skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I will also be attending the london VJ meet tonight but am looking forward to meeting you for a few hours.
The Great Books Project
The Great Books Project aims to distill the wisdom of the greatest and most useful business and self-improvement books of all time. Till date, wit has done 120+ books.
I've ran into a few instances where Sun rewrote some fairly major subsystem (like their plugin architecture) on a point release. It's caused quite a few problems.
I came across it in James Clavell's 1981 novel, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_House
The range of opinions which you access by posting a question like this on HN can have more value than the rationale page on the Clojure website.

That is to say, the reason for asking a question like this is not always laziness.
Ask HN: watching online video without Flash?
I have a very simple goal: I want to disable 3rd party plug-ins in my browsers. Flashblock doesn't work for me because it reports the presence of Flash to google analytics, and I really want my visits to count as "no flash detected" because I want it to be a thing in the past.

Currently I always have it disabled, but it's annoyting to hit a good video and having to go to preferences/plugins/enable... However, the iPhone and Android oftentimes can do that. How?

Here's a good video I'd like to watch without having to enable that arcane tech from the gloomy Internet of the 90s... http://blip.tv/file/98282
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I could be wrong, but at least in my little corner of science, this particular kind of post-hoc analysis, where you're moving thresholds on a linear scale for reporting purposes, seems not to be viewed with great suspicion, because it doesn't really produce arbitrary degrees of freedom. The worse kind of post-hoc analysis is where you can end up claiming things like "men who watched TV between 5.5 and 9 hours a week [whatever] more than men who watched TV either 1.0-2.0 or 11.5-12.5 hours/week", retroactively discovering a million probably random correlations in your data. Though even there there are ways of reducing the risk of doing so; for example, cross-validation is commonly used to test whether discovered correlations are artifacts of sampling or not, and has some pretty solid statistical theory behind it.

But in this case the general hypothesis is pre-chosen and fixed, basically "men who watch TV more hours [whatever] more than men who watch TV fewer hours", and the choice of threshholds is more of a reporting step, pulling out some binned tails at either extreme for emphasis and ease of discussion, while the real correlation is full-curve-to-full-curve.
Or you could say that it is because people are rational actors, but that rationality is often itself irrational.

Reason is a useful and important skill, but reason is the manipulation of symbols that exist within our own minds, not autonomously in the external world. If we take reason for granted, apply it without recognizing its subjective nature, and consider its product to be objective knowledge of the world, then we are acting rationally, but it is irrational to do so.
that's not the first time somone comes out with this great idea of google doc spreadsheet. Yay! Unfortunately that's not very maintainable. Would anyone be interested in a website à la Drupal which keeps track of all that precious information ?
Again, even the idea of a '10 point programmer' or a '5 point programmer' is depressing, and I struggle to believe that it could accurately convey the complexity of the value that different people have in different contexts.

Where I DO see some interesting numbers having values in this area are where the numbers aren't rankings, but rather indications of participation, passion, and relevance. For instance, I think Stack Overflow scores.. or maybe even HN karma points, might both be really valuable indicators. If I got a resume from someone with a Stack Overflow score attached to it, I'd know that this is a person who participates, is a good communicator, and knows the answers to lots of tough questions! Not only that, but I can go look at his or her posts.

I think this is where your project needs attention... What's in it for the employee? If only '10 point' employees really like your service, then I think you're wasting your time.. '10 point' employees don't have problems finding work.
A free bumper is my least preferred resolution. It essentially says you can't have the phone you thought you were buying. Instead, you have to choose: faulty or ugly.
Layerboom acquired by Joyent
US is in for another lost decade ahead for innovation, as:

- US venture capital industry is expected to shrink considerably (http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/13/report-u-s-venture-capital-...)

- Immigration brain drain takes place. Only 18,000 applications had been filed for regular H-1Bs so far this year.
(http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/14/news/economy/immigration_bra...)

- US manufacturing jobs keep slipping away, and the trend will likely continue - Nation's 100 biggest markets have lost ~40% jobs compared to a decade ago (http://buffalo.bizjournals.com/buffalo/blog/the_score/2010/0...)

We need to act now to reverse these long term trends, otherwise innovation will dissipate rather quickly, as the world braces austerity and the second US recession
IANAL/IANAA/etc.

This sounds a little messy. Draws/dividends aren't mandatory or an entitlement. As the majority holder and presumably the CEO, draws, reinvestment, and fat bonuses (to him) would be at his discretion.

If you really want to do this as an ownership thing, I'd ask for preferred shares and explicitly enumerate some rights/protections. (You have the right to inspect the books; a mandatory dividend payout; spell out his compensation in advance; etc.)

What about doing this as a partnership/royalty deal? You take 10% of all proceeds, net of hosting expenses? That sounds like it would be much cleaner. He could still buy out your share of the partnership at a later date.
> hire on attitude, passion and team fit, not current skill set (unless you are totally crunched)

I wish everyone in a position to hire thought like this. The overall quality of developers in the industry would improve sharply, for one. Programmers as a whole might be a less bitter lot, as well.

Kudos to you sir.
Hunting Lions with Customer Development
This is terrific.

I'm going to send it to every author that chose not to publish with us b/c our marketplace is DRM-free (and the reasons he enumerates is exactly why we're DRM-free as a matter of policy).
From the NYTimes article:

What was unexpected was that many of the men who sat long hours and developed heart problems also exercised. Quite a few of them said they did so regularly and led active lifestyles. The men worked out, then sat in cars and in front of televisions for hours, and their risk of heart disease soared, despite the exercise. Their workouts did not counteract the ill effects of sitting.

From the journal abstract:

In addition, high levels of physical activity were related to notably lower rates of CVD death even in the presence of high
levels of sedentary behavior.

If anybody wants to look at the article, I have access to the paper.
Landlords go by whatever the market will bear. SF is a great place to live and everybody living there is willing to pay more to do so.

My advice is decide what minimum qualities you must have in a place and find something that meets or exceeds those for the least money.

But try to make a short commitment initially. You will doubtless learn a lot more about the market and your own needs once you're here.
IPad As The Ultimate Navigation Tool
The efuse paranoia has, to a large degree, already been debunked. DroidLife[0] quotes BGR[1] as saying:

"The current theory being put forth by the non-alarmists in the Android hacking community suggests that the DROID X is locked in a similar manner to the Milestone. Though it may be difficult to crack, and may lead to many hairs being pulled out, mucking with the bootloader probably won’t brick your phone."

[0]http://www.droid-life.com/2010/07/15/enough-with-the-efuse-t...

[1]http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/07/15/reality-check-modd...
Clearly the dotcom bust (and closely-following recessions and wars) explained the immediate drop in IPOs. But those are cyclical matters. Why they haven't come back 10 years later is what requires some structural explanation. SOX is both proximate in time and plausible as a mechanism, on the 10-year scale.

Never mind the crazy IPO levels of bubble years 1999-2000. Why can't we get back to the modest 100-200 IPOs a year of the early 1990s?
I admit that since I am tired of Java, so far I have shied away from trying Clojure because at the end of the day, I figure I should rather try one of the other interesting languages that are completely independent of Java.

It's a shame that apparently Clojure does not run well on Android yet. If you are forced to use Java (as is the case on Android), Clojure would probably be really sweet.
Clojure is a lisp and a lisp is rarely just another language.

If you don't know lisp or you don't want to know why you should know lisp, go take Scala or Haskell or Python. If, however, you do know—or you're willing to read a handful of Paul Graham's essays on lisp—let's continue:

Most importantly, Clojure is a lisp that is 1) not a toy, 2) not too standalone without a supported platform, and 3) not Common Lisp.

1) Most lisps are toys. It is logical because lisps are fun, profound, and nearly everyone (out of a certain demographic) has written a few. Then there are various Common Lisps, Scheme lisps, Emacs Lisp, and then few others that come as a part of some fairly important software library, and those aren't toys but usable at least in some specific environments. Clojure is a full-blown language that has actual development history past the "gee, i think this is going to be interesting" phase.

2) libraries and compatibility are so important these days. The Python language is gold because it has a fairly extensive standard library and bindings to nearly everything, even if it isn't a lisp. Most lisps have marginal effect and impact because they are so disconnected from the 2000's state of affairs. They're only drawn from the chambers and wielded in superimportant projects where the cost of building a suitable environment to host the lisp system is negligible to the actual problem to be solved.

3) Common Lisp was a good, practical, multi-paradigm lisp by the 80's standards. (Ok, path abstraction could've just worked everywhere right from the start.) But the technology ship has sailed 15 years ago and CL wasn't on it. So far, Common Lisp has been the best we lispers have got. But now that there's Clojure, it doesn't matter we lispers weren't on the ship because with Clojure we just got a jet flight to fifteen years in the future. And I don't think we even saw the ship sailing below during our flight.
I write embedded software for TVs and have 2 40+inch TVs on my desk (in addition to my monitors) we watched every game on almost every TV in the office.
miss the country field greatly, too!
What an obnoxious article. Of course the world cup "matters", it only had about 3 billion viewers of the final for fuck's sake. If that isn't "mattering" then I'd love to know what is.

And I can't even begin to fathom the level of smeghead you'd need to descend to to start judging what "matters" or not based on your silly little graphs. I'd never work for a company that tracked me like that.
Manufacturing jobs are disappearing but real manufacturing output has actually been steadily increasing over the last 50 years.
If the plan is 100% to sell the shares back to him and you have a fairly certain idea of how much you want to sell them for and in what time frame, then just spell it out that way. The deal is $X up front and $X in 12-18 months.

If the business succeeds in 12-18 months then the money to pay you will be there, if it doesn't then the contract will be worth as much as your "shares" (zilch).
I do think that Motorola has gone too far in this, they shouldn't be designing their phone to break when you mess with it.

But you bring up an important point. Many (if not most due to scale) of the people who are rooting their phones are not developers/tinkerers. I was talking to a very non-technical person the other day and they said a friend had sent them instructions on how to jailbreak their iPhone. This person just followed the instructions and then was able to download a navigation app for free. Not so much your noble hacker.

Blah blah blah, DRM is bad so people should be able to steal if they want to, I agree with that. But these companies see the same problems the video game companies have seen and attempted to solve with DRM.
I have found lisps to be one of the more polarizing languages when it comes to opinion. Most people who have experience with one, either love them or hate them.

You are correct that I didn't address the 'I have no experience with a lisp' crowd at all. I was specifically addressing those who have some experience with a lisp.

If you don't like lisp, I suspect that something like Scala would probably be more to your liking. I'd be very interested to hear from people who use clojure and enjoy it after not liking lisp before starting. I suspect they are few and far between, but I'm open to the idea that all of clojure's pluses ( ease of concurrency, ability to tap into java libraries etc ) might win people over.
mos def. it's all about unification.
Nice to see the NYT catch up with what the rest of us were concerned about 5 years ago.
I agree, even though I think the bumpers are kind of stylish.

But Apple's between a rock and a hard place. Either they lose millions now proving free bumpers/gift certificates to customers, or they lose millions later by ignoring the issue and suffering a huge hit to their reputation.

Or worse, they attack Consumer Reports. I would love to see that fight. A for-profit company that lots of people love but not necessarily trust, versus a non-profit that lots of people trust but not necessarily love.
How to Write an IT Term Paper
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It is, to use a Spolskyism, a leaky abstraction.
Economics Research Paper Writing and Enrich Your Knowledge of the Economics
Undertaking to write a research paper in Economics gives a chance to the student to enrich his knowledge and at the same time to show his knowledge and the writing skills. Here you’ll find gives you some valuable tips for writing an excellent Economics term paper.
I thought 円 was equivalent to 'dollar', while ¥ was its currency symbol, equivalent to '$'.
The Optimizer's Guide to Google Adwords: Destination URLs and UTM codes
IMO, this is about protection of revenue stream. Sale of the hardware is only the first transaction. Ongoing licensing and kickbacks from second-order sales is the second: bandwidth, app sales, accessories, etc.

If users modify their phone, they could possibly escape the locked-down universe this maker has created, and therefore metaphorically short-circuit revenue stream plans.

In short, it's about control. Manufacturer control of the user, but not user's control of the device. (Note I deliberately said "user" not "owner" since I believe that best reflects the viewpoint of the manufacturer.)
I think you are confusing "Republican" with "religious Christian". Believe it or not, they are not exactly the same group.
A class lawsuit protects those who are oblivious to the problem. This is how you lose your rights - one by one, until you no longer remember you once had them.
Tired, anecdotal comments like this offer absolutely nothing new to the DRM/piracy debate and don't really belong on HN.

We need experimental, quantitative evidence, with a data set large and broad enough that we have a good reason to dismiss many of the variables as irrelevant.
I suppose it's difficult to find "graduation date" in a million differently-formatted resumes.
Poor Apple. Every phone suffers from similar problem (admittedly to the lesser degree), but now Apple will be forced to find the solution nobody was looking before, just because all this attention. That would be double annoying to them, especially because iPhone 4 has better reception.
There are posts on various Android related forums speaking against this, numerous blog posts, and some people have canceled their orders... so your implicit charge of hypocrisy falls entirely flat in the face of reality. Care to retract it?
I have always been intimidated by college level math and secretly wished I was smarter to not just understand, but to enjoy it as so many people seemingly do. I tried but failed to attain that level of proficiency multiple times.

The mistake I was making was that I was trying to read lectures/blogs/books recommended by random people who knew nothing about me. It doesn't work. The thing is: math is big. It's HUGE, it's a whole world with something for everyone, and not everything in there excites me. I discovered this by accident by picking an easy and fun book about cryptography called (I think it was called The Code) - it was fascinating, it took me to wikipedia and I started to explore this world following my own interests And then it clicked: suddenly even "boring" aspects of math showed me their exciting sides.
There's been some long, impassioned threads here (YC), stackoverflow, reddit, Lambda-ultimate. I invite you to dig deeper. You can't summarize a language's spec, implementations, libraries, community and tool support very well in a 2000 word blog post.

http://searchyc.com/clojure?sort=by_points

http://groovyguts.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/10-reasons-to-lea...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2120946/what-kind-of-appl...

---------------

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1072822

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1074136

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1089139

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1167820
> only a fraction of participants can tell the oddball from the group.

I don't doubt that, but I'd be one of those; they are significantly different to me, but I quit drinking soda a while ago, that shit's just bad for you.
I'm an example of this. I'm a .NET web developer but if I need to make a quick view (css/html/etc) change, I'll fire up Notepad++. It's way faster than firing up good ol' VS. NP++ is also good for more complicated/repetitive text editing.
The Estate Tax’s Perverse Incentives
Webservice API website proposal
I think you're a bit confused about inflation vs. deflation. There's either one or the other, not both at the same time.
A caveat emptor on FX trading worth reading: http://tickerforum.org/akcs-www?post=23331
Fair enough. I was truly just asking the question, not trying to inject judgment into it (although I guess some judgment was inevitable).
Serious question: Are there really that many web devs who don't use a *nix? It seems to me, as an outsider, MS web stacks are relatively rare. I would think it would be easier to work on the platform you are deploying on.
My only criticism of this article is the vagueness about Orbitz NOT being part of ITA:

"purchase of the flight information software firm ITA, with which it plans to enter the online travel search market occupied by Expedia, Orbitz, Bing and others."
And you should never forget telcos are their clients. As long as consumers buy locked subsidized phones under the illusion they are paying less, we will see market distortion like this.

BTW, Brazilian law mandates unlocked/unlockable phones and subsidies are just as present.
Did you try TextMate? I hear its very good.
Good to have you back Steve!

No, not everyone had an issue with the length of your posts, quite the opposite - it was kind of fun to see a pleasantly small bar in the scrollbar knowing that the treat isn't ending any time soon.

Big fan, big fan here... I once declined a job offer from a company whose engineers never heard of you as I figured out during interviews.
Thanks for the reasonable and thoughtful reply. This is why I love HN even in the face of pointless downvoting.
I'm also a .NET developer. But your usage there to me falls under what I called "scratch pad". As in NP++ is not your main means of writing code. I always have NP++ running so I can throw things into it as needed.
CodeRun Studio: A free, cross-platform browser-based IDE
Detroit/Metro Detroit Meetup?
Anyone interested in doing a meetup in this area?
There's definitely a risk of losing the modest revenue stream that I've had for the last 10 years and hope continues for another 10. It's something that I'm aware and try to prepare for in both my business (branding, continue to innovate, etc) as well as personally (diversified revenue streams).

There's also a risk in losing a business by pushing so hard for a buyout/IPO at the expense of ROI & profit, only to not get that IPO or buyout and be left with nothing. I went down that road several years ago and was fortunately able to get my business back on track before losing it.

You bring up some good points and I think it's helpful for HN'ers to see the interesting discussion on lifestyle vs IPO/buyout businesses.
The best technique I ever learned was to say 'Mr. Smith Please' instead of 'May I speak to Mr. Smith please?'. The first sounds more confident and is a little devious (the receptionist often thinks you are a friend, coworker, or important client). You can't be called out for lying, and it is extremely effective at getting the cold caller past the 'gatekeeper'. I'm glad I'm not in sales anymore.
Not a particularity strong argument there, YouTube has loads upon loads of videos so statistically you will encounter them in search results, as for maps Google can't really guarantee the reliability or accuracy of mapping services they don't operate.
He is the consumer, creating the demand. There is no demand for $15 compact discs, and there is lots of demand for good live performances. A band, like every business, must provide supply to meet demand if they want to make money. This is economics 101.
"Complying with the license to avoid breaking the law and risking a lawsuit is usually a very compelling argument for a business person. But not this one, that much is clear."

I love all the posts here about "breaking the law". I never see this much support when a content owner doesn't want their stuff shared on the torrent networks for free. Funny how politics plays into the rights and wrongs of society.
Be careful listening to this one with headphones w/ high volume. The sound is pretty bad.
That's an assumption. Do they really have a negative impact on net sales figures?
One of my favorite things about Clojure is how it does away with much of this boiler-plate. With macros and the general style of lisp, I turned a very boiler-platey java project into an extremely compact clojure project.

I really enjoy how I can look at the clojure code and easily see the flow of what I'm actually trying to do.
For some reason this brings back memories of the "austral", the Argentinian currency from the eighties. Had its own symbol and everything - too bad it wasn't available in any computer or typewriter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_peso#Austral.2C_1985....

I think only newspapers had the means to print that symbol non-lamely. For the rest of us, it was capital "A", backspace, equal sign. That was on a typewriter, of course. Don't remember which hack we used when trying to write the symbol on a text processor.

Later on, the zeroes started piling up again (hyperinflation will do that to your currency) and they went back to the "peso" with the more sensible "$" sign.

Found an image of the symbol:

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Argentine_austral