skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yep, UK access isn't that great.

24Mbps down? Only if you're sitting directly on top of the exchange! From Be*, I get around 13-14Mbps down and 1.3Mbps up with the option to move to Annex M to increase my upload speed to around 2.3Mbps, for an equivalent (or greater) drop in download speed.

However, a very good thing about unbundling is the ability to combine several SDSL lines from different providers to give a leased-line-like connection for a fraction of the cost.
Umm, you can type regular HTML tags in a Markdown document. It parses just fine.
Busting the Chip Cartel
Not exactly a secret, but Nokia's Remote Device Access (RDA) is insanely great. As far as I know, it's unique in the industry. It lets me test UIs on every single iteration of every target phone quickly and simply, and it means I can keep my own device library reasonably compact. I tend to take a week over the UI QA process, booking time on every device and going through the checklist for each. It works very, very well for me at least.

As to your own site, sorry to say this but I couldn't finish watching the video. I found it pretty tedious, and I couldn't really figure out what it is your software does and why I'd need it. As near as I can figure it's a way to bundle scripts in to SMS, and then the phone executes them. That just screams "security nightmare, don't touch with lead lined gloves" to me. Couldn't you add some text saying what it is, so I don't have to sit through an extremely amateur 15 minute video and still learn less than a paragraph of text would tell me?
I posted a similar question a while ago, and had a good response... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=119395
Languages aren't changing every 10 years?
Downloading Torrent from the Terminal
If you've never tried out scratch before it is really fun. I've been making games with my 11 and 14 year old brother this year; they've gotten excited about programming because you get really immediate results. The code looks like multicolored nested C-clamps which you pull off a menu from the side; no typing required. So far we've made whack-a-mole, an asteroid space shooter, and some other random half projects.

Now if they made a scratch to AS3 compiler that would really be something; the games do run as java applets but I think they would be a lot more excited if they saw their game on Kongregate.
Media Darling Powerset vs. Non-Media Darling Hakia
That UK keyboard layout sure is!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#UK_and_Ireland

Why have you moved all of my symbols around?
This is perfect! Exactly what I needed - THANK YOU FOR POSTING THIS GREAT LINK!
good point this - Is it perhaps not the QUERTY keyboard that is limiting language syntax design but the language itself. Most (but not all) languages have been designed "in English" - using typical English language words (for verbose languages like BASIC) and making use of the punctuation of English to punctuate syntax structure.
Every US Patent Decision since 2000 is Invalid
I suspect that Steve Yegge would agree with me that introducing type annotations into JavaScript is a mistake - a cure for the wrong problem as his presentation strongly argued.
In some way it is a security feature... Some keyloggers are set to record when a combination of '4 number + space + 4 number + etc'. This is why my bank removed the first 4 numbers (which are common to everyone) when I login to my account. Also, they switch automatically to the password field as if it was a continuation of the number.
I get to call my mom on Saturday the 10th, mexican mothers day...
I'd favor blank keyboards outright, at least until we have those keyboards with fancy screens embedded in them, and even then.

1. I hardly ever typed on a keyboard where the labels on the keys corresponded to the actual current logical keyboard layout. There are so many potential issues, maybe you're typing canadian french on a US keyboard, maybe you're typing Dvorak, maybe you're typing special characters, maybe you're typing some foreign language, maybe you're typing in emacs with your special keybindings.

2. Looking at the keyboard while typing is a great way to type slow and inaccurately, and maybe even have neck pain if you're lucky. And you can't see what you're typing on the screen. Learning touchtyping takes just a couple days (and motivation!) and is a great investment.

And an extensive keyboard macro system embedded right in the OS would be great!
Tahitian Noni
Tahitian Noni juice is a high quality health supplement that can actually 'improve your health' and even enhance your quality of life.
Lifecycle Messaging
For general use, neither, but for personal use, Markdown. Unlike Textile, with its specific syntax, Markdown adapts to various implementations of email syntax (numbered lists actually use numbers, bulleted lists use hyphens or asterisks). Write it like it would look in an email, and it should format nicely.
There might be some rationale behind the survival of this practice.

You see, the user likes to be sure: when the site works the way (s)he expacts, the user is happy. When it doesn't, the user gets frustrated. When the program gives the user text field of arbitrary length without giving explicit instructions how to fill it (i.e. "no dashes or spaces") the user might be just a bit afraid if the computer will parse the number correctly.

Credit card number is sensitive financial information, and people are not likely to be comfortable with making second guesses about entering it. Probably the freedom of entering the 16 digits the way user wants just doesn't outweigh the benefit of knowing that the site will behave the expected way by any significant margin?

Or those programmers (designers?) might just be incompetent.

P.S The "4 text boxes" solution (with or without auto jumping to the next field) might survive because of the same reason too: It elegantly reminds you about the format of data you are allowed to enter, so you can be sure that your input is parsed all right.
The example code I've seen from popular payment gateways is some of the worst code I've ever seen and that's usually the code the web developers start with. It's obvious the original authors of payment API examples has zero experience with each language. It's doesn't surprise me that the whole payment gateway feels and operates like one giant hack.
It's not only the "PG : at the beggining of a story", but the hostname, which is paulgraham.com that would trigger it.

Instead of doing this, why don't you ask PG to run through the logs and get you the same info?
This has got to be the among the most egregious breaches of the constitution I've ever heard of.

Yet, somehow, I haven't heard of it anywhere else in the media. How the hell does Jenna Bush's wedding merit more coverage than this and the hurricane in Burma?

I really shouldn't be surprised by this kind of sh*t from this administration anymore.
If you use RTL languages like Farsi, Hebrew, ... both of them are kinda useless.
On another note, the story seems to have been removed by the moderators from the new stories page. It doesn't appear anymore if not logged. I'll delete it myself then.
You speak in emotional terms like 'Tasteful' and 'Ugly'. Which makes a technical discussion about threading really difficult.
I have a few strategies aimed towards reigning in my drifting focus.

> I focus best in 2.5-3 hour blocks. Each day I lock in 2 of these, each focusing on an important task/project. I learned of this with an analogy from my Grandfather - if you have a jar and fill it with sand, nothing else fits in. If you fill a jar with pebbles, all the sand fills in the gaps. The strategy in having these two blocks of focus is that all the sand/smaller tasks fill in the gaps.

> Each week maintain a "top of mind" list containing all the things that are on the top of your mind

> Have a "possibilities" list - the things you want to do, but may not need to right now.

Regarding this constant flow of information:

> I prune RSS feeds by looking at the most active and least needed

> I check RSS feeds before and after work
It is rather ridiculous that this author would not include the simple fact that rents nearly always go up... especially over 30 years.
I LIKE home maintenace.
RMS at PyConDue
>There is a political swing towards what were once considered the ideas of the political left such as minimum wages, benefits and so on,' said Holgar Schaefer, labour economist at the Cologne Institute of Economics. 'It is a tendency that is only likely to become more obvious in coming years.'

Uhhh..isn't tight regulation of the economy what fucked up their job markets in the first place?
> First, let’s get the obvious difference out of the way. Mathematics is largely a theoretical field. Sure, we can often apply it to the real world, but where’s the fun in that? The goal is not to produce products for ordinary people, but rather to further mathematics as a subject.

I take serious issue with that statement. Many of the most serious mathematicians refuse to think about problems that don't eventually have an application to the real world. It's just that they do it by mapping the real-world problems onto mathematical abstractions, and then studying the properties of these abstractions. (Example: the three-body problem.)
Working with Apple Tech Support
I would add: A debugger that works, and an IDE that helps you get the job done (versus endless cycles of "print" debugging).

I'd rather use a moderately crappy language in a decent development environment than a wonderful language that was lacking tools support. It's not all about the language.
Isn't it funny how this is never mentioned in these articles. I'm both a homeowner and making a profit on my renters :-). Keep renting guys!!
I'm a big fan of Alice. Apparently there is a version targeting younger kids - Storytelling Alice (http://www.alice.org/kelleher/storytelling/index.html)
This is a repost. See the good comments at the link below for some good debunking:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186914
Audit. Our code is audited and certified by a security firm contracted by our merchant service provider (read bank). They don't have any such anti-transformation provision, but I'm curious to know if any payment gateway does.
BlackBerry Ex-9000
Google the headline. Last I checked the NYT lets people in for free if they came via Google search results.

Or just use bugmenot.
Well in technical terms, using threads can never be as efficient as not using threads. It can be equal, but not better.

A lot of these things are a matter of taste though. If you think it's a thing of beauty to create 5,000 threads, then good luck to you :)
If you have decent credit, you can generally get credit cards at, near, or even below a HELOC rate. I have two credit cards that I don't use (well I put 1 fixed payment on each every month to keep my credit score up) with limits at $30k on each. With the money access checks they give me with promo rates, I could easily sit on 30k each year, just bouncing the balance back and forth anywhere between 0 and 2.99%.
It's important to illustrate strong market potential in size ($$$) and scope (long term growth.) Your business plan should make a compelling argument that illustrates a strong understanding of your operating environment, market trends, and how your business will strategize to use these trends to your advantage.

It's also important to not overlook the risk analysis section. Go a step beyond a simple SWOT analysis and describe your most primary risks, how you will mitigate them, and what your contingency plan is. If you don't have this section in your business plan, investors will undoubtedly grill you with questions on how you plan to deal with risk.

Keep terms consistent and be sure to PROVIDE CITATION for sources used in your market analysis. Yes, it can be a pain, but it goes a long way in showing the reader that you've done your homework.

Following a template is not a sure-fire way to write a success business plan. The outline posted here is a very good starting point--take it and adapt it, add sections, and remove sections to make the plan more relevant to your business and its operating environment. Above all, avoid using business plan software. In any business plan, your primary goals are to illustrate that you know what you're doing (strong team, market and competitive analysis sections), you know how to deal with risk, and that you are passionate about what you're doing. When writing for investors, try to avoid coming across as desperate--give the impression that whether or not you receive money from them, this is what you're doing, the investment would just make things a little easier.
Dream Wildly - Steeler coach's commencement speeches apply to hackers, too
I think he was getting at something about industry language preeminence not changing much every 10 years. C in the 80s, C++ in the 90s, Java in the 2000s, QBASIC in the 2010s. Not that the languages themselves take that long to change internally.

I threw that last one in just to make sure I was illustrating the point and not trying to be historically accurate or trying to predict the future.
So what will you do if string theory is wrong?
> I really suspect that the whole conclusion (that small farms are more productive than big farms) is completely wrong.

Sounds like the usual "big corporate things are bad and small family things are good" dig. Surely there is a better way to measure agricultural productivity than dollars per acre of output. Maybe use calories per acre, or, like you pointed out, find a small farm that raises corn and compare it to a large farm that raises corn and see what differences there are.

If large farming operations were so much less efficient than small farms, then how come the Green Revolution nearly tripled our food output right as large farms became the norm?
Sounds vaguely like the domain-feces of a Microsoft operating system, although Universities usually go with Unix :-)
Wow, St. Louis all over Kijiji. Who knew. Glad to see these classifieds spreading to the midwest.
What makes you think it is rare? Genuine interest, I have no knowledge about it. I know cases were renters pay less than the monthly rates paying of the credit for buying the house.

Wouldn't it be kind of zero-sum? Either you live in the house yourself, than the calculations apply, or you live somewhere else, but then (simplified) your rent equals the rent your renters pay, so it cancels out and the calculations would still be correct.
"The one common bond that the really successful people I've met have is they're ridiculous dreamers. I'm a ridiculous dreamer. Continue to dream. Don't let the reality of the world diminish those dreams."

AFAIC, that pretty much says it all.
Your Guide to the Crowdsourced Workforce
That doesn't seem to be true. Doesn't "irrational exuberance" talk about that? Something can be the case for 20 years, but then change.
OpenCoffee is a great place to hang out and meet folks.

Here's a sweetener: anyone who shows up gets a beta invite to my startup.
My solution was simple: add digg, reddit, and slashdot to Safari AdBlock's filters. It has really changed my life!
My other major rant is when an application presents information to you in a certain format but won't accept it in the same format. So if they display the credit card number with spaces, and I copy/paste it into their own application, they reject it!

My bank fixed this bug, but for years they would display the credit card balance with a $ and a comma for more than a thousand; $1,234.56. But could I paste "$1,234.56" into the amount field when paying the balance off? Noooooo, "$" and "," are illegal characters!

Call me crazy, but when I speak to you in your own language, I want you to understand what I'm saying :-)
Are CEOs with left-parted hair more successful? So says Fortune Magazine
Duplicate post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182379
After reading that line, I went to Lenovo.de and clicked on desktop pcs. The result was a "page not found page".

Maybe I'll try again in 10 years or so...

AFAIK Dell and Apple are still the only retailers where you can buy build on demand computers.
Isn't it the proportion of commonalities rather than the absolute number of commonalities?
Of course. I'm sure it's common in some parts that landlords make a loss in month to month terms, but then once the mortgage is paid off they own it and sell it, and it's gone up massively in price. Maybe that's their big pay day.

I'm sure other landlords make a very good profit month to month also. But if landlords were making a loss in real terms over years, they would probably stop doing it.
Landlords factor that in to the rent. Here in Ontario, we have rent control legislation, so rents do not move with the market. However, the landlord is permitted to raise the rents when the cost of maintenance rises.

If you don't want the hassle of actually dealing with maintenance, you can purchase something like a condominium, where a management firm handles the maintenance and you write a cheque each month.

So... I'm suggesting the maintenance issue is orthogonal to the ownership issue.
For a lot of younger mathematicians, I understand that an even more important problem is finding two sufficiently close locations that the pragmatic constraints of the two body problem are satisfiable.

(the three body problem is a interesting problem, as problems go)
Many startups undervalue the importance of knowing their customer/user half life. It's vital to know the relationship between user acquisition and churn and I can not reccomend enough setting up a daily reporting system (even a plain text email from a crontab script) that gives you a sense of your startups heartbeat against historicals (prev day, 2 weeks, 3 months, 1 yr).

Also, a lot of startups develop these wonderful signup systems and acquire user emails but fail to realize the potential of ambient messaging. Even if they don't read the email, it keeps your users thinking about you. RescueTime does an excellent job with their email marketing. Not only is it pertinent, but I find myself going back to RescueTime more often because of my level of awareness for their product. The lack of user retention initiatives in my first startup was likely the ultimate driver of its inability to build community despite a very strong launch (it was still acquired for its tech assets/hr). Now, working on strong online properties, I can see the impact of reaching out to your users. Dollar for dollar, I think email has the highest roi. Much more so than your run of the mill facebook app.

"The most significant finding from our usability research on email newsletters is that users have highly emotional reactions to them. This is in strong contrast to research on website usability, where users are usually much more oriented toward functionality. Even a website that users visit daily seems to feel like a tool: users want to get in and get out as quickly as possible rather than “connect” with the site. Users tend to glance at websites when they need to accomplish something or to find the answer to a specific question. In contrast, newsletters feel personal because they arrive in users’ inboxes, and users have an ongoing relationship with them. Newsletters also have a social aspect, as users often forward them to colleagues and friends. The positive aspect of this emotional relationship is that newsletters can create much more of a bond between users and a company than a website can." - http://www.nngroup.com/reports/newsletters/summary.html
StrawPoll - a Twitter polling app
Does it astound anyone else that FSJs analysis is better than 99% of the actual "analysts" out there?
Yeah, what all the replies to this miss is that history and photography was never a degree you would expect to earn much money with. Neither is architecture (another example mentioned in the article).

Also, New York is WAY more expensive than Berlin. I think I remember paying 10$ for two pounds of potatoes in NY (and that was years ago). A coffee at Starbucks was like 8$ - wtf???
You need 20% down to avoid PMI, don't you? PMI is mortgage insurance if you don't have enough equity in your house. I'd guess that could run an extra 2-3 hundred per month.

You're also missing homeowners insurance which would probably end up being close to $200/month for a 300k house.

You ROI doesn't really make sense to me.

You're paying a little over $1340 / month in interest, $200 for homeowners insurance, $312 in tax, and $200 for PMI. That's $2052 / month in housing costs where none of that money goes towards principle. Now depending on how you're doing your taxes, most of that is tax deductible, so lets say that's going to save you about 20% of that - $19,700 is the cost of your housing per year ($1,641 / month).

Furthermore, 4% growth isn't guaranteed - especially with the current housing slump. The growth in housing experienced from the late 90's - early 2007 will likely not happen again anytime soon. I thought traditional growth was more like 2-3%. Plus, appreciation has to be considered in the long term. You need to pay capital gains if you sell the house within 2 years and any sunk costs on the house sitting vacant or realtor fees will lower your actual returns on the sale.

So if the house is worth spending $1,641 / month vs. what you could rent for $1,641 OR you plan on living in that house for a significant period of time where the fixed cost of ownership becomes valuable, then buy. If not, renting is still the better option.

For young people who aren't stable and might be moving around, I just don't see the benefit of home ownership, especially in today's uncertain housing market. Once you're ready to settle down, home ownership is a better idea.
XML: The Angle Bracket Tax
Hehe completely agree. It's good to waste your time on your own website.

1. Waste time on website

2. Get irritated to death by some bug/lack of feature

3. Go fix bug/feature

4. Goto 1
Here is all of the articles about tuning LAMP systems:

http://fuseurl.com/94
I take an even more serious issue when a title as 'Save software development' has the following in the second paragraph 'The requirements suck, so the design sucks, so the interaction between modules suck'
What deep thinking
American Express cards express the number with three fields. The first field has 4 digits, the second has 6, and the last has 5 - yes the number is only 15 digits long.
Brand magic
You are overlooking retiree benefits. GM workers are much more expensive. The per car cost of current retiree medical benefits is staggering.
Stanford Entrepreneurship Week Challenge Winners
This is a few months old but may still be interesting for those that have not seen it. Partially in response to a current front page story linking to the video made about the 2007 competition.

Disclaimer: I was a part of a winning team.
It Could Kill Your Children: Tech Obesity | Tech Jaws
Platial Goes Local & Very Soon Mobile
The space shuttle and Nasa command center
Carnegie Mellon students develop glove that converts sign language into spoken words
So it allows quoted strings on one side of the colon but not the other? Sounds like a bug to me!
Why Can't Twitter Scale? Blaine Cook Tries To Explain
Ask HN: Is Facebook worth $15 Billion?
Rough comparison: Yahoo’s market capitalization is now about $35 billion. With about 506 million unique visitors in March, that translates to about $71 per visitor. Apply that same metric to Facebook’s 109 million unique visitors and the company would be worth $7.7 billion, about half the value implied in the Microsoft deal of $240 million for 1.6% Facebook stake.

Source: New York times.
Everything You Wanted to Know About String Performance
IMHO - No.
Unfortunately (depending on the party in question), patent law shares at least one trait with ducks – getting that duck to walk backwards is next-to-impossible.
Right. I was wondering why he appears to have two handles -- both using his name, both posting stuff related to his research.