies anytime, startup or not. Startup is just your job. I sidetrack from my startup product sometime to work on small "fun" projects, like right now I'm making an Android game. They keep you on the edge and open up new things, and take your mind off from your main "job."
I work at On-Site.com and my understanding is that we're willing to hire remotely for the right candidate. The OP is probably not what we're looking for, though -- we're a JRuby on Rails and JSP shop (plus jQuery, which he does know), and we'd need somebody who knew both if they weren't going to spend time physically present (in Mountain View, CA) to get up to speed.
Ask HN: Is it possible to "find" a cofounder?
Hi all, I started taking an idea that's been burning in
my head for a couple years more seriously recently.

I'm starting to think more seriously about who my target
audience/market is, how big said market is and the available
money within that market, first functional versions of the
application, and so on. I spent most of this last weekend
just in front of my white boards, sketching out ideas and
writing down lists of things to do or areas I need to
research so I can turn my guesses and assumptions into
assertions based on facts. I started wondering if it might
be worth it to apply for the next YCombinator round and read
over Drew Houston's application for Dropbox Saturday night
(thanks Drew!). That made me realize how far I have to go
before I can even start to ask if the idea is an endeavor
worth pursuing. Reading over Paul's guide on how to apply
reinforced that I'm not to the single founder rule. So, I've
added "Find a cofounder" to my to-do list.

Thing is, I've been "looking" for a cofounder for a while. I
don't actively search, but I often share my ideas (and
especially this one) among programming friends I trust. All
are nice and feign interest, but nobody is as passionate about
raw data from public records like I am. Maybe I should be
studying Statistics instead of CS? ;) Some friends are interested,
but those few are at most a fraction as passionate as I am about
my idea. Of course, I understand it's my idea and that's why I'm
passionate about it. But I wouldn't feel comfortable coding this
idea up with anyone who's not even close to as passionate as I am
about it. I'm not crazy, right? From all that I read, especially
from Paul and HN, it seems that both/all parties need to have this
insatiable drive in order to have any chance.

So, is it possible to actively search for a co-founder? Has that
worked for anyone?

tldr; Getting serious about idea for a business; have told friends
and although some are interested, none are passionate/hungry; is it
possible to find a cofounder? for that relationship to work if it
wasn't pre-existing?
Find a site that shows their stats to the public (something with the same magnitude that you're interested in) and then use that to get the relative traffic of other sites you're interested in.

We've used this approach and it works well for getting approximate traffic numbers for our competition.
What's the difference between retiring and taking a job elsewhere and retiring and taking the same job? If these people want to keep working to make additional money on top of their pension payout that is their choice. The bottom line is that the pension draw is going to happen after they've been working for 30 years.

The only scheming I see is the possibility of circumventing state mandated hiring practices to not have to compete for their old jobs back.

What is really broken, in my opinion, isn't the double-dipping as much as the system that makes double-dipping a drain on the public good. If instead of a pension the money was drawn from a 401k would we have the same feelings against this behavior?

Edit: Tried to clarify/stay focused.
I don't think many people stopped using AltaVista because it was too slow.

That's exactly why I stopped using AltaVista. I never noticed Google's search results being more relevant. I distinctly remember this because I was aware of the hype around relevancy at the time and was trying to notice a difference.
What was magnificently different, though, was Google's subsecond page load and search response times.

One interesting thing about marketing is that the reason one gives for using a product is often rather disconnected from its real utility. (The book Positioning is about this.)
Which is why we have hybrid languages to help us combine paradigms.
FYI: Relational databases don't require transactions of any kind. SQL92 does require transactions; however it's not required to support multiple rounds of communication with the client.

Suggesting there is no difference between a Key Value store and an SQL database capable of ad hock queries, Transactions, and Joins is ridiculous.
Nevertheless, a subject that appears to have consumed over an order of magnitude more of a certain drug than any other known person is intrinsically interesting.

I guess they, or the journal editors, didn't think it was all that interesting, or they wouldn't have limited themselves to a giving a one-sentence summary of his history with the other drugs. I suppose it was heavily edited for length, which is tragic and ludicrous given the cost of storing and presenting a few kilobytes of data these days.

Also, if this is supposed to be data for further study, I'm not sure why they decided that in the limited space available it was less important to report the actual raw data they collected than to summarize general knowledge from other sources, such as:

All ecstasy misusers would develop a (mild-degree, in most cases) serotonin syndrome after acute drug intake, which is characterized by enhanced physical activity, hyperthermia and sweating, increased muscle rigidity, rhabdomyolysis, hyperreflexia, trismus, jaw-clenching, myoclonus, tremor, and nystagmus.4
low probability of legality in the United States
Maybe he will unleash the missing volumes of TAoCP
Tell you what I've always wanted.. You know the awesome Skype screen sharing function? Imagine everyone in on the call being able to draw and write on top of the live screenshare.

It'd be a great way to annotate/draw on top of designs live, while simultaneously talking about them with remote participants
The Visualization Trap
I wonder what the maximum occupancy laws are like. Could you get around this by simply putting down on paper that you're subletting for a month when they're just staying overnight?
It is much less practical than adding FP capabilities to C# which is where C# is evolving anyway.
Buzz still seems superior to me technologically. The reason it hasn't caught on is probably either lack of simplictiy, or bad luck/timing.

Wave I see as a work in progress/concept work. Features will probably bleed over to docs over time. In that it is not a failure I would say.
Interesting comment on related article by NYT that offers some insight into what type of behavior this bill may be aimed at curbing ...

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/bill-could-make...
I was hoping "loophole" was a new programming language I could start learning.
It's worth noting that the term "ecstacy pill" encompasses a huge array of psychoactive and non-psychoactive substances. Go and scare yourself at sites like PillReports:

http://www.pillreports.com/

Unless he or one of his friends was an organic chemist, MDMA - a relatively expensive drug to synthesize - is likely to be way down the list on the menu of chemicals that Mr A actually consumed.
I talk to myself all the time when working through programming problems. (And even some other types of problems.) I remember being told at a very young age that this was some kind of sign of insanity and should be avoided. I ignored that advice and have been reaping the rewards ever since.
It is for this very reason that I update my profile regularly, even if insignificant ways. I actually have a Google Calendar to remind me to do it twice a month.

This can be great for your career.

If you don't work for a itty bitty startup you can count on someone above you in the org chart catching wind of every LinkedIn update you make. I have been asked about my frequent updates twice at my current job; the second time they were so concerned that I was looking around for a new position (and I had just taken a crucial role in a new project) that they offered me an unasked-for performance bonus following the completion of the project. It totally floored me.
Oh yes it is. Users should be programmers. All of them. Just so they can write those little scripts. It's a question of independence.

You probably wanted to say that the future is not to dumb down programming to the level of my "mom". I agree with that.
thats actually a strawman, scheme and common lisp have some pretty awesome OO systems for those who want them. I in fact think that multimethods and related notions were first implemented in some of these scheme and CL systems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp_Object_System is probably a good place to start
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Where did he get the cash to continually use and abuse all of the above for 9 years?

I wonder if he was born rich and blew through all his family's money, since most loans would have come back at him well before then.

Either that, or he was a dealer and was sampling his own product(s).
Mystery of the Somerton Man (Wiki Article)
And conversely, cocaine can be made into a healthy tea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca_tea
It's certainly a failure from just how much it was being hyped up as "the next internet" etc.

Yeah I think quite possibly both are superior technically, and I think integrating Buzz with GMail was a good move, but I think they'd do better adding features and iterating gently toward where they want, rather than suddenly introducing new things that confuse/alarm users.
Actually, it's why Readability (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/) and Instapaper Text (http://www.instapaper.com/extras) bookmarklets exist. They blocks all the ads and non-essential content, ensures columns are wide enough, and standardizes the fonts.

They also work great for all those Typepad blogs with odd columns and tiny fonts.
Look at the checkout lines at Target! They're exactly like Walmart! Which are exactly like Safeway!

Are they? Because I see some fairly large differences.

Target: http://www.treesfullofmoney.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/c...

The checkout counters are stacked two deep, have a short conveyer, and a small bagging area. Small amount of merchandising. The lines (if present) are easily visible as you walk into the store. This indicates that they expect most people to be buying only a modest quantity of goods, and that they're confident that they have enough staff on hand to avoid having long, scary lines that will cause some customers to re-think their shopping trip.

Walmart: http://mike.creuzer.com/uploaded_images/SSPX0019-787334.JPG

Single layer, with a larger conveyer and bagging area. Large amount of relatively tall merchandising displays that also serve to obscure the presence of lines to new shoppers. This tells me they expect to be selling a fairly large amount of goods to each person, and that they expect to staff it so there's a queue to checkout. They use the merch both to monetize the checkout, and to obscure it somewhat, so the lines don't look as long to people who are coming into the store.

Safeway: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2611/4147295724_b4ea1e5e79.jp...

Smaller amount of merchandising, single layer. larger bagging area than target, shorter conveyer than wal-mart. They appear to be somewhere in the middle.

Big differences I see in checkouts:
How visible is the checkout itself as you walk into the store?
Are the lines (if present) clearly visible?
Did they design it so they have the option to add a large number of staff to handle rushes (like pre-christmas or pre-thanksgiving), or did they design it so there's just going to be some long lines during high traffic?
Do they cater to people with kids by having a couple aisles that have children's books and such instead of candy bars?
When there is a line, does it block access to any parts of the store? (just the other day I saw a long line that backed up into a pharmacy counter... does anybody really want to fill a potentially private prescription with a line of bored shoppers next to them?)?

Not to mention things like differences in self-checkout. Sometimes it exists, sometimes not... and sometimes it's so poorly designed (receipt, coupons, paper change and coins in different spots... oversensitive fraud checker that makes you re-scan items, etc) that you regret using it.

I could go on a rant about the other things too, but the reality is that these things only look the same if you're squinting very, very hard.
"Want to be sure certain parts of your program don't access /dev/nuclear_missiles?"

Actually, if you want to make sure that parts of your program don't access /dev/nuclear_missiles, I think that E is your language. In Haskell, it's as easy as `unsafePerformIO $ hGetContents "/dev/nuclear_missiles"`, which at least warns you that it's unsafe but doesn't really give any assurances otherwise. And if you're in the IO monad anyway, you don't even need the unsafePerformIO.
We use email, IM, google wave and yammer for work. None of them are perfect. I probably use IM most of all, we don't have a culture of instant response so it is not as disruptive as it sounds.

But you are right, I don't feel any of the above is completely perfect.
3d Fractal Tour Video -- now just need a way to make a game with it
It's probably safe to assume he dealt.
Is Tesla the future or the new Government Motors?
مشاهدة مباراة اسبانيا والبرتغال
مشاهدة مباراة اسبانيا والبرتغال
I think a more accurate title may've been "Things I don't understand are overrated."
Ask HN:  Hacking for the career, PhD for the fun stuff?
Lately, I think about hybrid opportunities. There is no doubt that my MS in CS had a better bang for the buck than staying for a PhD. But now, I tend to be a "pure IT" software dev and rarely work on deep, interesting problems.

I sometimes think that doing a PhD to scratch that itch to work on deeper stuff, maybe publish in journals without the "or perish" mentality, and be someone who can lecture/mentor the next generation of hackers while still earning most of a living from hacking work rather than chasing grants all the time would be an interesting life.

HN'ers are an interesting bunch - are there hackers on around here (other than our own PG) who have a PhD, mainly work on startups and in industry, but also do some research or teaching in a university setting on the side?

Did any of that subset plan to do that (as opposed to getting a PhD, planning to hunt down tenure at a university, but wound up doing startups or industry work instead)?
Curious about the upvotes on this one - I found it lacking much meaningful content.

The only redeeming value was that the author arguably misused the buzzword 'paradox' in the title.
... Except you do need to have a regular merchant set up. PayFlow is just a gateway like any other (Authorize.net, Braintree, etc).

One difference is that they now require you to accept PayPal to get the lowest rates. One of my clients is going through that now, if it's not up by the end of July their rates go up.
"Concurrent" is about observable behaviour. Like with a web server, serving many many requests concurrently. When SPJ is talking about concurrency, he is most likely talking about shared state with software transactional memory.

"Parallel" is about optimizing an otherwise linear, or atomic program. Like map-reduce, which can be run on a single CPU or on a distributed cluster. When SPJ is talking about parallelism he is most likely talking about nested data parallelism.

The distinction between the two can be made without ambiguity with the terms "task parallelism" (concurrency), and "data parallelism" (parallelism).
I've seriously underestimated the popularity of airbnb if people are purpose building structures (undercover no less) for the sole purpose of marketing them as a place to crash on airbnb.

Also amazed that neighborhood groups have "Illegal Hotels Committee"s
It's pretty much impossible to get as focused and steady in tiny spurts of meditation mixed in with the turmoil of daily life as it is when doing it essentially non-stop for days/weeks.

Once you've dived into it deeply, then you actually have an understanding of what's going on when you do regular sittings.
Its not just the old jobs back. They do this because they know its possible and allowed.

Lets say your out in the work force. Work for 20 years and decide to retire. You don't get your pension until you turn 65 in the U.S. These double dippers start their pension right away. So they are collecting on the pension while they get rehired. Government pension usually does not stop paying out when you decide to go back to work in your mid 40's. They pay you even if you took the same exact job back. So not only is a official getting paid their current salary, they are also getting paid their pension on top of that and they are only 40. When they go another 20 years and retire, their pension doubles. And if they are alive for the next 40 years after, we as tax payers are paying double their salary.

Its immoral.
Someone threatening your business model? They're not innovators, they're criminals!
Hackers and Founders is the #1 startup event in USA this week
I don't see how the issue of operating unlicensed hotels is specific to shorter-than-a-month sublets.