skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Where did you get it done? And costs/aftercare? And any particular reason you chose that finger?

I've wanted to get it done since I found out about them a year or so ago. Love the idea of adding another whole sense to my collection, even if its a bit of a hack.
Create IVR applications in minutes with QuickFuse
Are you kidding? History professors get massive amounts of tail.
Oh God. Let the crapstorm begin...
Yeah Django is definitely the big player. It's interesting though that python is bigger than ruby but rails is bigger than django.
http://www.builditwith.me/
Works for me in OS X Chrome 5.0.375.99 (latest version according to the about box)
I'm not a "professional" writer, but I do write fairly often, and am working on my own startup. I am looking for some part-time work sort of along the lines you are mentioning.

What's your site/blog? You can check out my writing at http://aflanagan.com and http://blog.lenguajero.com

Contact me if you want to talk more.
I read this book several years ago when I was still doing a lot of straight-ahead PHP. Was a bit of a mind opener at the time and totally changed my approach and understanding of programming and programming languages. Much of the book is applicable to Javascript, Ruby, and Python. I don't have much use for Perl now, but it's still a great read.
Shaving with a 5-blade Mach razor is like taking 5 passes with a single blade; the analogy is akin to driving an automatic vs. standard transmission. This is why 5-blade razors save time, and why a double-edge can give you a closer shave.

You don't burn your face as long as you re-lather with each pass, and I typically recommend pre-shave oil too. But, tThe Robert's wet method technique takes a bit of studying and practice.

Nevertheless I do agree with your first statement.. different strokes for different folks.
I began playing video games... and in the last four years from that I've gone through a full time job as a journalist in that field (award-winning :P), gained a lot of experience running large (70,000 person) events, consulting for companies that create games / hardware / events, and now work in marketing/various other areas, all in that same industry.

Just because I played games online.
It's not bad that they're white - it's bad if they're three identical clones.
PIE: Add CSS3 border-radius and multiple backgrounds to IE 6-8
Why is the onus on me to prove it is one way or another?

The information is available online. Do you really think people walk into Best Buys before they do their research? Perhaps if money is no object. But for most people, it is, and therefore research is pretty imperative.
Wikipedia to Add Meaning to Its Pages . . .
15" Macbook Pro i5 and 24" iMac Core 2 Duo
As a product manager I face this dilemma as well. I work on side projects but I'm not a great coder and not a great designer.

The following areas have helped me become more 'active' in the early development process:

-Learn an analytics engine (I like Google Analytics) like the back of your hand. Help engineers build great testing tools that work well w/ your analytics engine, then segment + comb the data for patterns that shape the direction of the company. (see: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/ and buy "Web Analytics 2.0" from Amazon for more info)

-Become very familiar with A/B split testing and other forms of automated online testing. Try to gain an understanding of adwords as well so you can send targetted users to your offerings and help developers make informed decisions about whether or not the product will have interested users that are cheap to acquire off the bat. (see: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/ for expertise/more info)

-Buy Silverback (http://silverbackapp.com/) and conduct user tests CONSTANTLY as in every day. Continously analyze the product, summarize user input, and pass that info off to development.

-Buy Balsamiq Mockups (http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups) and start prototyping pages with improvements or new features for existing apps. This can filter into User Experience/Information Architecture and I find that it's the best way for a 'product manager' to bridge the gap between design and development.

Sorry I know that these won't get you hired right away, but they will give you the skillsets to work at a small (5-10 person) startup that is hiring people who can 'contribute.'
Well, graduate degrees can be helpful, but it's not a competitive advantage. You competition can hire people with degrees too. The more helpful they are in your field, the more likely it is that the competition will have them too.
Advantages is determined by the existing competition.

If they aren't innovative, and you are, it's a competitive advantage.

Same goes for anything in your business model that you can do better than the existing competition.

Worrying about newcomers is a good idea, but pretending that your magical zord of power will give you a permanent advantage over people and companies that don't exist yet is largely pointless.
Home: (Coming today) AMD 2.8 GHz 6 core, 4GB RAM, Ubuntu 10.04. 23" and 15" monitors

Mobile: Asus EeePC 900 with EasyPeasy

Work: some Intel quad core, 4GB RAM, Ubuntu 10.04, 21" monitor

On the way: AMD 48 core machine
Absolutely. I burned out at a tech job in 2000, and spent several subsequent years working as a climbing instructor, outdoor gear retail clerk, cable technician, etc. ... anything that didn't require the use of a computer.

There's a difference between simply needing a vacation, and being completely and absolutely disgusted with your field and everyone in it.
I had not heard of a "arrest to quota" design in the USSR, could you point me to a relevant source so I can read about it?

I still disagree on the main point that to be at risk in nazi germany you had to somehow defy the regime.

Your view seem to be that in nazi germany you could simply comply with the ruling ideology and be fine, but as I said above, you can think of the killings and arrests by the thousands of the SA (which had been key to hitler's seize of power) as a glaring counter example.

Moreover, the gestapo mostly run operations based on delations from common citizens (the origin of the "gestapo=big brother" misconception), it's not hard to imagine how mundane they can be. Unless you have a much better view of humanity than I have :)
Cheal bed and breakfast London and hotels near London
Don't assume everyone is like you.

I do most of my 'research' by browsing in shops. I often go into places like Best Buys, Frys, looking for 'stuff I probably want'.

Also most people have credit cards. Most people often don't worry about money when purchasing things. They worry later when they're in debt.

The threshold is different for everyone, but I would say that $200 is below the threshold it makes sense to bother researching all that much if it looks like it might be useful. No point spending a couple of hours, extra petrol etc to "save" a few $.
Shimming: the newest con for stealing credit card info from ATM machines
And their race is supposed to predict this? I've heard white people can actually be quite different from one another.
i created a setups subreddit to post them to, but for some reason it got banned. i'm trying to get a reddit moderator to help.

http://reddit.com/r/setups/
Reminded me of that Mark Twain quote (apocriphal?) "Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't."
While I do believe there are genuine cases where a new company does have a 'competitive advantage' most do not. At the end of the day the only advantage a company should strive for is how to use their skill, resources and relationships to make more money than their competitors. MySpace was on a great growth path before a lot of people even knew what Facebook even was. They had more financial resources sooner than Facebook and had a lot of ‘cool’ corporate sponsors to provide brand equity before Facebook. At the end of the day what they did just felt better to more and more users and what MySpace didn't do made it an easy case to switch. It is not that MySpace could not replicate the features of Facebook it was the fact MySpace didn't.
MacBook Pro 15" with i7 processor and 8GB RAM, 24" Apple Cinema Display at a standing desk, Logitech Nano mouse, Rode Podcaster USB condenser mic, Wacom Intuos 3 tablet, and Canon Vixia HV40 straight into Quicktime via firewire for video.
That's probably true, but there's a lot more that goes into employment decisions beyond compensation.

As an early startup employee, I'm working for (all things considered) less money than I was when I was working in the defense industry. But I also don't loathe my job or lay awake at night, stressed about the idiocy and bureaucracy that made my days hellish, Kafkaesque, comedic nightmares.

That's worth more a LOT more than ~$10k/year and a guaranteed 'career'.
If BMW was the only car brand out there, then yes the emergence of the Corolla would actually represent new competition.
Bing Maps has a "bird's view" for a long time now.
Last I checked, mjd appeared to be out of a job, and was soliciting donations for his (awesome) higher-order perl book. It's a shame he's out of a job, because if mjd cannot get a job, what about the rest of us?
Those are great tips, thanks. I actually have some high profile people following @thathigh on twitter, namely, Snoop Dogg, Sarah Silverman, Doug Benson, Bill Maher, and Guy Kawasaki. Not sure how to capitalize on those, as twitter doesn't send a ton of traffic to the site. Any ideas? :-)
"80% of Americans believe they are better-than-average drivers. Can't be true, right?"

No, not "right".

For any finite (> 1) set of people on nearly any measure, it is easy for all but one to be "better than average".

E.g., for any positive integer n > 1, everyone gets a 1 except the one person with a 0 so that the average is (n - 1)/n < 1.

Done.
Ads aren't reliable in this version (from the Spotify site) - so they can't make it available for free users. Remember Spotify still works really well under Wine.
Trusty little white MacBook 2.1GHz/4GB running Snow Leopard and Ubuntu Lucid. I have an external full sized Apple keyboard, mighty mouse and Raindesign MStand, and I swapped out the 120GB drive for a faster 500GB one - and that's it. I'm looking for a good 1920x1200 screen, that's the most my MB will take, but there's no hurry.
> (...) a legion of Apple fanatics yells them down with "Doesn't happen on my phone/This is so overblown."

Anyone who doesn't have this problem or thinks it is overblown is an Apple fanatic, obviously, and of course they're all yelling all the time.

> There's already someone in the HN comments on this story who says it can't possibly be true because he's never had the problem with his iPhone. Seriously.

I can't seem to find that. Weird.

> I think that if one believes they are fudging the numbers, either duplicate their effort, or contact Consumer Reports and ask for more details on how the experiment is run.

Nobody said they were fudging numbers, nobody even implied it.

> (...) and with another face, they're hiring RF and antenna engineers.

Ah right, that whole conspiracy theory.

> There are real people who paid at least $200 for this phone who are having real signal issues, but I shouldn't believe them because AT&T's coverage in Philadelphia is so widespread that I can use my iPhone underground in the subway?

I haven't seen any comments recently (here or on reddit) which suggest that the problem does not exist, only that the problem does not affect them.
exhibit a:

http://viewsourcecode.org/why/
So you'll be OK with some country right now doing Holocaust over some minority, or will you protest that?

If you'll protest, why? And why you don't protest againist all the governments that do this all evil things?

Many things are relative, but not all. Making it seem relative is just comfy, but comfort is less important than truth.

I'll agree that every country in WWII wasn't innocent, that Jews right now are overplaying the Holocaust card, that many countries politis, unfortunately including mine, makes victims of itself, which is indignifing and stupid thing to do. But telling me Holocaust wasn't evil makes me think you wouldn't mean it repeating, and that makes me hate you a little :) (ok, I really don't believe you wouldn't mean - I think you just play the devil advocate there).
How to Own a Windows Domain
That's how Apple would define it. Lexus doesn't care what Kia's building, they care what BMW is.
I'll stick to my 7D for now.
Django is arguably the most used Python web stack, but it's also a much more controversial choice than Rails is in the Ruby world. I hear "you'll outgrow Django really quickly" a lot; whether that's true or not I can't say since I've never used it. Also, there seems to be a lot more choices for web frameworks in the Python world: Django, Pylons, web.py, Tornado, Flask, CherryPy, Zope etc. I'm not sure if this is the case in the Ruby world. All I ever hear about are Rails and Sinatra.
False dilemma: there are plenty of jobs that pay fair market rates that don't involve hellish idiocy and bureaucracy. It's not somehow automatic in companies that are a different age than post-founder pre-funding.

There's nothing about a pre-funded startup that magically banishes the "kafkaesque". Conversely, there's nothing about being well-funded that keeps you from sleeping at night (quite the opposite, actually).
Yeah, I've got a cheap-ass Compaq laptop, that cost like $400 a year ago with Ubuntu 10.04 on it. 2 GB ram and a dual-core 64 bit AMD processor is plenty to get work done efficiently, especially with Vim + Bash as my primary work environment. I can run Windows XP in a virtualbox instance without issue for IE testing.
This is what I was shotting for my site http://www.prepmeup.com.

Glad you beat me to it.
Yes, that reminded me of http://pomegranatephone.com/ - which is old but brilliant.
I bought an Asus Eee several years ago for writing away from home, but discovered too late that the keyboard is much too small for me to type comfortably.
I took an almost 50% salary cut when I first started working at justin.tv. I don't think you can generally expect the industry average in an early-stage startup. My salary is nearly back up to what it used to be now though.
Years ago I suffered what I would now call "burn out" although at the time I didn't know what was happening. I found this essay to be an accurate description of my experience, but I think a doctor would be a better source of information on this topic:
http://www.stressdoc.com/four_stages_burnbout.htm

At the worst point I was experiencing anxiety, paranoia and depression. My only strategy for coping with stress and difficult situations at the time was to put my head down and work through it. I thought if I was having problems getting the job done, I would just put in more hours. This turned out to be a terrible idea. I worked 80 hour weeks for months at a time in highly stressful situations. Initially this work ethic bought me promotions and raises, but you can't work these kinds of hours under a huge load of stress for years and not suffer consequences. In two years I gained 40 pounds and became a pack a day smoker. When you never put a limit on how much you work you eventually break down.

I nearly ended up quitting and going to seminary. Instead I just got a new job with less hours and responsibility on the other side of the country. After a few years I'm finally getting to the point where I can handle stress like I used to: until now any moderate level of stress has caused me to spiral into anxiety and paranoia again. I was worried I was permanently damaged, but thankfully I'm getting better.

EDIT: I haven't smoked for two years. I've lost over 40 pounds and I'm running my first 5K on Thursday. I got better but I had to drastically change my life.
Was and still am concerned about who can comment on these submissions. People can be quite rude.
Install Apache on an Ubuntu Server
I can agree with both the potential savings, and the enjoyment. I've switched to a straight razor, and I'll never need to buy another blade probably for the rest of my life. Soap and possibly my waterstone are my only consumables.

As for time and enjoyment, it takes me probably 15+ minutes because I'm still getting the hang of it, maybe even 20 if I'm practicing a 3rd pass (for the perfect shave, you go with the grain, across the grain, against the grain, and your face will be smooth in all directions), but I feel good when I'm done.
As much as this phenomenon should, theoretically be common in most major cities, it turns out to be fairly rare. To achieve it, you need a city with canyon-like streets (ala sky scrapers), a grid street layout without "blockers" (curved streets, other buildings) getting in the way, and a fairly unimpeded horizon, geologically speaking. Manhattan fits the bill perfectly. Some other US cities...
"Although particular skills can help, there's always someone smarter, more experienced etc."

No. Need infinitely many people for that.
Obviously we'll never know, and we can speculate all day. But I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that yes, Germany would have calmed down eventually.

Empires have a tendency to reach their zenith and slowly recede after that. When you have occupying powers like Nazi Germany they're likely to fall apart eventually due to internal strife. The Roman Empire did, so did the Soviet Union, partly.

Had WW2 not happened we might just have had a Cold War with four actors (USA, UK, Germany, Soviet Union) instead of 2. The world might not be too different today, with Germany either toppled from within, or having had their version of the civil rights movement.

Then again they might have tried to take over the entire world. But I think it's somewhat naïve to extrapolate states at their most violent beginnings to how they might have evolved in the future.

If some hypothetical world police would have stopped the USA at its beginnings we might very well read in our history books today that if it wasn't for that, the US would have proceeded to eradicate the rest of the world's indigenous peoples. And that it would still be keeping millions of people as slaves.

In reality the fate of states is more complex than the plans of any one man. Even if he's the Führer.
Hardware:

- Core i7 920

- 6gb DDR3 RAM

- ATi 5970 for graphics - currently RMA'd

- 19" HP Display awaiting upgrade.

Software:

- Ubuntu for working (GNOME)

- Arch for hacking (GNOME)

- Windows 7 for games

Portable:

- Dell Mini 10v base model with Ubuntu

- College issue Core 2 laptop with Arch
Is that unique to de safeties? I am using a straight razor, and while I cut myself sometimes, it's always a slice, not a chunk.
I love a good hackathon; how bit.ly-related does our project have to be to fit in?
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1502132

Many, many comments there from a couple of days ago. Probably polite to read those before repeating them all over again.
"With everyone having access to mostly the same information and the same tools,"

Not even NEARLY true.
I have always worked in relatively diverse environments and I have enjoyed it and would look for the same in my next employer.

My current company had no diversity until I joined (the founder and employee #1 even went to the same school), but it never struck me as being worth thinking about. I'm honestly curious, what benefits do you get from a company with ethnic diversity?
Good fiction, then. I suppose you may argue that bad fiction need not make sense.
Did you write the entries at first by yourself? They're hilarious!
I think this one has less bullet point features and it's cheaper. Tough crowd.
I didn't say otherwise. I'm saying that my current job, taken as a whole, as valued by me, benefits me more than my last job.
Mr. Pekar had an amazing ability to show the gritty and hilarious reality of our everyday lives.

He is also so thoroughly Cleveland..

Harvey, you are missed.
[edited to be less dickish]

First comment:

> The iPhone 4 antenna attenuation issue will be remembered as one of the biggest avoidable but unforeseen design errors of all time, I think.

The response:

> iPhone 4 owner as of day 1 and I haven't had an issue. I can't imagine that this is true.

What cschep can't imagine to be true is:

That the iPhone 4 will be remembered as one of the biggest avoidable but unforseen design errors of all time.
Earning more money: Finding the right idea
On my blog, I've been teaching people how to earn more money on the side via freelancing. The #1 barrier of 5,000+ people I surveyed was finding an idea, so I wrote this up (includes customer-development techniques to identify/refine ideas).
At home, I have a Core i5 desktop with 4GB of RAM and dual 22" monitors running Windows 7, and also a 13" unibody MacBook which I bought back in October 2008 -- on the day they were released, actually.

In the past I used the desktop for quite a bit of gaming as well as remoting in to my work PC with Remote Desktop. These days I find I don't really game very much anymore, and I can connect to my work VPN/RDP through the Mac anyway if I need to work from home. Consequently, I'm on the MacBook almost 100% of the time. I'm actually considering getting a Mac Mini, moving the big HDDs out of the desktop into external enclosures attached to that, then getting rid of the Windows box and the older 22" display. I suppose I could also just get a NAS, but I like knowing I have a spare machine around in case my MacBook dies.

Work is a Q6600 with 3GB of RAM running Vista Business, since I'm currently working with mostly with .NET.
In addition, can anybody suggest something more along the lines of Jeffrey Richter's CLR via C# for the JVM/Java? CLR via C# covers a wide range of topics about how garbage collection, threading, appdomains, etc. work under the CLR using examples from C#, which I think would be more useful for learning what you need to know about Java and the JVM than your typical Java programming book.
the Supreme Court's botched decision in Quality King

The footer of the Supreme Court ruling says it was a unanimous decision. More than likely, the problem lies in how the law was written, not in how it was interpreted.
I started blogging for enjoyment long before the word entered the popular lexicon. That never made a ton of money directly (though it did make some) but it did indirectly help me land a book deal and start a couple related businesses that made a lot of money.

It also gave me a chance to figure out how to write and communicate well, which I think is why we got into Y Combinator. I'd say that writing is probably the second most valuable life skill (behind understanding the concept of expected value) that I've picked up to date, and I was abysmal at it before I started that first Movable Type blog.

So in a roundabout way, blogging has made me a fortune, though I never could have anticipated it. When I started nobody had made much off of it.
I have a 15" Dell Inspiron 6400, given by my school for free 3 years ago.
1.6 GHz Centrino Duo
2gb ram
ubuntu 10.04
gnome+xmonad as window manager
internal hard disk space is absurdly low(80gb, I think), I have a 500gb external drive, though.
They don't have to be bit.ly related at all: http://blog.bit.ly/post/786142591/celebrate-2-years-of-bit-l...
Is anything a real competitor if it doesn't compete well out of the box?
Early startups have super high variance. Some are utterly Kafka hellish, others are great. Unless you are either a strong personality and able to influence (which is kinda unlikely IMO if this is your first real job or first startup, and if you can't just quit at any time.), you have a good chance of losing.

A funded startup is almost as good a learning opportunity for tech people, with some assurance that it won't be hell (legal liability, the selection and survivor bias, bigger team)
Get back to us once it's actually on sale and we can buy one. It seems everyone other than Apple is keen to announce products but then aren't so great at ever releasing them.