skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are my preferences. Infact, I use all of these.

Search: Bing (This is my default search engine);
Maps: Bing (Their Bird's Eye is way cooler than Google Maps);
Gmail, Calendar: Zoho Mail & Calendar;
Docs & Apps: Zoho Docs & Business;
Voice: YouMail.com;
Translate: MicrosoftTranslator.com;
Sites: Weebly;
Finance: Y! Finance;
YouTube: Blip.tv, Viddler, Vimeo;
Photos: Flickr;
Browser: Firefox/Safari
We could have street signs that turn off when safety goes down then, and turn back on when measurements show that people are getting used to it
I just did get my Lego blocks out to start playing!
The Startup Idea Filter
Alternatively, for those who want good-looking text but prefer the WYSIWIG approach: just use a half-decent DTP program like InDesign, which will get you everything mentioned in the article except for the per-character transparency.
Our un-winnable and unending adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq are orders of magnitude more costly than wages and benefits for federal employees. This is not to mention the cost of the Bush tax cuts.

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3036

tl;dr version:
http://www.cbpp.org/images/cms//12-16-09bud-rev6-28-10-f1.jp...
In the example, if the last four bits are 1100, it's a string. The first seven four-bit quadruplets, plus a bitmask'd version of the last quadruplet (1100) comprised eight sets for four bits. My questions is: how can four bits, if they don't already encode the hex character I'm looking for, be bitmask'd into displaying it, and still be capable of encoding any of the 16 possible hex characters?
Why understanding batting averages is important
Bad programmers did what they were told instead of creating their own solutions to fix problems. Although it sounds like their own solutions would have been ignored by the brass anyway.
These comments regarding ECC are pretty much the exact opposite of reality; ECC is mainstream, and used in plenty of environments because its "ludicrously unnecessary strength" correlates with "smaller, more manageable keys". ECC vs. RSA is a library option setting for pretty much every dev environment in the world.
Start-Up Village Emerges in SoMA's 410 Townsend
> Bad programmers wrote a bad search engine, and Yahoo lost all their traffic to the good search engine?

Yahoo didn't have their own search technology, until acquisition of Inktomi in 2003 (they used Inktomi to serve their results prior to using Google, whom they used until ~2004).

Correct way to put it is "they didn't hire enough good programmers to build a search engine". A web search engine isn't something bad programmers can build. They acquired a great search engine (the algorithms were, IMO, better than Google's and more immune to gaming, they were a first distributed search engine paving the way for Google's "cluster of commodity hardware" architecture [1]), but it came too late.

[1] See http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.83.... for what I mean by "paved the way". Their mistake was using Solaris on SPARC (appropriate choice in 1996) for a few years too long (Google started on Linux/x86 right away, Inktomi transitioned by the time of Yahoo's acquisition).
This is the story of the non-story.

I'm not sure whether to flag, laugh, or cry.
My boyfriend is a Python programmer. My main language is Obj-c.

Of course we share a lot of languages in common, but I have an almost complete lack of Python experience, as does he with Obj-c. Together we wrote a simple url-shortener in Python (http://get.emo.gd/), and with a little of my help, he has been dabbling in an iPad app that he's been wanting to write for ages.
Make it where people want to grow up to be teachers. The only idea I have for changing that is to pay teachers A LOT of money. Not just decent money. I'm talking about medical doctor money or more. Make it where teachers are not only respected for what they do, but for how much money they make. Maybe doing so would cause more great-minded people to teach instead of being tempted to other things because of money or status.

Think of the people who have inspired you. Surely if you have had a great teacher, that person would be in your list!
Interpretation of a Steve Jobs Quote
"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."
- Steve Jobs
Easily gamed then.
Don't miss the allusion ("Theirs was not to reason why") to the poem The Charge Of The Light Brigade. Into the Valley rode the 500. Very funny.
How Software Companies Die: http://www.zoion.com/~erlkonig/writings/programmer-beekeepin...
It is but since the first part of the story was submitted n-times over (including comments proclaiming Apple turning evil because of the patent) I thought is was only appropriate to submit the conclusion, too.
I heared that when one of the large investment banks (forgot which one) got a new CEO, the first thing he did was stopping all IT outsourcing projects. He did realize a modern bank is, in fact, a software company, and you shouldn't outsource your core activity.
When pg says something is dead, he doesn't mean it from a current revenue or size point of view.
When did Google have great enterprise search?
Read Microsoft is Dead: http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
"It's probably too much to hope any company could avoid being damaged by depending on a bogus source of revenue. But startups can learn an important lesson from [the fact that] in the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture."

I think Yahoo made the correct decision on both counts. As far as depending on a bogus source of revenue, all new advertising mediums are massively undervalued at first, then massively overvalued, and then only eventually even out. It would be a huge mistake not to plan your entire business model around this cycle. Yahoo did this, and they made literally billions of dollars because of it. Sure, if they had chosen to go into a different sort of business they could have perhaps extended their reign, but it's hard to argue that they made the wrong choice.

As for not having a hacker-centric culture, I think they made the right choice here as well. Every time Yahoo bought a startup, their stock rose more than they paid for the company, meaning every time they acquired their tech through a buyout the execs took home massive paychecks. Whereas every dollar they spent on elite programmers was money out of their pocket.

I think the lesson here, if anything, is that you can make mostly the right decisions and your business can still decline over time.

Incidentally, I heard a great story about one of the Yahoo sales guys. Apparently he bought his own inventory at the end of every month to meet his quota, because the stock he was getting vested was worth more than the 100K or so he was required to fork over each month. (Because he obviously couldn't actually make any sales.)
Nah, anything that makes Gmail more useful is good for Google. The ads don't mean much.
Yahoo went bad because:

1. It has no notable engineering foundation;

2. It has no clear vision about what it is and where it's going; and

3. Like Microsoft, it's put a business person in charge, which is the death knell of any tech company. You need someone with a technical foundation or a product person, not a business wonk.
Hack to Unlock Sim of your Mobile
You're right -- and that's why I didn't flag.

I really wish somebody could manage to write an article that explains to folks how to read patents. I know it's boring, and we definitely need some kind of reform, but the ignorance and misinformation out there is incredible.
PG: "But [Yahoo] had the most opaque obstacle in the world between them and the truth: money."

Sounds like yet another variant of Upton Sinclair's Law: "When a man's paycheck depends on his not understanding something, you can depend upon his not understanding it."
Alot, but thats because I also find it interesting which renders the question, how you say, moot. :)
I was surprised to see PHP and ASP.NET on the same line as Rails. Is ASP.NET relevant, and would seeing PHP really inspire that much confidence?
As a PHP programmer in my day job… I would not consider PHP experience as a negative, but I would be quite reluctant to hire a PHP programmer who, when prompted, could not criticize PHP. Its failings as a language are numerous: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-crawling-horrors-of-PHP
Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article.

...the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had.

Is Apple a big winner, like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (the other companies he mentions repeatedly)? Bigger. (Check the last 1, 5 or 10 years on Google finance for the GOOG or MSFT comparison. FB is not public, but...) Do they have this obnoxiously elitist focus? No. They still manage to hire great engineers, though.

So which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture?... any company that needs to have good software.

I wouldn't say that Apple is dominated by a hacker culture at all. It's dominated by Steve Jobs and a focus on design and attention to detail. Yet that seems to produce much better software than Google or Microsoft, IMHO. That's very subjective, I realize, but the market seems to agree. At any rate, Apple does produce good software.

So are the hacker culture and the elitist focus really necessary for a technology company to succeed? Is Apple a complete anomaly while Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are typical? What say you, pg?

I realize it's borderline suicidal to post an HN comment that simultaneously calls out pg and lauds Apple, but it's criminal to completely leave the best (imho) technology company out of a discussion about attributes of great technology companies.
There are a LOT of online judges out there. How is this really different?
I would enjoy mowing the lawn more if I didn't hate emptying the bag of cuttings. I always wind up trying to mow that last little bit when the bag is full so I don't have to empty it twice, but then the bag gets really heavy, and it becomes markedly unenjoyable.

Alas, I may not find his Zen in lawns :(
Hah, would these be the same financial models that were used to rate sub-prime securities AAA?! :)
Hindsight is easy. If you look back at the two decades before 1998, it was basically Microsoft, Intel (and to a lesser extent Oracle) buying (hopefully) or crushing every single engineering-centric company out there. They used good ol' monopoly power and FUD, which is pretty far from an engineering culture. Borland, Lotus, Apple, etc. IBM had successfully made a transition to a service company and the conventional wisdom was that that was all that saved them from being crushed in turn. Jerry Yang was just following the conventional wisdom.

EDIT: Most importantly they had just witnessed the spectacle of Netscape, a company that seemed unstoppable, just completely buried by MS.
My partner deals with assholes all day long. In fact, she does colonic irrigation.
I used Construx. Y'all are a bunch of rich kids.
Rich Yahoo in 1999 overlooked the value of search.

Rich Google in 2004 overlooked the value of social networking (both their in-house hit Orkut and outside services).
http://duckduckgo.com/faq.html - What's with the name?
Buy Urchin and run it yourself -- it's virtually identical to Google Analytics (or at least used to be) because it's the company that Google acquired to make GA.

Avoid Omniture SC. It has a terrible interface, is too expensive, harder than GA to implement, and Omniture doesn't seem to be improving it much, if at all anymore.
Now I can truthfully write: "Observers say that many democrats were concerned with the Obama admin's decision to..."
Sure, it's all wine and roses... until the day you find yourself fighting with your spouse over a bug.

It happens.
I'm confused. If BankSimple isn't a bank (it's not, right?), then why does it have "bank" in its name and issue statements like "how we're building a better bank?"

Be a bank or be something better that isn't a bank, but you can't have your cake and eat it too.
wow, a smart CEO
How To: Visualize All Your Foursquare Check-ins
Education is hard to disrupt or change because it is labor intensive. I really don't see any way to substitute technology or other capital improvements for skilled labor there. Nor do I think you can easily disentangle parenting and culture from education. Kids from educated households can endure really awful teachers for large proportions of their primary and secondary education, and go on to do fairly well. Kids from worse-off households have a much harder time.

Here it might be well for you to say how you wish to shape people. To be solid citizens? Great coders? High earners?
I'm not a lawyer, but I have a little experience.

After completing college you should be eligible for an OPT (optional practical training) visa, which will let you work in the US for a year. You can use that time to catch on with a company who will sponsor you for an H1B.

Speaking more personally, I've dealt with a family-based immigration case but not employment based. I filed my family-based petition mostly on my own, and took it upon myself to learn all the applicable laws and forms and stuff. I say "mostly" because I had a lawyer act as a consultant, and he gave me reviewed my forms, gave me some tips about how to package the filing, and set expectations. It was a lot less expensive than hiring a lawyer to file the application, and it was a big help.
Work with Erlang on Emacs
Watch The Lottery Ticket (2010) Full Movie Free
Kevin Carson (Bow Wow), a young man living in the projects, wins $370 million in a nationwide lottery.
I have a theory that most people just don't like being alone, so finding someone to fulfill that need is enough. It doesn't matter what that person does, what they look like etc... As long as they are reasonably inoffensive, then they are a winner. It is called settling, most people do it.
Using web applications in a Ubuntu Desktop
There is a difference between boring someone with what you do, and talking about what you did that day. It can be a fine line, but there is always a way to explain in layman terms what you do.

Do you not talk to your wife about what she does during the day?
I bought 3 W810is for myself and family. Ironically, I think many of the things that made this phone successful were actually manufacturing limitations of the time:

* rugged nature: Most of Sony Ericsson's newer phones have been thinner and have bigger screens. This makes it easier for them to break when dropped.

* long battery life: The W810i was not a smartphone. Its web browser sucked, and it only had EDGE. The lack of constant data transfer, combined with a small screen, undoubtedly helped battery life.

I am not saying that the W810i was not a good phone for its time, but rather that it was not made to deal with the modern mobile landscape of real-time status updates, push email, and monthly OTA firmware upgrades. SE phones are falling down now because they have unusable user interfaces, are based on obsolete software versions, or are just plain buggy. The W810i was stable, but it also never needed to be upgraded.
So Yahoo's problem was they were trying to get big, and one way was to call themselves a media company (earn ad dollars, avoid MS radar). However, by doing this, they stopped acting like a technology company, and lost their focus on technology and solutions, but rather chasing the next banner ad buyer.

In contrast, Google was concerned about perfecting its search product, and therefore was focusing on what would help in that regard (hackers), which helped sustain its hacker culture.
http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...

Saying "Yahoo is dead" (pg didn't, btw) is a sensationalist way of saying "Yahoo is in a slow, steady decline."

To predict this, look at the leading indicators:

- new products
- strategic acquisitions
- flow of talent
- company morale
- growth relative to competition
- positions in key emerging markets

Yahoo seems to be struggling in all these areas.

Also, using "biggest site" as a metric is one of the problems with Yahoo that pg mentions in this article.
MY ex was a surgeon.

I am intrigued to hear your reason about why so many doctors are unhappy? More than any other overly bureaucratic profession?
Clearly you are not a journalist: "Experts say that many democrats were concerned with the Obama admin's decision to..."
Tidbit: A global database for exchanging signed tidbits of information
>Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article.

The article is about Yahoo and in a round about way the move of internet marketing focus from 90s banner advertising to search marketing in 00s. I didn't find Apple Computers Inc. (as it was) to be missing, indeed I'm kinda at a loss where you think Apple fit in to this article.

There are already plenty of articles about Apple.
> I wouldn't say that Apple is dominated by a hacker culture at all.

It's a mistake to say that. All the work that went into the LLVM/Clang, low-level development that's done OS X and iOS isn't something that you can do without hackers; neither are the algorithms used by Aperture or even iPhoto.
I know (hope) this comment was made in jest, and I don't have an interest in starting up a "women in tech" flamewar, but this kind of comment really gets me. XKCD (http://xkcd.com/322/) has a good comic about this, as usual.

"Joking" about how there are not any women who enjoy your hobbies just perpetuates the stereotype. And once learning about how awesome this woman is, what is the follow up comment? Wondering if she has any sisters, presumably so you can marry someone who looks like her.

Wouldn't a much better comment be "Wow, someone who codes SVMs, listens to Ulver, and reads 18th century literature? Sounds like my ideal girlfriend."
Ask HN: How to sell an iPhone App?
I have an iphone app that I would like to sell (the whole package, not an individual app in the app store) as my priorities have shifted. Not sure on the best way to go about this. The app has generated strong revenue and has had 50,000+ active users over the last year. The only catch is a yearly data feed cost. Not looking for some huge pay day but dont want to leave the loyal users hanging. Has anyone in the HN community sold an app to another company/individual?
I don't know enough about what it's like inside Apple now to say. Certainly from what I've heard there used to be a hackerly culture in the past. I remember reading how mystified and offended Gil Amelio was by it. But I don't know what things are like now. Is there anyone here who can talk about it? Is the atmos hackerly or corporate?
Well, now they know.
Pilot-in-command.
Oh, there are plenty of great hackers at Apple. That doesn't mean the company has a "hacker-centric culture", though. Does Apple make "a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing", like the article mentions about Facebook? No way.
Choosing an arbitrary cutoff of 6 years and then assuming that everyone who didn't complete their degree within 6 years is a college dropout is not a particularly valid way to measure dropout rates. I completed my degree after the 6-year mark and I'm certainly not the only one to do so. These statistics erroneously include people like me in the dropout category. A more accurate method of measurement would be to track each cohort of students from entrance through graduation and chart a histogram of the elapsed time from initial enrollment to graduation. Once you've collected these histograms for several cohorts, you're then in a position to construct a model of the statistical distribution. Then you can make accurate estimates of the true dropout rate by fitting the known graduation data for a given cohort to the model to estimate how many of the students are in the tail of the distribution that will eventually graduate.
If you really want to sell the whole thing maybe contact your competitors.
Two more options:

1) come up with a clever (must be easily memorable) variant which is available as .com. Be careful how you search as I've read about situations where the domain gets parked upon an inquiry. I just use whois & dig from the command line.

2) perhaps .biz or .info would work.
Lyx is a Latex editor with WYSIWIG features: http://www.lyx.org/
I guess they fixed it? It's not showing anything about me on a wrong password...
I'd argue that Apple is a hardware design company that knows how to contract things correctly (from Mac era to today). Apple has always been focused on a complete packaged form, from Lisa to the iPad. They demand perfection, secrecy, and obsession from their people. Some of their worst years are because the business talent of Steve Jobs was not at the helm.

How long did their core OS not have protected memory, or pre-emptive multitasking?

Apple still see's their OS as a package with the hardware. I would think this is part of their attachment to iOS (that and the massive markup and market penetration they've had so far).

The iPod gen 1 through gen 4 was not a hacker platform.

" Apple did not develop the iPod software entirely in-house, instead using PortalPlayer's reference platform based on two ARM cores. The platform had rudimentary software running on a commercial microkernel embedded operating system. PortalPlayer had previously been working on an IBM-branded MP3 player with Bluetooth headphones.[4] Apple contracted another company, Pixo, to help design and implement the user interface under the direct supervision of Steve Jobs.[4] As development progressed, Apple continued to refine the software's look and feel. " -- Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#1986.E2.80.931993:_R...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod

Edit:
I could go on longer, for example, OSX coming from BSD and NextStep etc but I'm done. :)
I think the anti-Google anger arises because people misinterpreted Google's pro-consumer stance as a principled one, rather than opportunistic pandering.

They're no worse than most other companies in terms of what they're doing, but they branded themselves heroes to the internet; now that it's in their best interests to go against their previous stance people feel like they've been sold a bill of goods.
It's neither. It's ship-great-product-y.
Wouldn't a much better comment be "Wow, someone who codes SVMs, listens to Ulver, and reads 18th century literature? Sounds like my ideal girlfriend."

I have never in my life met a woman who knows what an SVM is, or who Ulver is. Why should I get jumped on for wishing that I had? Who said anything about looks? Also, generally speaking, saying that somebody else's girlfriend sounds like your ideal girlfriend is considered a little too forward.
A Good College Essay
To write a good college essay student must have a good plan. Working according to a plan helps student to write essays in time and finish a good essay. There are accepted norms and rules for writing essays. This short article explains some rules for writing the essays.
> "I remember telling David Filo in late 1998 or early 1999 that Yahoo should buy Google, because I and most of the other programmers in the company were using it instead of Yahoo for search. He told me that it wasn't worth worrying about. Search was only 6% of our traffic, and we were growing at 10% a month."

I'm assuming that their other 94% of traffic came from their content/media business, mail, and other portal-related activities. Since search seems to be a large part of the internet now, has their numbers changed today, or have they stayed about the same?

And search was such a small thing back then—did Google set the example for search becoming one of the most important actions on the internet?
Forgive me, "I'm 50% less likely to be unemployed in a bad recession if I go $200k into debt for college". You have me sold, where do I sign up?
Let's forget the fact that ITV is a TV channel in the UK... Not confusing at all