skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I designed and built high-end web analytics software for years.

Sampling your data by visitor/cookie (not by page view) is the number one thing to do that that no one does. Just sample your data down by a factor of 10 or 100. The costs drop by a factor of 10 or 100, query speeds improve, and the business value of the data drops by very, very little.

The only unfortunate prerequisite for this approach is that you need a company/boss that understands that sampled numbers are OK even if they are not exact. (So, explain, if you must, that your industry insider source tells you that the notion of 'exact' in web analytics world is very loose indeed.)
I do not find his Zen in lawns either, but for different reasons. For me, it's the layout of the terrain. I'm so worried about bumping into trees, bushes, gardens, and stumps that I can't afford to "zone out" for very long. Plus the electrical chord must be kept at a safe distance from the mower. To him, mowing the lawn is akin to taking a shower. For me, it's more like a struggle.
Don't get the regular beta, get the one with Tab Candy built in: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/tryserver-bui... . It's definitely my favorite (and most used) feature in FF 4.
Getting Financing for a Movie (Children of Invention) by Tze Chun
24" 1920x1200 display as a bonus? Seriously? A 24" CRT display was standard equipment that I was issued as a entry level hire ten years ago. If you want to make your devs feel like valued employees now, you're going to have to aim a little higher with the geek toys you distribute. Multiple displays is standard now. If you want to impress somebody in 2010, you're going to have to step up your game. Might I suggest a 4 megapixel 30" LCD upgrade so your devs can have the advantages of multiple displays without the annoying middle-of-the-desktop bezel gap?
I'm a little worried that it didn't jump right out at you.
Apple TV is only 720p for video now. The only thing that's 1080p is the menu!
Inexplicable Superconductor Fractals Hint at Higher Universal Laws
There are hundreds of technology 'startups' out there that exist to fleece investors. None of them go out with a bang as in The Producers, because it's far more lucrative to maintain the illusion of a technology perpetually on the cusp of commercialization so they can continue raising round after round of fresh investments.

Examples:

-Phantom Entertainment

-Moller International

-Blacklight Power
Ah, the cuttings bag. That's the best part: it goes on my garden (eventually). Of course, it's better when I can have the kids do the cutting :-) This leaves more time for the zen of gardening for me. YMMV.
It claims that part of the proceeds from the sale of the noodles will be used to promote and develop the Ruby programming language. Truth or a stunt?
Ruby is in Grave Danger
Facebook differs with Google on Net neutrality
I've noticed this pervasive bias that if a person is good at programming, they must be terrible at anything and everything else.

Perhaps this is a hacker-culture reaction to that kind of thinking?
What's More Important - The Stock Market or The Bond Market?
Hmm... probably about 15 years.

On balance I find tapes easier to use and less frustrating.

I am not prevented from skipping the FBI warnings, studio logos, legal disclaimers, previews, and other nonsense.

VHS tapes are much more robust. I've never had to clean one, or have it not work. DVDs have conniption fits over a few fingerprints, and if they get scratched, forget about it.

And if you do have to remove and clean a DVD to resolve a freeze-up, you then have to navigate through menus to get back to where you left off. With VHS, you can stop the tape, remove it, turn the player off, and come back later and pick up exactly where you left off.

Yeah the VHS picture is not as good as a DVD, no argument there. But for a typical Hollywood movie on a TV at home, it's good enough. Certainly no worse than the haphazard stutters, pixelization, and freezes one experiences in a typical DVD viewing.

Now, consider the iTV. Fingerprints and scratched media, not going to be a problem. Picture quality, at 720p, good enough for the masses, especially for a $99 device. If they can bypass the studio-imposed inconveniences and make using it a frustration-free experience, they will sell plenty of them.
And no doubt it's still slow as molasses. Sorry, I'll take my Mac Mini w/HDMI, running Plex any day.
It only looks like a sneaker. Darn. Still can't call Agent 99 on a shoe phone.
some more information here: [ http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/62006/title/Super... ] & here : [ http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727733.800-fractals-... ]
Shades of Minority Report?
Deolalikar Responds To Issues About His P≠NP Proof
There's some truth to what you say but I don't think it's completely for insidious/non-meritocratic reasons.

I'm far along enough in my career that I can say that I think what's happening is that it's very very hard to hire somebody through the old "post job, take tons of resumes, filter, interview" method because there's so much crap, and so much noise, and so much risk of getting false positives and false negatives, etc., that eventually you realize it is much much easier and more reliable to hire people you've already worked with at a previous company in the past. You can vouch for them as a known quantity.

Ideally, a bigger proportion of hiring would happen like this. But there's always new folks entering the field who won't have somebody to vouch for them, plus, not everybody who you would vouch for is available or interested, so you sometimes to have to go the posting-resume-interview route and cross your fingers.

So it's almost the opposite of what you said, though with the same goal! You should want to hire based solely on merit -- but if you have to fill a job opening and your choice comes down to filling it with a total stranger whose resume claims he has 20 years of experience in "J2EE/JBOSS/Jscript" versus filling it with a guy you know firsthand had delivered a major threading-related fix to a previous employer's Java codebase the wiser and more meritocratic choice is probably to go with the second guy. And it's not because he knows a secret handshake. :)
Apple is still prestigious for programmers. If you're a good programmer and you work at Apple, you're not embarrassed to tell your friends about it.
Bringing a Network Effect Business to Market
..by purchasing a sombrero at once.
Because frankly, Google does half-assed work these days. Small companies can do very well just by cloning and supporting various features and applications that Google has already abandoned. Worrying about what Google might do in the future is just silly.

Consider all the posts made to HN by users mourning the loss of Etherpad, for instance... and look back at them in light of what's happened. Google fashioned the technology into a proof of concept called "Wave," shipped it, started to build a user base, then - oh, look, a bicycle. I wonder if it's one of the new carbon-fiber Cannondales?

Basically, Google has a severe case of corporate ADD, just like any number of organizations who have failed to capitalize on assets they already owned. Believe me, entrepreneurs can eat very well from Google's table scraps.
My wife is a writer and painter. I regularly frame her work, correct her English, sell her paintings, and do random carpentry, plastic and metal work in service of her art.

For her part, she is also my first editor, and knows a lot about what I do, and has taught me so much about both language and art.

edit I'm struck by the coincidence of geeks and artists in this thread. I'd suspected there was a correlation before, but, damn...
There are plenty of American Universities below position 40 on that list. I also doubt that if France would suddenly start to charge its students a huge tuition fee that the scores would go up dramatically.

http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2009.jsp

Given the size of the respective economies of France and the US it is actually surprising to see them in the top 40, I would never have expected that, if tuition were the secret then they should have been near position 100 or lower.

The first 39 slots are divided between the US, Japan, England, Canada and Switzerland.
Great insight from somebody who should know, thanks for posting that.

I also wanted to ask, am I the only one who thinks it would be completely awesome to work on a project called Panama, simply because you'd have an excuse to have a Van Halen song as your theme? "Pa-na-ma-ha... Panama!"
Just respond, "You have to climb the mountain to reach the guru. Otherwise you won't appreciate his wisdom."
My wife is a dentist, and I took part of her time to explain what I do showing some naive sort algorithm.

At the end she asked why I need to do all that stuff if she can click on an excel option to sort the data!
First question is if the app is profitable. If yes, I would look into a process like this: http://taptaptap.com/blog/the-easy-way-to-get-into-the-iphon...

I would first post an explanation to your users as to why you are moving on / seeking other opportunities. Also offer very preferential treatment if any of them are interested in purchasing the app. You are going to have to be very transparent on the fact you are selling because
a) The fact that you don't know who to talk with first means it is likely you don't have the proper in's at competitors or obvious interested parties. This was me when I went to sell my first start-up. It makes it harder but a good product sells itself:)
b) You need to reach a wide audience. Selling an app is a very illiquid market meaning not a lot of active buyers. By the way, I mean this in a relative sense. Yes, I know there are many apps bought every day but percentage-wise, its low.
> and will probably always do line-by-line breaking, because who wants their text to jump around while editing?

What about "re-flow whenever you leave everything alone for two seconds"?
2. That is not all that different from Google.
Yea... With my wife's study I try to involve myself. I think my wife does not want to completely understand programming or is intimidated by it.

She did get the geekiness aspect though, in fact when I didn't want to join my college's sci-fi club she signed us both up (and became the president who all feared and respected). We had a blast there and made some life-long friends. Then she watched star trek: tng and the love of ST began :).
Sure, any reasonably intelligent person can grasp what a Hamiltonian Cycle is, once you explain it to them. But this article starts talking about 'em before it's defined 'em, which is just bad pedagogy.

Sure, you don't have to know what it is to understand the rest of the article, but it's still a pretty valid criticism.

(I did three years of undergrad maths and I had to go look up what a Hamiltonian cycle is.)
This seems to coinside, at least in the examples you give, with companies that have a "suit culture" who still recognize the importance of perpetuating a hacker culture. Maybe it is a simple flaw in the to-market process for such cultures.
Conflict brews as some companies (Facebook) organize against google/verizon plan
This is Apple, no cut&paste on the original iPhone, no USB on iPad. I'm guessing the user experience wasn't what they wanted either with the performance of the playback, or with the speed of the download/streaming of 1080p from the store.
Discuss Treatments for Breast Cancer
Not just make you less productive at work, but these roads are inherently roads where you drive more carefully (read slower). Driving slower means longer commutes, and can be correlated to the same economic problem as road congestion (read slower). Richmond estimates that it has saved 18 million dollars from the economic cost of congested roads by providing public transit. There's a lot of money to be lost in the time.
For some reason, a lot of articles about LaTeX focus, like this one, on typographic features such as ligatures and line breaking. For me, where TeX earns its keep is the macro capability. While primitive as a programming language, the ability to define your own commands is a powerful tool for enforcing consistency and reducing effort.

Two examples from work. For a proposal, we had to produce two documents, a short and a long one, with common titles and introductory paragraphs and cross-references and such. With LaTeX, we actually wrote just one proposal, with the contents embedded in TeX macros. Changing the macro definitions let us produce what became two "views" of the same material.

Second, for a paper on sorption modeling, we used macros for all the physical variables, to make sure all the equations "read" correctly (e.g., writing "\cSorbBulk" rather than, say, "C_b"). Halfway through the paper, we decided on a new notation for distinguishing between gas- and sorbed-phase concentrations. It took maybe five minutes to update the pertinent definitions and re-set the paper.
Socializing however is all about varying levels of privacy.

I won't tell my coworkers or boss the same things I tell my friends, I won't tell my friends what I tell my close friends, and my family sits on the highest tier.

Maybe facebook will get this maybe it won't, or in general maybe it is impossible on the web where information tends to be so open.
Could you compare and contrast yourself with TopCoder? Or should I just wait and see?
There is also tempalias by one of the HNrs.

http://tempalias.com/#/

A very handy app indeed.
Speaking as one of the technical crowd, it is hard to adjust to the fact that all of your skills put together contributes only a few percent to the success of a product.

It is obviously true, but it still takes a while getting used to :)
Ask HN: Do you donate to any charities?
If so, which organizations are your favorite and why?
One issue that comes up with people who speak multiple languages is the way you speak them and the way you are perceived, which in turn lead to a personality shift.

Say for example, you are a native english speaker from South Africa. You speak with a normal informal accent. Then you go to study french in a school in france - the french you will learn will be formal school french, and not street french.

As a result, people who speak to you in french will perceive you to be a formal, educated person, because of your choice of words. So they will treat you that way, and you will adopt the same formal characteristics as the people who are talking to you.

So it will appear that you have a personality shift when you switch languages.
Apple is driven by design (industrial design, product design, graphic design). They think about products, not technology.

I would actually disagree with the last part of that. I think Apple is always thinking about technology, but in the context of design. The Apple difference is not simply that design comes first, technology second, but that design is the gatekeeper for technology.

The iPod is the shining example. Could Apple have made a music player before the mass-production of the 1.8" hard drive? Sure, but it wouldn't have been the wonder to hold in your hand that the iPod was. It was when the technology was ready for the design requirements that they pounced on the opportunity.

Same thing with the iPhone. Apple could have made a smartphone before affordable capacitive multi-touch screens, multi-gigabyte flash drives, and fast-enough-for-desktop-browsing SoCs, but they likely didn't feel they could make a user experience to their standard with anything less.
الحلقه الاولى من مسلسل ربع مشكل
What percent of people still use VHS tapes? Your personal opinions are a poor predictor of how the mass market will accept a product. Your choices seem relatively well-reasoned, but they are odd.
I have enjoyed your anecdote.
Regardless of how this plays out, this needs to be at the top of Top Science Stories of 2010 lists. If it is a good proof, Top News Stories of 2010 (or whatever year it is confirmed).
If that's so, you need a bigger identity.
Apple's legendary UX is driven equally as much by programmers who write efficient code as it is by designers who design efficient UIs.
Most Googlers I've talked to call it the 120% project.
The essay seems to draw the conclusion that the difference between Yahoo and Google was more or less a matter of historical happenstance. Google did well because at the time Google was being built, they simply weren't (and couldn't be) part of the typical business model of the day, while Yahoo simply became trapped by it.
Unless of course apple licenses the trademark. These things can be settled civilly.
5. I’m Steve Jobs
Or a canister of gunpowder?
Literally ramen profitable?
Er, what are the "women" words for "dog" besides cachorro and cachorrinho? I'm a Brazilian guy, by the way.
How I Document my Business Model Hypotheses
Bioinformatics
Synthetic Biology
Genomics

If you're got a a good handle of biology, statistics, and computer science you should be set.
And a few more for those late to the game

6EA3K3EJMW4Y

9M3N36YFFXXR

FRMN3PXL777Y

HN6F3PNEPPK4

4RA47J33WHMF

HKYXTJY99RYF

N3A3HNN7YKMW

9YA3RMWJJYWX

NLY67WJ393WT
And are speeding down the road, secure in your knowledge that even though you cant see, if the road turned, there'd be large reflective warnings beforehand?
In addition to the reduced air density at altitude (as others have mentioned), body position, weight, and clothing also have a lot to do with terminal velocity. A light person wearing baggy clothes in a belly-down position might fall at only 90 mph, whereas a heavy person wearing skin-tight clothes in a head-down position could fall at 170 mph. (speeds given at lower altitudes, close to the ground)
Really? I find it's much better on Linux than on Mac (where most of the time it doesn't behave the way a Mac app should). I have no problem using it on Linux or Windows though, it works great there, the way the rest of the OS works.

I suppose this makes me that guy that shows up in every Firefox thread complaining that it's a shitty Mac app.
Add to Firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=duckduckg...
I agree completely, Apple looks at technology as an enabler of design, not the driver of it.
My current guess is that Tumblr is going to figure out the real potential of their "reblogging" system sometime in the next 18 months and whatever strange new beast that has become will make "liking" look like using an AOL keyword.
Does RTP == Research Triangle Park in North Carolina?
Another hoax, huh?

:wink:
By crap, do you mean "not like Windows," or actually crap? It looks native to me ("good" in my book), just like every other GTK app that I use.
If the algorithm contains more pidgin holes, should it be judged based on the fact that it is still an algorithm, or should we actually consider whether it might be a better algorithm?
First look at Shopsavy for Windows phone 7
There's quite a lot of interest in the proof by some key experts despite their general impression that the proof is wrong and unfixable.

Maybe experts are using this proof as an opportunity to promote theoretical computer science? It's a way to get more grad students and funding?
What looks like a blatant contradiction actually isn't. Though they start off the add with "If you're feeling frustrated with job posts asking for experience in a specific language" they go on to mention Ruby on Rails specifically.

The way I read it is that you don't have to have experience in Ruby on Rails, you just have to be able to learn it quickly and be comfortable developing applications with it. As a seasoned .NET or Java developer, it might only take you a few weeks to adapt ("you can pick up a new language faster than your laundry"), even if you have never used Ruby on Rails before.
Companies tend to protect their cash cows. I suspect a Noogler would be fired to suggest they should get out of search and do something else, just like MS (will take) took a long time to release an Office killer.

When process and hires are set up to maximize an offer, over the years the company gets fossilized "doing things this way".

It happens on every industry. You find some awesome source of revenue, you build upon it, you get blind to other options.
Another core competency that Apple has, one that neither Yahoo or Google seem to be able to figure out, is the ability to create, penetrate and dominate new markets. For all the various products Google creates, it's still essentially an advertising company using search as its publishing media in terms of what makes them money.

Very pitifully few of Google's projects have either created new markets they can dominate, or have penetrated existing markets to the point they can drive billion dollar business units. Gmail, Maps and Android exception to that point, but Google is woefully incompetent in most other respects. And the first two in that list are simply different takes on the search paradigm while Android is a knock-off of the iPhone OS (a really good knock-off, but certainly not a game changing original new idea).
Consumers will probably like this, geeks probably won't.

The current model is x86 based (1 GHz or so, single core, something like a Celeron M) and runs a stripped down version of OS X. It's a bit underpowered, but with some work loading things it can run standard OS X apps. QuickTime can handle the same codecs used on OS X.
With the current model, the more powerful but more costly Mac Mini is an alternative.

As described, the new model has a much less powerful and Mac-binary incompatible CPU, but it will use MUCH less energy and can handle h.264 playback with hardware decoding. That'll pretty much rule out adding codecs for those XViD .AVI videos many have laying around. Lack of an Intel CPU lowers cost significantly. It seems it could run app store stuff except for the input device hmmm.... maybe it should have a touch screen? Add video out somehow to an iPod touch?

Apple so far has stayed clear of directly supporting off-air or cable-tv PVR functionality. The USB tuners from Elgato Systems work well ("Eye-TV"), but with a Core 2 Duo it would take a dedicated hardware compressor to shrink archives down to h.264 etc at a decent quality level and in a reasonable amount of time.

Locked down like an iPad/iPod touch/iPhone, much of the geek appeal would be gone. The thought of a browser without ad-blocking alone is a big deal to some.
(perhaps someone can fine a clear way to do some ad-blocking in a router with open-source firmware?)

Hopefully whatever Apple does will allow access to plenty of tv content that isn't costly. DRM issues (and poor support of video that people already have) could be a negative.

It'll probably have (DRMed) HDMI output but no VGA or DVI. Or maybe Apple will prove us all wrong and do something really surprising?
If that doesn't work, try this instead:
Chrome: http://www.baydin.com/boomerang4gmail/download/boomerangforg...
Firefox: http://www.baydin.com/boomerang4gmail/download/boomerangforg...
Yahoo went bad because a business person was put in charge? From my point of view I would say that is generally the rule rather the exception. Particularly for those firms wanting to go public.

I'm going to defer to mixmax's quip about putting a gardner in charge of a gardening firm's finances [1] as the alternative.

You can't argue Jobs or Schmidt are not business people. Although Schmidt could be used to either refute or backup your point depending on how you feel about Google these days.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1596850
Some school districts do this for courses, called "Pre Tests". Of course, most students don't take them seriously so I'm not sure how good of an indicator they are.
This did it for me:

10 PRINT "DAMON"
20 GOTO 10

I think it was 2nd grade at the school library. Both computers constantly had some witty phrase infinitely looping down their screens...
This. It's not like it doesn't already do some heart-stopping repagination every time you drag borders or type into a table that crosses a page boundary, or when you drag around any object that is being word-wrapped.
Way too much resources for something so basic. You can run it out of a 1GB VM, if you wanted to.

I do about 8k uniques a day out of 512MB box.