skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't underestimate engineering because it is done in a less than elegant way, if the problem got solved and the device fulfilled the requirements and it was within the budget then it was a good design.

The old Soviet defense design houses benefitted tremendously by being the follow-on developers. They could see what US defense contractors did, then figure out how to do it cheaper and more reliably.

That said, the Soviets have had an amazing record of comparable, cheaper, more rugged, more reliable dating from World War II. Where a US cargo plane requires infrastructure, a comparable Soviet cargo plane would be able to land on unpaved airfields and include a manually operated fuel-pump. Where German designers would require over 20 parts for some doo-dad in an artillery piece, the US equipment would accomplish the same functionality in about 3/4ths of the parts, but the Soviets would undercut them by another 3 or 4 parts.

James Dunnigan discusses this in his classic _How to Make War_.

Being the follow-on competitor is actually a great way to avoid overengineering.
How to market your eBook
Of course it's true. No American woman has ever killed herself more than once, and no Scandinavian woman has ever killed herself twice.

(The article should have read "Scandinavian women don't kill themselves at double the rate of Americans")
"US tax revenue per-person is pretty much in the middle of western Europe."

Not really. The OECD average is 36%, Americans pay 28% and no western European states pay less. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenu... In nominal terms the US may be higher, but I don't really see that that proves anything. The main problem is of course that so much has to be paid for by the individual in the US that is efficiently taken care of by the state in Europe, so comparing tax rates misses a big part of the issue.
The Next Silicon Valley
Excelent point.

But you see the iPhone is an American product, so it's human costs somehow are excusable. These subs were the product of an enemy state, so they are not excusable.
When you submit http://foo.bar.dom/quux.atom.xml, its entries will be available on news.gmane.org (or news.gwene.org) in the group gwene.dom.bar.foo.quux.atom. You can also specify an alternate group name. Auto-submit like so:

http://gwene.org/index.php?url=http://foo.bar.dom/quux.atom.xml&auto=true&confirm=true
Alternatively, be so damn good in what you do that 'they' won't be able to 'ignore' you
See this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1586495
The poster, is looking for a quality developer to help guide him through the process of building an app.
No, because all hashing algorithms suffer from collisions. A perfect hash function for files would require space of at least a number of bits proportional to the size of your problem space.

In practice, you can go with SHA-2, for which no collisions have been found yet.
I believe Tim Ferris wrote that for his business ideas he would first create the actual site to sell it and then spend a few hundred dollars on adwords. When the user clicked to purchase, they would be shown a page saying "Sorry, this product is still in development page. Please enter your email to find out when it will be available."

That would let him know exactly how many people were willing to buy.

It's a pretty clever idea. For only a few hundred dollars and a little bit of time building the website, you will be able to find out what your conversion rate would be. I may do this for an idea that I am just starting work on.
Skype invested $6 mm in Rdio and $10 mm in founders' VC firm Atomico
If you think a Verizon iPhone has any chance of being introduced at CES rather than an Apple event, you're nuts.
Sally may not bring in enough to cover her own pay. Instead, she might enable someone else to bring that much in. You know, like programmers do.
It's version 1.0, so feel free to make suggestions! V2.0 will be fully dynamic, filterable, and worldwide.
If you are willing to install QuickTime, iTunes, Safari, Bonjour and so on along with it...
That's more up front about it though, rather than simply being sneaky. It's a direct and public challenge to a bad law. Something else along those lines might be Rosa Parks and her refusal to sit in the back of the bus.

I suppose it's not always cut and dried, but what I see in Italy is a broad disregard for rules and laws, and it's a very unpleasant aspect of the country.
In the past I've done something similar where I asked potential customers to pay me to build a product and learned, before I wrote a line of code, nobody wanted what I was selling.

On the other hand, I've run into a situation recently where this didn't work as I expected. My current project is sold to businesses. When I asked a few of the businesses I was talking to if they would pay me the price I was going to charge for the service to actually make the product, something strange happened. Even though the amount of money I was asking for was quite small this request still went through the entire purchasing apparatus of the business. I figured the manager I was talking to could just write me a check, but I was wrong. Long story short they wanted to own a part of the business if they payed me money to make it, so I opted to not take their check.

I figured this was good enough validation and I'm plowing ahead on development even though I am a tad worried about what my sales cycle is going to look like. But I never would have learned this if I hadn't straight up asked for money before I even built it.
I was part of a team for Yahoo's Hackday in London a few years back.

We worked on a project that took as inspiration a photo montage research thing that stated that the average of a stack of photos is the most attractive: http://www.uni-regensburg.de/Fakultaeten/phil_Fak_II/Psychol...

For the hack day project we attempted to take a target user of a social network, and then to look at the friends to derive properties that we would then include (diluted) in our fake user.

The aim of the hack day experiment was to see whether the fake profile would both be convincing enough and attractive enough to then be befriended by the network of people that the target was a member of.

The experiment failed in the time given as hackday didn't last long enough and our target didn't log on. But I ran the code again later and it worked well (being befriended a few times before I figured that it was beyond the experiment and should be killed).
Ah, thanks for explaining!
I tend to disagree with this kind of worse-case-scenario thinking. That there's a slim possibility that something terrible will happen is not reason enough to stop doing something that will undoubtedly be of benefit. Not receiving an important emergency call because you disable calls form unknown numbers seems about as (un)likely as missing an important call because you were busy taking care of an unwanted one.
but how many of those are other bots?
...society. If workers pay for it, there's less money to spend on other things (and they might not have the same bargaining power). If companies pay, they'll have less money to invest. If the government pays, it comes from everybody's taxes.

You can't dissociate any player from the others.

It should boil down to the question of finding the most efficient way for society overall.
thousands of Markov bot followers ;)
No need to be disingenuous. You don't know me from Adam, so your surprise is just rhetorical. Mine was genuine and aimed at getting additional responses, maybe responses more in line with the intent of the OP.

In adjacent sentences, you say that there are no probably no universals, science can tell us nothing, but that we have certain foods that are proven to work.

Yes, there are common themes in this thread, and that can be useful sometimes. But there were common themes in popular opinion about flat earth, Adam's ribs, and the four humors as well.

Again, without the context provided by an expert, things that are factually incorrect can seem incredibly persuasive.
many companies build up the hype before they ship. isn't that just marketing?

i call hypocrisy. jgrahamc is involved with causata: check out their website.

http://www.causata.com/

count the number of times you read:

"This has to change. Stay tuned for more details."

where are the products? what have they shipped?
The OECD publishes an extensive comparison of tax burdens on wage income in various OECD countries: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/44/2/1942506.xls

Some key numbers, at average wage: US 34.4%, UK 38.8%, Germany 63.3%, France 52.0%, Japan 34.2%, Hungary 71.5%
Or, alternatively, they don't have to worry about it because there is no health insurance tax deduction to force individuals to get insurance through their employer.
I agree, I think control is something the user should have rather than the provider supplying the solution.

Technologically speaking, implementing something like this is pretty simple.But it will cost the provider money rather than make money - which makes this investment pointless (No company will invest money to loose even more....).

I currently own a N900 and i have an app to block calls (currently blacklist only) i think - though i am not familiar with the N900 incoming call API - it should be rather simple to implement a whitelist instead.

And i pretty sure the same goes for SMS etc...

But frankly i don't really want that kind of blocking, i would prefer blocking numbers of known spammers (which i have a list of) while occasionally letting one pass through the filter, rather than miss even one important call which could change my life (And it happens every day doesn't it?)
AFAIK he's using jQuery for the blog page. Probably compressed with Google's compiler, but still.....
Media Campaign Against Craigslist Continues
Not living in the US, but also worried about my government giving away all my money: isn't real estate one of the safer options? All my money and other investments, the government can simply take away (taxes) or devalue. Even gold is not safe - history shows that the government will try to get it, too.

Now the government could of course also try to take my house, but I think the public outcry would be bigger than for other investments - so it seems even more of a last resort governments would choose than other forms of taxpayer exploitation. Am I wrong?
Indeed. And it doesn't look like we'll be able to replace many extremely easy jobs (from an intellectual point of view) by machines any time soon : picking up garbage, taking care of old people, etc.
Making DRM practical
Relying on MaxMind for your CDN location targetting is not how I would recommend doing this.

Anycast is better these days as it will taking routing topology into consideration over a hardcoded list of IP addresses. And routing topology can then be adjusted to account for congestion and other variables.
"arguably less civilized"

Not sure I agree that it was all that inflammatory. It mas a bit tongue in cheek, but actually has a little bit truth to it. Anyway. You can take the boy out of Reddit, but not ...
LinkedIn Automated marketing software
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Virtualization security - what is the fuss?
Pitch you... then pitch your company
> OK, so lets say this is a bad idea and you should instead
> not have any savings in that case, and make all of your
> savings into payments on your mortgage interest. You're
> saying we could model that by assuming you are making
> periodic risk-free 5% (or whatever) investment instead.

Exactly.

> I get what you're saying but a tax deduction can never
> completely offset the interest payment right?

Agreed, but I just meant that the more mortgage interest you pay the more you save on taxes, not that the interest is totally offset or anything.
That's called a Dry Test. It's not original with Tim; there are quite a number of sources on the subject.
You'll be hard pressed to find a V.C. willing to invest in a company at this early stage anyways.

I would argue that finding folks willing to give you $5 is as valuable as LOI's. The point is to validate your model. It's never enough to simply ask people "would you be willing to buy this?" You have to figure out how to validate that when push comes to shove that they'll actually take action to do it.

Talk is cheap after all. So if you can find a handful of folks to throw $5 your way, or at the very least enter into the purchase process for a $5/month subscription... well then you probably have something. Just as a LOI for a larger ticket product shows commitment from those larger companies.

Both show that you have a product your target market is willing to actually pay for. That's huge.
That's not really an alternative-- how do you know you're so damn good if you can't find 10 people willing to pay?
Airline Fees, Often Hidden, Test Travelers’ Limits
Great quote:
"In June, American introduced a “boarding and flexibility” package that gives you a $75 discount on flight changes, as well as early boarding and free standby, for $9 to $19, depending on the flight. Yes, you can now pay a fee to possibly reduce your fees, and that is not a late-night monologue joke."
Technical question regarding IPOs: is the offering for the entire stock of the company, or just a fraction, and how would potential investors know what fraction? $100m would be low for all skype share but high for 2%.
I was looking for a painting app like this just yesterday. Some of the brushes are very similar to this HTML5 drawing app: http://mrdoob.com/projects/harmony/ I wonder if they are related?
Any ideas why this would be interesting (or useful)?
Single page without the annoying ads:

http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.asp...
Well they didn't actually "solve" every position, they just found a solution under 20 moves for every position.
60 Ways to Increase Your Influence Online
Except look at all of the American Capital investment firms that were in on the offering - Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch.

Putting the good 'ol American dollar in good investment overseas. I'm happy for Skype, but this act doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
Great quote:

"In June, American introduced a “boarding and flexibility” package that gives you a $75 discount on flight changes, as well as early boarding and free standby, for $9 to $19, depending on the flight. Yes, you can now pay a fee to possibly reduce your fees, and that is not a late-night monologue joke."
Online Maps Review Credibility: What do you see?
There's still a huge group-bargaining incentive, although, I agree, it would be a move in the right direction.
Seems like spammers have done this (convincingly enough for at least some users). I don't have some foolproof method from telling a spambot from a spammer using copy/paste everywhere, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised.
With soldiers holding engineers at gunpoint?

No but you have to look at the entire value chain. In the old Soviet Empire (call a spade a spade) conditions were often very poor for miners, farmers, etc. If those people had been paid a market rate for the raw materials and labour, and so on, at every stage in the value chain, then the cash bill at the end would have been much, much higher.

I don't doubt Russian engineers were very talented - we all saw that Russia produced great mathematicians, chess players, etc. But not so good as they could work miracles.
Ask HN: Good Aeron knock-off/alternative?
I've been meaning to make an investment in a low-end Aeron (do they exist?) or an Aeron knock-off. . .I've been through 2 chairs in the past 2 years and it is seriously interfering w/ my work. I'll actually even go to my school's computer lab for extended periods of time if I have a lot of work to do since their chairs are so comfortable to sit in while working.

I know it's not just me and I'm not trying to act as if I'm a special case, but the biggest problem I see w/ office chairs is they don't support a proper posture while sitting at a computer. For instance, I often find myself slouching or trying to reconfigure my arm-chair height so I can jump from the keyboard to the mouse w/o much effort.

Again not to sound like a special case, but I have extremely long legs (high-waist line, like a woman...) and short torso, I don't know if this physical feature is affecting my posture in normal office chairs, but Aeron seems to effect my posture enough that it makes a huge difference.
They're probably putting a relatively small percentage of the company on the public market.

I don't know how much of Skype is being sold, but here's an example from Wikipedia:

"Google's initial public offering (IPO) took place five years later on August 19, 2004. The company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. Shares were sold in a unique online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. The vast majority of the 271 million shares remained under the control of Google, and many Google employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited because it owned 8.4 million shares of Google before the IPO took place."
A good friend of mine hangs out with the 7x7 cube champion of the United States. He plays with various different kinds of Rubik's cubes, and from what I gather cubing can also get rather addicting.
I think with coercion pvg refers to the use of 'perks' (such as education for your kids and the privilege of being able to buy in the hard currency stores) rather than that family members were going to be shot if some device or gadget wasn't produced in time or at all.

As for the oppression bit, the satellite states of the USSR were fairly ruthlessly kept in check, lots of very bad things happened there, more than we will probably ever know about and there are definitely examples of scientists that were forced to work on projects that they did not want to work on, such as Theremin.

http://www.mediascot.org/atmosphere001
Agreed.

I've been using the compiler for months, slowly adding type annotations as I went, but not really "getting" a few key concepts.

Investing in the book was worthwhile, especially since it's the only source for documentation for certain types of compiler optimizations or the module functionality.
these guys are some of the biggest crooks out there. fuck em

investors, I wouldn't go anywhere near this stock. you'll get burned.
Only new Verizon android phones, if I understand correctly.
Did Sony, Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google have 10 people who said they will buy their first product? (I am asking because I am not completely sure. Maybe it is a bit more complicated in case of very technology-heavy/research-based/very innovative startups?)
So if we divorced healthcare insurance and employment, how do we garentee that Sally gets the $12,000 the business is currently paying as an increse in her salary?

What stops a business from giving her 75% of the $12,000 they currently spend on her benefits, pocketing the difference as increased profit, and leaving Sally to make up the difference with her dwindling discretionary income (despite a pay raise). I'm not sure how this help Sally.
I'm no protectionist - I love freedom - but I don't think a tariff to compensate for lack of environmental regulations etc overseas would be amiss. Obviously not levied on imports from countries with comparable regulations.
One reason this might not have happened is because you don't fuck with gmail. That's 180 million users right there. Repeat: you don't fuck with gmail. (But I would have liked the wave/gmail rollout, yes.)
Ok, so essentially all of us agree this is creepy fraud... But it seems like an interesting exercise. Monitron already posited value to amputees.. Can anyone else think of actually valuable uses?
Thanks, modeless. You seem to understand where I'm coming from.

Is this something you are personally interested in as well or were you just passing through?
> conditions were often very poor for miners, farmers, etc. If those people had been paid a market rate for the raw materials and labour, and so on, at every stage in the value chain, then the cash bill would have been much, much higher.

You could be writing about very large parts of the world today there, not just the USSR as it was.

And some of those parts would be closer to home than you may be comfortable with.
Everyone is wired differently. This is exactly why I go to libraries to work/study and not coffee shops. Listening to people yammer away is the last thing I want when I'm trying to concentrate. I can't get a thing done in a coffee shop.
verizon is the only one pushing out big new android phones right now, though, iirc.
Robin Sage at the 2010 Blackhat conference:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jul/18/fictitious-f...
"You can't dissociate any player from the others."

Exactly. Companies will still have to worry about it, whether they pay for insurance directly or indirectly.

"It should boil down to the question of finding the most efficient way for society overall."

To what end? And as judged by whom? The majority?
Very useful and informative. Looking forward to V2.0 and community participation.
The EU itself is such a project.
I am not sure why you have problems to access the page. Works ok for me. Try again! This has nothing to do with Closure though, it's not used in the page ;-)
The businessman in the example did not avoid the laws. Far from it - he found a way to comply with them at the lowest possible cost.

Deliberately subverting the law should not be commended. But in this example, he was able to work around the deleterious effect of a bad law while fully adhering to its provisions. I can't see a problem with this.
Makes me really wonder if those explosions had any scientific need, or were they just displays of power. I would think that those test sites would be so polluted that any fallout analysis would be very hard if not impossible.
Matt Simmons Has Died
Make your choice:

Faster loading, clutter-free, single page, print version:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/travel/08prac.html?ref=...

Slower loading, ad-ridden, single page version:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/travel/08prac.html?ref=...
I wouldn't see why not.
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I agree with the general sentiment there, but calling them 'crooks' is a step too far, they've been this side of the law or they would have been sued for sure.
Credit Card debt is in no way different than the supposedly secured debt which precipitated the housing crisis (tell the banks that are sitting on foreclosed properties that they cannot liquidate how "secured" that debt really is).

Both are built upon cash generated out of thin air by banks that, in truth, put up NO assets of their own when they lend money. It is this criminal behavior that is the money-making engine of not only the credit card companies but of all lenders whatsoever.

The entire debt-based banking system is built on time-delayed suicide, and the paltry (in comparison) fees collected from merchants in no way, shape, or form stems the inevitable collapse.