skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reminds me of the story of that company that was called Bradford & Reed, even though the founders had different names, just because it sounded serious and imposing.

Edit: ah, found it, it was Andrew Warner's story.
"Producing financials seems bold, but the app appears capable of doing alot of bold things like calendaring and mail. Once they get imap enabled, that tool will be powerful."

Sorry - I couldn't help but chuckle. Saying the app appears capable of doing "calendaring and mail" is like saying that new Chevy Volt can drive like a car. There are a shit-ton of apps and systems that deliver mail and calendaring very well already, this is just another client. Enabling IMAP is like saying "and now the chevy volt can fill up from a regular gas station too if you're stuck somewhere" - yeah, just like a prius..."

As I read through the demo page - I was struck several times by how rule.fm seems like a cool app, but seems to be trying to boil the ocean.

Rule.fm Money for CFOs? Any company that has a CFO would likely not be able to run this as their CRM (which is basically what it seems like this system is).

This sounds like a salesforce.com-lite CRM system that is web 2.0 looking, but has no API (from what I can tell).

While a techcrunch article is nice and cool, and I applaud them for getting to a techcrunch article - the software seems to a solution in search of a problem that has already been solved before...

Each use case they present seems a bit simplistic and limited.

That's my $0.02, but I'm looking forward to checking it out in more detail to see if they have actually innovated in solving any of these business problems (Ticket tracking, financials, Contact management, etc.) rather than just simplifying it into something that works for a 2 person company - but needs to be dumped when you hit 5 people.
Universities certainly seem to employ a lot more people outside of the businesses of education and research than they used to. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think college used to have "diversity programs coordinators," "counseling and psychological services," and a paid intramural sports infrastructure, to say nothing of steadily larger dorm rooms and increasingly common private bathrooms. My parents teach at a small liberal arts school, and they say that landscaping has skyrocketed out of nowhere into a pretty expensive part of their budget. They also say that they are under constant pressure to hire more "diversity professionals" from regulatory bodies.

A university is a meal ticket for a lot of people, not necessarily just professors, and once some people find a meal ticket, especially one as intertwined with the public sector as higher education, good luck getting them out.
Personal Blog, then a blog that's for "professional" stuff. Martial arts, video games, fencing, etc. goes in the first. Finance, development, and design work goes in the second. Actively plug the second.
If by "non-experts" you mean "people who have hardly any familiarity with the language at all," then yes, I'm OK with people who don't know the language not understanding code written in that language.

I agree that we should not write code only for experts, but that doesn't mean we should take the absolute opposite approach and refuse to use case statements or blocks because somebody might read our code without bothering to learn the basics of the language.
Some really good comments here. Most seem to advise me to stay the hell away. I will be pondering over this long and hard over the next few weeks/months and doing a bit more research before I take any action.
US to build giant pickup trucks that SUVs can drive under.
College educations, health insurance, housing, etc. are non-tradables, goods which cannot be imported or sold on a world market. When we have a “strong” dollar, the relative price of tradable goods (imported from somewhere with a “weaker” currency) is reduced, while the relative price of non-tradables increases. The presence or absence of inflation is an orthogonal question to this exchange-rate distortion.
That's because you're looking at android as a delivery medium, but not because you make money of your applications right ?
I left a career to do a PhD at age 42. It definitely helped me take on challenges that require much more technical knowledge than if I had stayed on the "tinkering" path.

The distilled version of my lessons learned:
0) Hard to do a PhD part-time. Consider "retiring" for a while.

1) Your advisor will be focused on cranking out publications to advance their career. Not always the same as increasing the amount of knowledge in the world. You might be viewed as free labor in this effort. Protect yourself.

2) Your advisor will not help you manage your time or set goals. In fact they might need help in this area themselves.

3) If you haven't been in school lately, or deep into work related to your topic, expect to spend a lot of time "getting the rust out". Painful but useful.

4) The younger brain can solve problems more quickly, the older brain can pick better problems to solve. Your advisors won't know this either.

5) A storied career in academia is unlikely for an older student. (See Robin Milner for a great exception.) Keep your business network alive and growing the entire time you are in school.

6) The #1 goal is to finish. OK to repeat that to yourself over and over. Your thesis need not be the last word on a topic to be acceptable or even good.

7) You will feel like an idiot every day until you suddenly realize nobody can answer your questions anymore. That day you should start writing the answers in your thesis and finish it asap.

Finally, other than all the pain and anguish, it is an invigorating experience to find the brain still working.
I've actually looked into developing the same thing, as I really dislike all of the existing stuff out there. Let me know if you all are looking for a helping hand.
Tips for Noogler Engineers (Noogler = New at Google)
Computing the mean of medians
The problem with the interviews is that those early days are colored by the fact that they were successful. It would be interesting (although impossible) to have interviews before they actually reached measurable success.
I then promptly removed all hundreds of megabytes of it.

I think he was referring to Itunes.
No, that's the exact opposite of my point. By patenting something, you stick in it the database of "public knowledge" so that it could be discovered 50 years later if need be. That means it wouldn't be necessary for Corning to sit on it for 50 years. Sitting on things for 50 years and making the current status of the filer irrelevant (dead, disincorporated, whatever) is one of the purposes of the patent system.

The "limited monopoly" is part of a social contract and understanding the whole contract is important.
This cartoon is loose on the details, but I think he's just suggesting coalition governments. Lots of countries have coalition governments, and have many problems with their politics. The UK election this year resulted in a coalition government and the large parties badmounthed the idea of a coalition, claiming it was weak and unstable government. Trying to make the same thing in the USA would probably result in the same campaigning against the idea.
If you don't mind the Google branding that shows up, and all you want to do is collect emails and URLs, you can embed a Google Form in your document and have it collect the info for you. After you create the form in Google Docs, go to the Form menu and choose "Embed form in a webpage". Copy the link into your landing page, and you're done.
The iPhone is a smartphone model. It should be compared to other smartphone models, not other mobile OSes.

Err, the iPhone is a smartphone "family". iPhone 4 would be an smartphone model.

I'm sure Android will overtake iOS at some point though; Android handsets are getting cheaper and cheaper, while Apple cares more about profit margin than unit sales.

I'm not convinced this is a meaningful comparison, either. As far as developers are concerned, the number of wealthy customers who are used to impulse-buying apps are a metric Apple will dominate for the foreseeable future. As far as profit and margins, Apple is well ahead of all other hardware manufacturers, as well. User experience... well, that's subjective, but I think generally agreed on, as well. Just as comparing BMW's and Ford+Honda sales isn't very helpful in predicting the success of the companies, nor the market for compliments, neither is this.
A mainframe is to transaction processing as a GPU is to 3D graphics. Does that make sense?
Very interesting. According to your source, actual inflation is about 1% less than what the CPI measures, due (among other things) to a failure to make proper hedonic adjustments.
I think he's referring data as "content of the files", since Git tracks content not files as Subversion or CVS do.

This is what Linus refer to as a "stupid content tracker" because Git tracks content changes not file changes.
Travel essentials: Useful small tech to pack
File copy in Java – Benchmark
It's more expensive than on street level. But they could build the rail over the highway in very crowded areas, keep it at street level in areas where land is cheaper, and even go underground for short distances (ie: to pass crowded intersections). It seems way more flexible to me than this bus idea.
I think it's fair to call HipHop a native compiler, since it can generate native executables. phc generates C code, which is admittedly lower-lever, but it's roughly the same idea.

I'm interested in how you'd like phc to be more evolved. I've had lots of ideas (I'm the author) but I'm curious what others would like. Thanks!
> there really isn't a point to publishing a blog unless you think someone out there is going to visit regularly

Why does it have to be "regularly"? What would be wrong, in your eyes, to trust in Google and word of mouth to steer readers to your blog by issue instead. If there is a noticeable line through all your articles ("the voice") and people like it, they may even read on topics they were not originally interested in, and eventually subscribe to it, but why do you feel this is necessary to begin with?

Also, don't underestimate the degree to which interests are correlated. Off your supposedly varied list of interests, for example, there are only three that don't match mine.
I can think of a lot of new products and services a bank could offer. You would have the opportunity to rethink the standard checking/savings account world and hybridize cd's and savings accounts. There has been so little innovation in banking (some would say that it's because of how banks are tied to legacy infrastructure) that a re-think of what exists and what customers want would be very refreshing.

I think the best part would be that because of the legacy technology in place at existing banks, they would have a very hard time making changes to adapt to anything new that would be offered. Just imagine adding a new account type that isn't checking or savings and has new rules. How long would it take for a bank to re-write their backend system to incorporate that change? A long time.

If a disruptor entered banking and did offer this kind of change, I think you'd have banks banging down your door to buy you out, if nothing else.
> And then explain that "Hadoop" is named after a teddy bear.

Hadoop is named after a stuffed elephant.
I had thought about that...but I DEFINITELY hate that Google branding.

I tried Campaign Monitor though, like matthewphiong suggested and it seems to be working out really nicely.

We'll see how things go.
I'm far from being an expert on statistics (and related stuff), but I'm still a bit leery of the "Women Build Great Companies" section. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they don't or that I'm against having more women start companies or anything of the kind. It's just this: all of the author's claims in that section are backed by statistics. That makes me wonder, if there are "so few women entrepreneurs starting high potential, high growth companies", doesn't that make it likely that there's some statistical bias in favor of those companies?

My reasoning is like this: if you can get into the XYZ college either by being rich or exceptionally smart, wouldn't a statistical analysis tend to "show" that poor people are exceptionally smart?
That looks like a very poor checklist unless you're purely looking for someone that rapidly turns templates into markup.

Otherwise, a grasp of how the users will interact with your app and what constraints that imposes on the front end is far more important than their ability to regurgitate CSS clearfix syntax and knowledge of server side javascript frameworks they might not have to learn.
Ok, so we see that only 9% of women who apply for VC get it. Then we hear about how startups run by women do so much better than those run by men. Now, suppose the reason so few women get VC is because the male VCs are less disposed to give women money--and those who do get money are those who provided such a fantastic plan that it was a clear winner. Since this essentially makes the entrance criteria harder, you'd expect that those few enterprises which make it through are going to do extremely well... something along the lines of all those uber-startups run by women.

I'm not saying women can't make good companies, I'm just saying that the implied bias on the part of male VCs would tend to select only the very best woman-founded startups. Level the playing field, and you'll probably get the same performance as men.
Exactly; I meant that if you're not 100% sure already, you should probably stop.

In fact even being 100% sure itself probably isn't enough, but I for one will at least stop second-guessing you, since being able to perfectly predict who will succeed in advance is basically impossible.

This is a big life decision and it's exactly the wrong time to be a romantic about it. Trying and failing for a PhD is hugely expensive in opportunity cost. Trying, succeeding, and depending on a faculty post on the other end to make it all worthwhile can be pretty dangerous, too.

A lot of us in the 15-35 age range have been force-fed the idea growing up that encouragement is automatically good, regardless, and the entrepreneur community can be especially prone to this because you need a lot of drive to be an entrepreneur. I actually think that's ok for entrepreneurship, because the worst case isn't really all that bad unless you are really stupid. (Incorporate early, incorporate often; don't take on debt personally.) You at least get some very valuable experience. That's not true for everything. Getting your PhD is one of those things; a partial PhD is not worth it. I would be appalled if I encouraged someone to get their PhD and turned out to be that little tipping factor, only for them to find two years in that they are miserable and can't finish. If anything, a little light discouragement is what is really called for; if that's enough to turn you away from a PhD, then good! You were in trouble anyhow.

Life advice is serious business and unthinkingly spouting "common sense" can be very destructive.

But typing all this out is certainly less... pithy.
They have kids. White male is king of the jungle, get over it.
Mark example:

mm - the cursor position is now known as mark "m"
`m - return us to the cursor position named "m"
It's like you're psychic or something, posting exactly what I was thinking while I was still composing my response :)
It's not a problem for Android, but it might be a problem for people writing apps for Android. Given that a goodly number of people want Andoroid to 'succeed' against iOS because of the greater freedom for developers, it seems like this would be a significant dampener in many folks enthusiasm.
Meshing is the only reasonable way to network the meters and related communications (collectively AMI), but at the substation level (for distribution and transmission networks) you can realistically start using cots. People like Schweitzer who are already entrenched may try to keep the custom everything model, but there are serious efforts to at the very least use a single standard stack. Big pushes for 61850 in the substation and a common wide area solution for utility-utility and utility-reginal coordinator communications are happening right now.

They may be somewhat custom, but they are more cots/standardized than previously. Further there are several FOAs right now that require a built-in security component. These FOAs fund next-gen technology development, so I am not sure how you see this as only an "edge problem".
3. "They are more likely to reproduce and therefore more risk-averse."

Not a mention of this seems a little disingenuous.
Does anyone else find the prospect of video résumé a bit frightening? Some people (myself included) are simply not that comfortable in front of a camera.
This sounds harsh, but I'd rather be honest and risk that.

I have a PhD in physics and work supervising doctoral students and early stage post docs.

A PhD will not help you personally unless:

a) You want to prove to yourself that you can do something original AND

b) You are incredibly fascinated by a certain field, to the point of obsession AND

c) You are capable of continuing to work, unaided and unsupervised for up to 6 months (or longer!) at a time with no encouragement and no external pressure.

I don't know what CompSci is like, but I cannot imagine that it is so different to physics or mathematics, which is where I have some experience.

I wouldn't recommend doing one, if those given above honestly are your reasons. Seems like you should take a part-time job working for a small startup (commercial) or join a well-run open source project (not-so-commercial).

Otherwise, look at ways of motivating yourself using external tools. Set deadlines, make lists and allow yourself rewards for ticking off items on your list or hitting those deadlines.

If you do start a PhD, it sounds to me like you risk giving up half way through, having wasted 3-4 years of your own free time.
A little simplistic I think. Big decisions should include the head and not just the gut.
I've got karma to burn, so I'll just point out that Daniel Ellsburg is not, in fact, an authority on the impact or ethics of this Wikileaks dump. Counterintuitive as it may sound, Daniel Ellsburg is not actually qualified to judge whether Wikileaks did the same thing for AfPak that Ellsburg himself did for Vietnam.

The Pentagon Papers showed the war in Southeast Asia to have been an outright lie, and one to which the administration had resigned itself to losing but was feeding troops into in an attempt to extricate itself "gracefully". It exposed overtly illegal activities on a strategic scale, such as the widespread bombing of Cambodia and Laos, which the government had previously disavowed. The Pentagon Papers impacted the standing of the administration on a policy level.

Anybody on Hacker News can compose an argument that suggests that somewhere in the Wikileaks dump is information that would expose:

* strategic decisions to expand the AfPak conflict (say, continuous coordinated airstrikes into Baluchistan)

* strategic acceptance of defeat in AfPak and a decision to make a face-saving retreat at the expense of American lives

* the notion that we occupied Afghanistan for reasons other than the elimination of the Taliban (for instance, to grab resources, or to counter a resurgent Iran)

But so far, no such information has been turned up. Instead, we have the meme that "the Wikileaks dump is like the Pentagon Papers in their raw original form". But we don't know that. For that to be true, they would need to paint a clear picture of a shocking distinction between reality and the ongoing narrative of the conflict; we'd have to be secretly at war with Pakistan or Iran, or already resigned to letting the Taliban reclaim the country, or something at that scale.

Furthermore, the Pentagon Papers and the Wikileaks dump aren't ethically equivalent. Ellsburg leaked 4,100 pages of digested intelligence and policy information. Wikileaks dumped 70,000 documents taken directly from field reports. Wikileaks claims to have "minimized harm" (presumably by scrubbing names from reports or withholding documents they believed would have exposed people to harm). Ellsburg didn't have to take responsibility for avoiding that kind of harm; the NVA probably could not have organized death squads to react to his disclosure.

Has this happened already in Afghanistan? Nobody has provided evidence that it has, but it seems pretty clear that it's a real risk. Death squads don't care about due process. All they need is a town, a time, and a rough description.

All this, as usual, is not meant to say that the US Government is on the "right side" of this issue. For one (obvious) thing, none of this information should have been available, to anybody; negligence in DoD information assurance makes them just as culpable for deaths of outed informants.

But I'm still left wondering: if you don't draw the line at a decent (tens of % points) chance at outing (and thus killing) an informant in Afghanistan while you're sitting behind a laptop in a safe western country, where do you draw the line? Is there any line at all?
"ensures maximum compatibility with various email clients"

Are you sure? Are you testing deliverability and open rates? Are you following the various idiosyncrasies which major mail hosts display (yahoo rate limiting, etc)? Do you follow strong anti-spam measures, and check your system for security holes often?

Not saying you don't but there's more to a hosted mailing solution than just the mailing. I'm not sure most people are able to put in as much time in to providing tried/true templates which work across a variety of clients unless they're working for one of the larger mailing list companies.

That said, I still do most of my own mailings, but I knowingly make the tradeoff.

@gaiusparx - mailchimp, madmimi, icontact and bronto are some of the bigger ones friends of mine use, and they all have generally good things to say about each one. I know some of the folks at icontact and bronto and can attest that they're both security-minded, customer-focused and basically 'on the ball' folks overall.
Is he also adding non-phone android deployment?
I hadn't read about the rail in Bangkok, looks cool:

http://www.railway-technology.com/projects/bangkok/
If you're using Apache, then it should be easy to do with a rewrite rule, or proxy pass.
Ask HN: What is this email virus?
I just received yet another spam message -- from a friend. This is the third spam email I've gotten in the past month or so, and it shows that it circulates to the sender's contact list. I think I know what is happening. Some of my less technical friends/relatives have picked up a virus somehow which accesses their address book, but what is it? It sends just a link in the message like ----pills.com, and comes legitimately from them at their hotmail/gmail account. Solving the spam issue completely would be a great startup, I think.
This is pre iPhone 4 information, it doesn't take into account the biggest phone launch in history.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/08/02/nielson_androi...
I can't deny that, enlightened modern man though I supposedly am, I would be a bit leery when considering funding a startup if the founder could at any time call me up and say "whoops I'm having a baby, things are going to have to go on the back burner for up to a year".

I do hope that any serious businesswoman would not do something like that, it would be extremely unprofessional and a good way to drive your company out of business. Luckily I don't have any money to fund startups, anyway, so it's not something I have to worry about.
Microsoft's patch for the .LNK vulnerability (2286198) is out *now*
Yes that's a fair point - for now at least Android and iPhone are both strategically important to us, but not at all for the purposes of generating revenue.
Is there any way to get in touch with you?