skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why is that? Would you like to run a company that employed mostly uneducated people? More over, would you like to be part of an economy where most available goods/services were the product of unskilled labor? What about shopping around amongst an appalling number of undifferentiated providers?

The "we educate entrepreneurs" is an abdication of the higher education establishment's mission. It profits by producing a bunch of graduates without regards for the needs of society. This includes not only the contents of the curriculum, but the yearly amount of graduates as well. It is a bubble in the making, or so it seems.
Have you tried using Silverlight for a RIA app? Rendering a XAML file takes at least 5 seconds, and it's a process that's riddled with bugs and consumes at least 1 gig of memory.
I'm sure the WinForms designer is much faster (I've never had any trouble with it in VS 2008), but the new toolkits with WPF and XAML seem to consume all the resources of my dual-core laptop with 3 gigs or RAM (a somewhat acceptable dev machine), the parser is horrendous and prone to causing unexpected exceptions, and is generally not as nice.
Open rate varies a lot city to city but we see anywhere between 20%-60% opens across all of the issues.

We still use twitter/facebook to spread our blog posts, archives, etc but email is our main channel of distribution. For us we see twitter bringing ~30% of our subscribers, facebook doesn't do so well for us.
There's a $100 fee when you finish.
Yes, you don't get the two episodes as DLC over Steam, you get the standalone SKU "Episodes from Liberty City". Just the same as if you bought the EfLC retail box on PC.
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I bought $170 worth of games today through a friend in the US. :)

The only thing I don't like is PC games are stupidly complicated with add ons, expansions, packs, chapters, bla bla bla. I don't have time to keep up with gaming to know what I need, what order I should do it in etc.
Postmodern literary theory is a mess.

Postmodern literature, on the other hand, is wonderful and often beautiful.
Heck, screw oxygen. Rationally, defense-oriented civilizations should smash all habitable-zone planets just to be on the safe side.

But you're right: the fact that our suspiciously life-supporting planet has been sitting here for billions of years unmolested does appear to indicate that there aren't any planet-destroying game theorists in our neighbourhood.

Alternative scenario: instead of a relativistic projectile, they sent a starship, which will leave us alone unless we develop enough technology to be a threat to its home planet. If we think that's a likely scenario we should all be sitting around worrying about how to not piss off the starship.

On the other hand, since knowing about the starship is a threat to the starship, we should try to avoid even thinking about whether there might be a starship.
Sometimes Achievements can be for things you were going to do anyway but now you have a way to prove/show off that you did it.

http://stackoverflow.com/users - Jon Skeet probably doesn't go out of his way to earn points and achievements. Its just a biproduct of his actions and a good/measurable reputation followed.
Popular opinion may be that you need a co-founder; but once advice is doled out, its not necessarily relevant any longer. It's getting easier and easier to get started on your own; and you can avoid all of the friction that comes along with sharing a company with another owner.
Ping from Auckland.
So -4 then? Was it because I advocated a form of DRM (and all DRM is bad m'kay), endorsed Steam even though lots of people dislaike it, or just used too much sarcasm because I thought this was self-evident to this crowd?

Steam seams like a faltering step in the right direction. Its quite a bit better than the "cripple the whole experience and make the user stand on his head while playing our game" DRM that's included in too many games today. Its not perfect but for the first time, moral judgments aside, it makes obtaining and playing a game as easy as pirating it. Its good to see people warming to this and validating the model.
The thing about having the Earth hit by a relativistic projectile is: you wouldn't die knowing that. You'd just die.
Deploying a Linux server on my environments takes exactly 5 minutes. Most Windows Server installations run over half an hour, require babysitting, and quite a bit of time previous to that if I want to make a custom image, a process which I can't really automate.

Using SSH is a much, much better solution for administration. I don't depend on having a large screen or fast connection. Believe, when you're managing servers 8000 miles away it makes you want to tear your eye sockets out.

Licensing. You must be kidding. Keeping track of license numbers, WGA validation, and being artificially limited in how I can move OS images around is nothing pleasant. I don't want to depend on anyone's approval for purchasing licenses; I need to download, burn, and deploy.

> I'll give you this, but I've yet to see the need for such an environment.
I've been a UNIX sysadmin, I've seen my Windows counterparts. Please do take the opportunity, if you have the chance, to learn about shell scripting on Unix. It's incredible.

> Don't use it then? I think LINQ is a horrible idea, and horribly implemented
Alternatives? I don't know of comparable alternatives. I don't think NHibernate would be right, neither do I want to go back to validating raw SQL.
Ah, but Air does support RTMP.
Methods of Improving and Reorganizing Natural Deduction Proofs With Graphs [pdf]
Easily turn that napkin scribbling into a prototype
Apple doesn't advertise the fact that they do keep a list of your purchases. If you call them you should be able to get them to let you re-download all the content you have bought through ITMS.

IMHO, Apple should be putting a feature like this front and center, but my guess is that the labels are against it. Who else wants you to buy the same song first on vinyl, then tape, then CD, then digital, then...
I think what borisk is pointing out is that LINQ isn't an ORM. It's a language feature. You're thinking of LINQ to SQL, specifically.
Design Tips for Programmers
performance hasn't been an issue. The demos are some pretty intricate stuff and for the most part not made for performance. Even most of those have been speedy.
I wish people would figure this out where I work. A meeting destroys half a day because the time on both sides of that hour is spent getting back into the coding zone.

What would be nice is some way to collaboratively work on diagrams in an email thread. Occasionally it is helpful to hash something out at the whiteboard but if that could be captured and automatically included as documentation that would be even better.
That's why Valve's TF2 updates, combined with Steam, are great (they had one today, coincidentally). You can get new features without lifting a finger :)
Of course, first there will need to be some evidence (other than anecdotal) that shows that DRM actually reduce more genuine customers than it does force casual pirates to buy the game. Or, specifically, that

cost_of_sales_lost + cost_of_drm_tech > revenue_gained

Sure, DRM is unpopular (among the tiny proportion of users who know what it is), but does it affect the bottom line?
The answer typically depends on the circumstances and how much is at risk. If you have a family to support and your startup does not succeed (especially in this difficult job market) then regret will likely set in.
I agree with you, now if only the movie studios got on board. The day a movie comes out on DVD it should also be available to rent through every digital service out there including Netflix.
Follow-up to: Did Americans in 1776 have British accents?
True story: my wife majored in Musical Theatre in college, and had the privilege of studying with Rocco Dal Vera (http://www.ccm.uc.edu/faculty/facultyProfile.aspx?facultyid=32/), a world-renowned dialect expert.

To put in context how freaking awesome this guy is: name a country in the world, and he can perform every dialect in the region flawlessly, as well as tell you how it originated and developed over time.

Awesomeness indicator #2: Rocco did the dialect work on the "Indiana Jones" movies. 'Nuff said.

Yesterday, my wife e-mailed the "Did Americans in 1776 have British Accents" post (http://www.nicholasjohnpatrick.com/post/767354896/did-americans-in-1776-have-british-accents) to Rocco. Here's his reply, posted here with his permission:

====================

That is very cool, and I found most of the post accurate, except at the end when he speculates on why New York and New England may be non-rhotic.

There's a small contradiction: if their connections were British and British was itself rhotic, then that doesn’t explain how they lost their Rs. (Except that it could have happened 100 years after the Revolutionary War.)

England’s journey toward a non-rhotic prestige accent followed the Revolutionary War, a time when we were pretty cut off from them. We were in a state of almost continual war with them through the war of 1812 and even through the Civil War when they supported the South more than the North.

Much later, in Victorian times, wealthy residents of Boston, Philadelphia and New York sent their children to England to be educated and their prestige accents became reflective of those schools’ emphasis on RP. That persisted well through the 1950s (and shows up in accents we call Boston Brahmin, Philadelphia Mainline and New York 400). It may well be that until then New York wasn’t terribly non-rhotic, but I would love to read a real study on this.

Immigration also had a huge effect on New York and New England speech. How much that accounts for the rhoticity question is hard to say. But is has to be a factor. Still, the result is surprising because notice how Boston, famously the center of Irish immigration (a heavily rhotic accent, then and today) somehow ended up with a non-rhotic accent in a country that is mostly rhotic.

Incidentally, the author doesn’t comment on US Southern prestige accents that were non-rhotic almost from the start. The reason for that? They were raised by their black nannies and African languages are non-rhotic. Southerners hate to hear this, but their prestige non-rhotic plantation accents are the product of slave speech! A lovely topic for the 4th of July as we contemplate liberty...
yes. the problem with all online storage services is keeping multiple copies of the data to protect against disk failure. I wish there were a dirt-cheap service which said "we'll shove your files on a drive and keep it online. You'll lose data when the hardware fails; that's your problem". For most of my audio/video files, it'd only be a minor inconvenience to have the online version explode through hardware problems. As it is, I end up paying for reliability that I don't need.
Here's a follow-up to this post by Rocco Dal Vera, a world-renowned dialect expert: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489723
I only programmed .NET in the days of 2.0, so my problems with it come from an older less capable framework. Nonetheless, when your language of choice requires you to distinguish between:

- IComparable

- IComparable(Of T)

- IEquatable(Of T)

- IStructuralEquatable

- IStructuralComparable

- IEqualityComparer

- IEqualityComparer(Of T)

- IComparer(Of T)

- overriding Object.Equals

- overriding operators <,>, <=, >=, =, <>

...it's time to find a new language.

edit: Just imagine you encounter a new collection BozBag(Of T) which has to test your objects for equality. Without looking at documentation could you as a coder possibly know if BozBag uses x.Equals(y), x = y, x.CompareTo(y) = 0? Heck it could even use x.Equals(DirectCast(y,Object)) or x.CompareTo(DirectCast(y,Object)). The only way to really know is to dig through documentation.
True, alas not on iPhone, though.
Pro Git on your iPad
I can understand wanting 1 ring to rule them all, but having specialized devices has been the solution for a while now.

1 = Server

2 = NAS

3 = HTPC or Server w/ dongle

4 = HTPC again (any XBMC variant, with a receiver for audio)

5 = XBMC remote apps, I like Boxee's remote for iPhone

6 = FTP, VLC broadcasting, VNC

7 = FTP

8 = Capture Card, streaming to mobile = VLC/justin.tv http://apiwiki.justin.tv/mediawiki/index.php/VLC_Broadcastin...

9 = NAS

rsync for backups

This is all tech that's been around for a while.
I haven't regretted quitting a good job to start a business, but I miss certain things about that job: being on a large team, office camaraderie, a dependence on a nice salary and not worrying at all about money (we're bootstrapped so we're constantly worried about money both for the business and personally,) people always taking my calls and responding because i was from a name-brand company. All that said, I was just remarking to my wife today that I wouldn't trade anything for the flexibility I have now running my own business.
1) Just do EM with parameters in an arbitrary semiring and you generalize nicely to all the special cases you mentioned (and more)

2) I see how all of EM is coordinate ascent, but I don't see how the M step is gradient ascent. Where the gradients at?

3) Second-order optimization methods can be pretty tricky and fall apart for large problems. Stochastic gradient descent ftw.
Watch out, I might only be playing games with words like "true" and "obvious" ;-)

Since we can make many useful statements about this universe the quicksand we are all standing in (if we indeed are) must be very slow indeed. So what if there are no absolute metrics. That doesn’t seem to matter all that much.

If I count my sheep on their way out of the pen and if I count them again on their way back into the pen I can be reasonably sure that if those numbers match, there are no more sheep on the pasture. I don’t have to look for missing sheep. This seems like a useful statement. I would call it true.

Sure, sometimes it doesn’t work. Tests with other people have shown that I sometimes tend to overlook a sheep. Further tests have shown that I sometimes misremember the number by the time the sheep are coming back. But other than that it seems very robust.

Why not call that statement true? Do postmodernists expect that this would only work here but not in other cultures? And if that were the case couldn’t you just test that, no need to throw your hands up in the air and give up? Do they expect that it might work on Earth but maybe not on Mars or Alpha Centauri? Testing that would also be no problem. It’s at least not impossible, no reason to give up.

Where’s the beef?

(The sheep story is blatantly stolen from this essay: http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth)
Winning with a shill bid defrauds the next highest bidder, to whom you had an obligation to sell.
Thanks for writing - forwarded this to a famous dialect professor. Here's what he added to your analysis: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489723
well this guy really loves to employ stereotypes to make his points. i suppose to some extent he has to

other than that, though, i didnt get much from this
What are you optimizing for? Income? Learning? Benefits? Status? Long-term family stability?

In a quest to optimize for learning and connections, I quit my cushy corp gig to found a startup. I cut my income from 120k w/ benefits to 54k w/ no benefits.

I didn't regret it for a second because I learned a ton and I met a slew of new and fascinating people (aside from launching a product, building a team, raising money, getting customers, etc.)

The world is full of well-paying gigs for smart people. Go do your startup.
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You're comparing apples to oranges. One is graphical while the other is text based. I've personally never had issues with RDP and bandwidth. If you have multiple connections open you can minimize the RDP window; the connection is maintained but the window is not refreshed so it doesn't use your connection.
...the Orion design would have worked by dropping small shaped charge fission or thermonuclear explosives out the rear of a vehicle, detonating them 200 feet (60 m) out, and catching the blast with a thick steel or aluminum pusher plate. [...] The 'base design' consisted of a 4000 ton model planned for ground launch from Jackass Flats, Nevada. Each 0.15 kt of TNT (600 MJ) (sea-level yield) blast would add 30 mph (50 km/h, 13 m/s) to the craft's velocity. A graphite based oil would be sprayed on the pusher plate before each explosion to prevent ablation of the surface. To reach low Earth orbit (300 mi), this sequence would have to be repeated about 800 times, like an atomic pogo stick.

What could possibly go wrong?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsi...
Ask HN: Project Management app for freelancer?
My work recently changed from working on a project-to-project basis to working on multiple projects at the same time.
It's starting to get time consuming to keep track of all the feature requests, custom quotes and actual work performed, so that I was wondering if the HN users could recommend any project management software?

I am basically looking for something that takes care of the administrative tasks related to the projects, such as quote-, job requests-, jobs performed- and contact tracking. Team management is not needed at this time and it also doesn't require any repository integration or bug tracking.

Any recommendations?
Not sure what you consider stereotypical: he's mostly referring to the names and locales of dialects, which is proper usage...
Saying that you need to understand and differentiate between all of these is disingenuous.

- The "Structural*" types are new in .Net 4.0, you never had to understand them before and you probably don't need to even know they exist now.

- Many of these listed are just generic vs non-generic. The generic ones subclass the non-generic ones, so contraviance eliminates the need to really understand the distinction upfront.

- Compare means Compare(a,b):int which returns -1, 0, 1.

- Equals means Equals(a,b):bool

- If it ends in "er" it is a functor which operates on two free objects instead of "able" which means one subject of comparison is "this".

- Overriding individual operators gives you more flexibility than Compare(a,b):int because you can use specific algoritms for specific comparisons.

Maybe it's time to find a new arbitrary reason to hate .NET?
I find that small-scale meetings are underused. I have been making a habit lately of going to see folks I'd usually only connect with via email.

Seeing someone face to face at their cross-town facility can't be beat.
Beware short forms: the dangers of a low word count
He/she might also have been referencing the preferential tax treatment of religious groups, some of which amass vast fortunes without paying taxes.
It is certainly easy to see why the US and Soviets wanted to investigate using nukes for peaceful uses. But claiming that the 250 or so peaceful nuclear explosions (out of a total of more than 2000 nuclear tests over-all) makes the nuclear bomb something other than a weapon of mass destruction seems to me more than a little intellectually dishonest.
You're totally correct, but if you do that: you are an outlier. Most Microsoft shops stick as close to the neatly groomed path as possible. There is nothing wrong with being an outlier generally, but it can bite you if you find a nitch bug that only affects you; it may never be fixed and you won't have the power to fix it yourself.
Jack Dongarra on Exascale computing
Mountain lion scouts out new territory through Kansas
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>- The "Structural*" types are new in .Net 4.0, you never had to understand them before and you probably don't need to even know they exist now.

You're right, I scooped those off MSDN and never use them myself. All the others, however, have made numerous appearances in my code. I think that the preponderance of comparisons is a language smell-- it's not close to my only problem with .NET development but I think it captures the essential headache-inducing inelegance of C#/VB programming. That language-blob has little regularity but much accretion. There are rarely sane defaults nor any overarching design for your mind to latch onto. After time spent with saner languages (Python, Haskell, Ruby, OCaml, etc...) coding in .NET feels terrible.
TMDb — The open movie database
If you define a cofounder as someone who would continue the startup alone, two provide redundancy.

On the other hand, if you're overly emphatic about the peril of going it alone, then if one of two cofounders leaves, the remaining one won't want to continue.
Heh, I like it :D
http://wrttn.in/b0495d

Seriously though, it's nice! I can see myself using this in future.
Anyone have linkage for the Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Other "Who Owns What" matrix? Seems not to have come online yet.

Nat's Truly Open Data is here: http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/03/truly-open-data.html
I wish there were recordings of people talking all through time, I'd love to hear the evolution of language.
I can't seem to find info on whether WHS's filesystem checks for corruption or not. One thing ZFS has going for it is detecting corruption, and when you're storing 10TB of your most precious media to a single machine you really need to trust the filesystem.

Do you know if it verifies data integrity? I have heard about WHS from a few people now and it seems like the best solution. I don't even have a Windows machine so that may sound odd, but afaik there's no Unix-based equivalent available today.
Barranquilla - Colombia
Amazon shopping to Woot
Incidentally, the author doesn’t comment on US Southern prestige accents that were non-rhotic almost from the start. The reason for that? They were raised by their black nannies and African languages are non-rhotic. Southerners hate to hear this, but their prestige non-rhotic plantation accents are the product of slave speech!

Are you sure about that? Does "rhotic" vs "non-rhotic" even have any meaning outside the context of English?

Frinstance a non-rhotic accent isn't about not being about to say "er". A non-rhotic speaker will say, frinstance "her father" with an "err" sound on "her" and an "a" sound on "father".
Physics simulations. I've found it surprising how useful my intro physics course knowledge has been. Things like vectors, position vs. velocity vs. acceleration, damped harmonic oscillators, FFTs, etc. It's most useful when building UIs and games - oftentimes, you can make a UI feel significantly more natural by adding easing functions that behave like acceleration when you ease in and frictional damping when you ease out.

Any good physics book that I could look into? Preferably books that integrate physics with programming?
Expando is a neat concept in the 4.0 spec.
Try this:

$env['echo'] = new Lisphp_Runtime_PHPFunction(create_function('', '
$args = func_get_args();
foreach ($args as $arg) echo $arg;
'));

after:

$env = Lisphp_Environment::full();
I'm sure that this is what Rocco said, and of all people in the world, he's in the best position to know for sure. If you have questions, I suggest e-mailing him using the address on his site, which I linked above.
Might make an alright Twilight Zone episode, if the exposition were dragged out a bit more.
These in general come from the book 'Building Web Reputation Systems', which covers the topic in a good bit more detail, as well as when and why certain approaches work to solve more specific problems (public karma, 5 star ratings..)

Definitely worth looking at.
Startup competition lessons from the Gamers Portal team
Your alternative scenario boils down to "who cares if other people are watching, let's go develop warp drive so they will feel right talking to us."
As the Prime Directive of Star Fleet tells us.
as my friend Mitch Lillie says, geographic isolation leads to linguistic conservatism. Iceland is another great example of this - I believe Icelandic is derived from middle-ages era Viking languages?