skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> a) The people with jobs without benefits are paying minuscule taxes, so it's wrong to say they are paying for the benefits of public sector employees in that sense.

They're paying sales and gas taxes. They're paying property and utility taxes (either directly or through rent). They're paying garbage collection fees. They're paying for stamps. They're paying for licenses. And so on.

Poor people pay a lot of money that ends up in govt workers pockets. And they can't pick a different provider.
NASA - 'Island Universe' in the Coma Cluster
This is what happens when you work yourself almost to death.
This is excellent. Best article of this genre that I've read in quite awhile. The best part? It isn't developer/programmer/coder specific.
Actually, I clicked on the link thinking it was by another "Sriram Krishn*":

http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/

I thought Dr. Krishnamurthi finally saw the Dark ;-)
Speaking of math, do you think you could throw a few integrals into some post, or a sequel to "Technical Explanation of Technical Explanations"? I have a friend who's mildly interested in LW because I read it, but isn't willing to read enough to solidify an opinion without that s-shaped signal of competence.
One of the issues I had as a contractor was amount of energy I spent chasing invoices. Not being paid on time (or at all) was a big headache for me.
I know this is less of a concern for gov't contracts but some of the mid-size corps would place me last on the totem pole when prioritizing their vendors, knowing I was a 1 man shop.
I almost linked to that article. I always found that picture from 2006 was the poster child of: "holy crap this web stuff is so easy, and so is that fundraising stuff!"
Most stats providers compute unique visitors using client-side cookies; not entirely accurate, but quite cheap. You're right though, it's a lot easier to use an existing (and free or nearly free) tool than to build your own.
That sounds great. Maybe focus on the topics you're more knowledgeable in and then expand upon concepts you're not 100% familiar with? I would certainly love a series on Marketing & PR. Specially for startups at pre-launch stage.
"English, a more unemotional and efficient language than Spanish"

That claim is because it is usually perceived that lots of words and expressions in English are shorter than their Spanish counterparts.

car vs carro

dog vs perro

lol vs que risa jajajajaja

I'm really interested in an expert explanation of why this is complete bullshit.
That's not a good story; that's what they're suppose to do on the most basic level. They don't deserve praise for that. They do, however, deserve a very bad reputation for stories like above. I have one myself and of others close to me but I'll leave it at that.
> [SS] has massive assets

Those "massive assets" are T-bills.

If push comes to shove, who do you think will get shafted - SS or China?

More to the point - how much are you personally willing to pay to maintain the SS benefits for folks 10-20 years older than you? How much do you think that folks who are 10-20 years younger than you are willing to pay to maintain your SS benefits?
Note to self: never let a press photographer put earphones on you, turn your hat backwards, and suggest you give double-thumbs-up. You'll never live it down.
I think drosenthal is talking about sampling the number of hits you send to analytics. GA's tracking api supports this:

http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gaJS/gaJSApiBasic...
Hmm that link doesn't work for me (get something about the website being offline) but I am curious about what your panel will be about, is it readability and how these things affect it or just design in general?
Do you think that cultural or socioeconomic issues play a role at all?
I'm glad this was pointed out. Doing a startup is definitely like doing a dance. You have to know when to step forward, and when to step sideways and when to step back. Do it at the wrong time and you'll end up in pain.

I know people who give up too quickly on an idea and I know people who stayed too long on an idea. The problem is usually that it's never so binary as to quit or keep going. It's easy to end up in a situation where you've spent 6 months or a year building a product. Over that next year you convince yourself that that NEXT feature is all that's needed for your product to explode. In the meantime you have a handful of users that give you validation that there's value to the idea.

A/B testing would be great but there's also a saying that A/B optimization too early is also a mistake. Time could be better spent understanding product-market fit.

Perhaps, more important than this was mentioned in the blog post:"spend a lot of your time thinking about customer acquisition (for me it's ~50%). Only very rarely will they come on their own early on."
Way to go, Chris!
As I stated in the blog post, I'm sharing this here in the hopes that someone can point out where I'm going wrong. I emailed the author's, but I'm not sure how busy they are, and if they would consider a question like this significant. If anyone has a copy of the book, would you mind taking a second to see if what I'm describing makes sense?
Surnames.
My surname is Hacker.
How many other members are like me & did they join because of this?

Question of the day:
I am very interested in the Universe & physics/philosophy. I do not beleive in the Big Bang theory. How many agree & why?
Keiller D.
I've been resolved since I was in college to give away 10% of my income a year. I give to two anti-human trafficking organizations that I know first-hand spend their money wisely and vastly improve the lives of individuals who have been victimized in a way most of us can't imagine: GEMS: Girls Educational & Mentoring Services (http://www.gems-girls.org/) and Polaris Project (www.polarisproject.org/). I also give some money to NYC arts organizations (NY Philharmonic, etc), but that is mostly because I like the benefits rather than out of any great philanthropic ideal.
Textured Tactile Touchscreens
"Usted" is alive and well in Argentinian Spanish. Divided by a common language indeed...
Oh I agree and it's my reaction too, "yeah but what problem are they solving? how are they doing it?"

That's the extent of my evaluation. And that's also why I'm not an entrepreneur. :)

There's a definite mismatch between the valuation function I (and a lot of us, I think) use and what the market uses which is addressed by the YC's of the world.

But the bottom line is I don't think pg should misconstrue the confusion (and sometimes frustration) as malice.
Is there somewhere I could buy an Electrotactile device? I'd be curious to hook it up to my Arduino and try it out.
The need for self insurance can be a big issue if you've got any chronic health problems or dependents.
"Too much" seems subjective to me.

Additonally, I've spent thousands of hours over the course of a decade obsessing over design details and historical context. Then, I spend a week crafting a blog post to condense a piece of my knowledge for sharing. I then ask for an opportunity to spend hundreds of hours preparing a presentation to share more of my knowledge. Somehow this is self-serving?

I don't need more (or more prestigious) clients. A SXSW badge is (relatively) inexpensive. I do all of this because I love to share knowledge. I understand what it's like to be turned off by shameless self-promotion, but sometimes a little perspective is called for.
The problem is, no amount of good stories can repair the damage done to those who trusted PayPal because "it works OK for most people". They may even have great customer support most of the time, but if they still do stuff like this, it reason enough to be very careful:

1) Never solely rely on PayPal for your income.
2) Never keep large amounts in your PayPal account - they can be come PayPals for 6m+ at a moments notice.
Its the wrong answer as to why digg was able to raise money. While Kevin's reputation may have led to growth (given that he was a cable tv host at a just purchased network that was going through multiple rounds of layoffs, I would find that suspect), the real reason was traction. Growth was crazy.
Ask HN: Java/Groovy/Scala/Clojure/Ruby for your startup?
What JVM Language are you using for your startup? if any.
Java/Groovy/Scala/Clojure/Ruby?

For what layers?
And why?
It's easy not to want to retire when you're young. Get back to us in 40 years and I bet you'll have something different to report.
Jimmy, use http://www.FollowUp.cc. It's a way better version of HML. Also, for anyone who's not into using browser extensions or uses other interfaces to their email, FollowUp works through email in general. Give it a go, you won't be disappointed.
It seems that the PanelPicker is down. Thanks for your interest.

I plan to talk less about the technical aspects of design, but talk more about the classical principles that guide good design. This post is about the relationship between medium and form, but I also plan to talk about use of proportion, and color theory.

However, I plan to have an open dialogue with those interested (through the Facebook Page), so I can tailor the presentation leading up to the event.
The bigger news here is that PayPal is getting more negative publicity in mainstream press and that will, over time, force them to become more responsive.

A few hackers bitching in online forums is one thing, A large social media response in connection with a well known festival threatening to close accounts is going to be much more effective
Not since they figured out about decoherence and got rid of the collapse thing, no. http://lesswrong.com/lw/r7/quantum_physics_revealed_as_nonmy...
On Unix I did this:

cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp

There is a free iPhone app too.
Feels like. I dithered between 5 and 10, but although it was a decade ago that I lived there I remember thinking that dutch drivers were remarkably patient. Mind you, traffic laws there are such that motorists are almost automatically at fault if they hit a pedestrian or cyclist, so they have an incentive to be careful.
Fahrenheit. Yes, it is too hot; home-brewed coffee is ~140 degrees. McDonalds was warned multiple times, at least once by a burn victims' society, that their coffee was dangerously hot prior to this case but chose to do nothing about it. I don't know the exact temperatures that McDonalds & Starbucks currently serve their coffee at, but that specific McDonalds franchise lowered the temp by ~10 degrees afterwards, and though I've never measured the temperature of my Starbucks coffee (from multiple franchises), it's never been much hotter than the drip coffee I make at home.
You can have your volume buttons to be ALWAYS volume buttons by NOT downloading the app. It's your choice.
Apple invention would create custom comic book from game experiences
Literature Term Paper Writing
Literature term papers are assigned to students to assess their understanding and the knowledge of various forms of literary works like novels, poetry and plays. Student can select about one literary work or an author. Learn how to write your literature essay.
The article mentions Google Font API and Typekit as sources of fonts online, but there's another option that's worth looking at: The Open Font Library (http://openfontlibrary.org/)

The fonts hosted there are free (both as in beer and as in freedom). It's interesting to see how they apply the concepts around free software to another medium, like fonts.
They say there is no such thing as bad press.
Ya, but what I don't get is why an iPad app needs to raise $8 million or why Slide.com that just sold to Google for $180 million raised $87 million. I must be missing something? Does most of the funding go to marketing, engineering, what?

Will someone shed some light on this?
Agreed. It was meant to be one of many reasons Digg raised money with "Intense Growth" being the main one. I feel the reputation was exactly what you said: what lead to growth /started the fire.
Because you're off-topic & thread-jacking, my friend.
Former engineer comments on "What Happened to Yahoo"
Actually upon further thought, you're sort of right, but you got the wrong person. Jay Adelson had already produced a big exit, and his reputation was probably key in raising money.
AddThis (acquired by ClearSpring) is doing this as well. It goes even further by injecting an invisible Flash object that's just there to set a Flash Cookie that 99.9% of users don't know how to delete.

The shadiness of all of this tracking should give us all pause before we plaster our websites with these widgets.
While we're on subject, I wanted to note that Helvetica makes a terrible body font. Please use Arial instead for your body, as it renders more clearly and reserve Helvetica for text above 13pt.

KISSmetric uses Helvetica and a matching bg shadow blur for all of their body text, which makes my eyes bleed. Horrible practice. Avoid text-shadow for body.
Tonido gets an iPhone app
> What would you suggest as a color blind alternative for this color sequence?

Not relying on colors at all. The rule of thumb is that there shouldn't be any information expressed using only colors. You can use color for emphasis.
If you want your volume buttons to stay volume buttons, I recommend not going out of your way to reprogram them. Or did you mean that you want MY volume buttons to stay volume buttons?
X-wing Targeting Computer
I am envious of your achievements and organization. That sounds like a terrific workflow!
I find it amusing that people still use Paypal. Its been widely documented that they're a horrible company for years now. I closed my account a few years ago and haven't looked back.

Paypal will not change their ways so long as people keep giving them money.

Paypal is not a bank and thus doesn't have to follow the same rules as a bank. Please people, quit treating it like its a bank. Do not store your money there. Do not link it to your primary checking or savings accounts.

Remember! Paypal will cause you great pain and serious amounts of anger. Its only a matter of time.
I was in that article as well. There was a lot of lying all around.
Yikes! A cautionary tale, to be sure. Glad to hear you're back on an even keel; a bit of time to recharge your batteries and reconnect with the basics of life sounds ideal. This is also a good time to read that Serious Book you always meant to get around to, so as to keep your mind exercised without falling back into its habitual grooves.

I think that looking after ourselves is a problem for a lot of 'knowledge workers'. William gibson said it best, in Neuromancer:

For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.
Competition.

Destroy the public school monopoly with vouchers so that the same forces of creative destruction that power the tech industry can modernize and make more productive the education industry.
Not actually using any, but if scale problems come, we have the following order: Jruby, Clojure, Scala. The reasons behind the order:

* Jruby, because we really like the level of metaprogramming of ruby, the readability, the ammount of libraries, the effort Charles Nutter put into making it a very good port of ruby, and the library support that feels like ruby (dsl-ish, easy to use, easy to change, with tests as documentation, etc), even if you are not using Rails.

* Clojure, because it is dynamic, and enforces immutable state (most of the time), it has great metaprogramming support as well (which is very important for readbility), and you can use type annotations to remove all reflection code, and use direct invoking (as fast as java).

* Scala, because it is much more convenient to use than Java (and has other advantages, http://bit.ly/4DIKy4), while still being compiled to very efficient java bytecode. Its static typing has issues (http://bit.ly/asQ7FC), as its lack of metaprogramming. Implicit conversions, on the other hand, can deal with it for most part.

*Java/Groovy: Scala should be the lowest level we would like to handle. Groovy feels a bit like Ruby, it has more metaprogramming facilities (like categories, and AST manipulations are builtin, unlike Ruby's Parse Tree, which doesn't work on 1.9). However, Jruby is the same language we use everywhere else, and Groovy is not faster than clojure. So it is a "master of none" type of language. Not to mention that its stack trace is riddled with java garbage, and it feels a lot like Java, which is really a put off.

This is mosty for backend, as with are probably sticking with Sinatra on front end for a looong while. Twitter uses Rails on front end even nowadays, so it seems like we won't have too much problem with it as well.
It'd be hard to be more subtle when informing the readers that a) you've written the submitted article and b) you've got an upcoming event that might also be of interest to the readers.
there are negative reasons, too. deals get overheated all the time. vcs patternmatched too hard. etc.
I would very much like a simple cheat-sheet of "standard" fonts and what range of sizes each looks best at with regards to webpages.

Something that I can blindly follow when making the first draft of a site.

Anyone want to share a link to such a thing?
GNOME chief 'embarrassed' by lack of free software Web services
Google Unveils Awesomely Fast And Accurate Voice Actions For Android
What happens if we put it all into the stock market and the baby boomers retire?

I really don't want to see a stock market that has 3x the money coming out as is coming in.
Now that's a creative idea
13pt font at 72dpi is actually a pretty decent body font size, and helvetica renders not altogether horribly with these settings, so it's a reasonable choice for designers testing only on macs.

That said, yes world, please don't use Helvetica for body font, most people don't even have a good version of the font, and plenty of renderers butcher its kerning, anti-aliasing (especially with versions of the font without good hints, or with renderers that ignore them), and even its baseline.
Google Launches Chrome-To-Phone Extension To Link Chrome With Android
You gotta remember to A/B split test your MVP before reaching P/M fit yo
can someone explain the "business arrangement" they made with tweetmeme? will tweetmeme get their data in exchange for showing them how to build this? (they say the new code is 100% original to twitter though)....

also curious as to why twitter didn't BUY tweetmeme.
http://www.typetester.org is a great resource for making comparisons.

But I will try to put together a simple list of standard fonts and how to optimize them for the best results. Will shoot you an email when it's done.
Actually this brings me to the one thing you left out - "luck." The Paris Hilton cell phone incident was an external event that made a huge difference.
It's not mine, and it's a long story. The short version is that a chap I know - nowin his 70s - never finished his PhD. We were chatting about the SWH and linguistic relativism and he mentioned it. I asked to see it, he loaned it to me - with permission to copy - provided I never made any of it public.

I'm slowly trying to persuade him that it wouldn't be a bad thing, but it's slow work. He also has the early symptoms of Alzheimer's, so it may never happen.
I didn't really care for Flipboard very much. It's really nice looking, but it just makes the information I want much harder to get to.
Well I can speak from my own experience but the spending on marketing and sales for some companies ends up being a lot more than engineering. The way my company works is that we developed what we think/hope is a scalable business model and we are scaling our marketing and sales operations to sell the product. We're trying to self fund that but some people don't want to bother or can't for any number of (mostly) good reasons.
I programmed in Lisp back in 1985 and liked it a lot. Today I consider it too imperative for my tastes, and also too heavyweight. So lately I've been embedding a little interpreter for my Fexl language ( http://fexl.com ) into my systems written in Perl. That way I can opportunistically use a pure functional language for script-like purposes such as dynamic web sites and report generation, without committing to rewriting my entire system in another language. The Fexl interpreter is tiny and only has 7 grammar rules, so it's really easy to deploy in very focused areas of the system.

It's going well so far in testing. I suspect that over time I will migrate an increasing amount of system logic out of Perl and into Fexl, so eventually all that remains in Perl is the Fexl interpreter itself. Then I'll swap that out for my interpreter written in C and be done with Perl.

Don't get me wrong -- I've been using Perl for 12 years and I know how to write disciplined code in it, so I am grateful to Perl. But I find the pure functional approach to be liberating, making many tasks seem almost effortless.

In fact, I've even been applying the functional concepts to my Perl code itself, with great reward. For example, when I'm parsing text, I don't use the usual destructive position pointer. Instead, I use a functional representation of the text, with head, tail, prefix, suffix, and such. It's liberating.

Another example: when I use my key-value maps with automatic hierarchical structuring by disjoint prefix, I no longer use a destructive "put" operation to change entries. Instead, the "put" operation in effect returns a brand new key-value map with just that one entry changed. It's amazing how efficient this is because of structure sharing, and it also adds much clarity to the code and avoids a lot of thorny implementation issues (especially because I actually need a super-efficient "virtual copy" of large key-value maps for what I'm doing.)

So my main points here are:

1. You can deploy a small embedded interpreter for a purely functional language, inside a system written in any language (yes, even Perl). You don't have to rewrite your entire system in a "pure" language all in one fell swoop, or ever. You can just systematically migrate more logic into the functional side, completely at your leisure, in an evolutionary fashion.

2. You can apply functional concepts and techniques to code written in any language (yes, even Perl). That works even if you don't go as far as using an embedded interpreter.

I am finding both of these techniques to be highly rewarding, and the most exciting thing I've done since I started programming in 1975.
There are lots of links, and a lot of them are crap (for example, most suggest garamond and helvetica).

Here are my suggestions:

sans: "font-family: Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, sans-serif;"
serif: "font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"
mono: "font-family: 'Courier New', Monaco, monospace;"

Always remember to put the generic font type ('sans-serif', 'serif', 'monospace') at the end so browsers have something default to fall back on in all cases. For example, most linux distributions have a good monospace font defaulted, so you don't even need to try to guess a font (though 'Bitstream Vera Sans Mono' and 'DejaVu Sans Mono' are not bad guesses) there.
Study: To improve schools, we may need to fire up to 80% of teachers.
I'd love to see this once you're done. My email is my username @ gmail.com
I had this feeling a while ago, and I found that I got a lot more excited about the technology by using it to work on something I chose. Being employed by a big company, you're either working on what someone else decided was important, or you're just doing busy work - it's very easy for either one of those to not excite you.

I think joining a start up would help you if it was just the corporate environment that was choking the enthusiasm out of you, but I think working on anything that you're personally motivated to do will make you enjoy your day-to-day life a lot more.
Straight Dope on the IPod's Birth