skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In this kind of case I find it helpful to distinguish between what optimizations the system could implement and what it does implement. There are so many theoretical optimizations that don't work in practice that you can spend forever debating them (especially since no one can be proven wrong in a theoretical debate). I actually like the abstraction to leak a little when it comes to performance. And keep in mind that PHK develops the FreeBSD kernel that he's using, so he knows what it's going to do.
Why did Time Inc. have to develop their own app vs. using Zinio?
Bill Gates Consoles Steve Jobs About Jailbreaking
And development on it stopped a few years ago as well.
* Obviously no website UI can ever cover absolutely all cases and some queries will need to reach a human, but most companies don't even seem to try*

I completely boggled the other day at encountering a "Contact Us" web UI that had no "Other" option in their drop down menu. As my purpose for attempting to contact them was not remotely related to what the listed options covered, I just gave up.

All I wanted to do was suggest to them a totally minor change that would have opened up a whole new market for them. shrug Oh well.
as it has already been mentioned -- having to pay license fees means ramen profitable is even further away for your average, small bootstrapped startup.

there are some good startups based on the MS stack, but they're generally startups done by people with money, connections, or extensive experience in the MS stack.
Great article. I think this article was part of 'Best of Software Writing I' by Joel Spolsky.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BestSoftwareWriting.h...
I think you might have misplaced blame on some of those points. I was not aware that the US government sponsored reality TV, celebrity news, facebook simply by the virtue of not making people pay for them. The government not taxing something does not equate to the government condoning it.

Part of that blame has to come down on capitalism. There exists a market for these things and if the market demands it, is it the government's job in matters of entertainment and nutrition to step in and decide what we can indulge in?
That's like suggesting that you can eliminate CPU cache because most resources are going to be in main memory. Few systems scale 1:1 when adding more systems, yet making each system more powerful has the potential to be more useful than increasing the scaling factor.

In other words if 100 machines are 60 times more powerful than 1 machine, increasing your scaling factor is less important than doubling each machines throughput (assuming you keep the same scaling factor).
> It's as if we're all plagued with a /heavy dose/ of masochism.

Fixed that for you. ;>

Back on topic -- it's not actually surprising that this happens. Shared mildly traumatic experiences, especially ones where there is a visible common enemy, are an excellent way to unite people. That's why the military shaves your head and your DI is a hardcase. It's also why co-founders either founder or become really, really good friends. Even if the startup fails, that friendship may have been worth it.
As stated in the article: Any number of other iOS apps exist to display content bought/subscribed-to elsewhere.

Given the apparent double-standard, I'd say the burden of proof is on Time to demonstrate that they really were unfairly rejected and the problem isn't something along the lines of their implementation violating the ToS.
>And most of us started our careers doing stuff like "admin assistants" etc.

Really? what is the upwards path there? I mean, is it easier to jump from 'admin assistant' to IT than to just jump into IT with no experience at all?
Bit.ly Button - jQuery Plugin for Your Clicky Post
RailsConf 2010: Interview with George Guimarães from Plataforma
With BizSpark startups dont have to pay any licensing costs for some time. I also think that licensing is discounted when you become profitable.

BizSpark aside, I think hosting costs/maintenance is much more. For a $20 512 Linode it would cost a hell of a lot more to run MVC.NET + MSSQL.
bit.ly -The intelligent URL shortener- offers realtime statistics about the clicks on shortened links and this button takes advantage of that information. This jQuery button give you a uniform click count button -tall or wide- that people can also use it to retweet your post.

When you use a short link to tweet your post, it may get 100 retweets but in terms of bit.ly stats that could mean 1000 clicks coming from the whole twitter ecosystem which makes another interesting measure of how popular is your post!
I believe teachers currently are comped at above-market rates. I would bring them down to market rates. They would work under that system for the same reason most other professionals work at market rates - it's the best they can get.

The independent agency which currently devises metrics to figure out how good I do my job is the stock market. My bonus = % of profits.

When I was a professor, I favored (and suggested to the department) that some higher authority should devise midterm and final exams. It would a) allow us to measure teacher performance, as opposed to student opinion [1] and b) allow comparison of student performance across classes.

[1] To get good student evaluations, all you need is easy tests + jokes + good looks.
A few years down the road, displays may natively have higher PPI and this issue will become moot. See for example, http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2010/06/apple-retina...
Glass Plasma TV Stands
Buy plasma TV stand, TV unit, TV rack and entertainment furniture at great prices. We also sell CD rack, DVD stand, CD DVD rack in chrome and wooden finishes.
I don't necessarily disagree with the overall gist of your comment, but I am curious as to what the US did to restrict information about the BP spill, and how it would have undermined US authority if the information got out that a London-based petroleum company caused a spill along the US coast.
So, let me see if I understand. This is a hosting company that had (foolishly) some kind of unlimited plan, and when people actually did use boatloads of resources they turned them off without warning? No throttling, nothing?

Well. That could have gone better, eh?
Do people actually switch to a browser than "enhances" the surfing experience on just one site?
People Platforms: Are strangers more important than friends?
It's about getting everyone on the same page about what you're building before jumping into design
Noted Dunning-Kruger Study hailed by Dunning and Kruger
3G Nokia Mobiles Under Rs.10,000
Beyond just that the cartoonist misses (or outright distorts) the points of Brave New World, ey makes the truly bizarre (and yet oddly common) assumption that at some golden age in the past, "the people" were less distracted by their own lives and what entertained them and were more civic and more aware.

They weren't. Before they were playing video games, they were playing ping pong, board games, cards, or catch. Before they were watching YouTube, they were watching TV or listening to radio shows. Despite the journalistic myth-making about their own industry, the news has always been cluttered with trivialities and partisanship in every medium.

And there have always been people complaining how everyone but they has descended into terrible trogolodytes who only care about their own lives and interests - and not what smart people like themselves find important.
Plentyoffish too I think.
Smokers Save the Government Money
Ask HN:How to attract best programmers for non-software company?
Dear Hackers,

I am looking for suggestions on how to attract truly exceptional programmers for a non-software company. A variety of sources (Joel on Software, friends at Google, Yahoo, universities, and research labs) seem to say that the best software engineers prefer to work at software companies as opposed to software roles in other companies. Does this have to be the case? What can non-software companies do to attract a few excellent programmers?

As background, our group is a hedge fund that uses a variety of fundamental and macro ideas to trade stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodities. In order to manage complexity, we tend to try to automate everything that can be automated and are looking for a great programmer to help manage our software systems and support the investment process. I think some benefits of our group are:

* we have excellent people in pretty much every role

* we are a small group so we have the fun and excitement of a startup with the stability of a larger organization

* programmers get to work on a variety of interesting projects and occasionally contribute to open source projects

* everyone has their own (nice!) office

* great benefits, compensation, etc.

I have always thought that a company devoted to excellence should be able to attract great people in any field. But despite what seems like a great environment I occasionally have people basically say, "I'd rather work at a software company like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Oracle, etc." without even bothering to listen to what we are trying to do. What are the features that make pure software companies so attractive? Can these features be replicated at non-software companies or can other features be substituted? Any comments on how to attract great people in general as well as how to advertise a specific position (e.g., like the one at http://www.baincapital.com/BainCareers/ViewPosition.aspx?position=aaf6b68e-8f63-44a3-9222-14cc21fc0bb4) would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
-Emin
Is that really state-sanctioned fear? Or is it arbitrary, and at the discretion of an individual cop?
I don't get his examples. He talks about designs being both "usable and pleasurable", but I don't see any real difference in the designs. They both have fairly flexible layouts, attractive backgrounds and well formatted text. The only element that WuFoo has that BaseCamp does not is a "warm" color scheme.

The rest of it basically boils down to "give your users feedback, but do it in a 'fun' way." I mean, that's a good lesson to have, but its nothing earth shattering.
Competitive lockpicking growing in US popularity
A bit pedantic, but: the cartoonist didn't really write anything, he just illustrated text Neil Postman wrote in "Amusing Ourselves to Death."
The fail here is your request; you can't "turn" the userbase into anything. The userbase is what is is. That's why we have the upvote/downvote system. Downvote the articles you don't find relevant. Or ever easier, don't read them/comment on them.
Check my submissions. They'll have the details you want.
The important stuff in the U.S is controlled by creating false dichotomies between different alternatives that both assume a uniform underlying reality and are different in practically meaningless ways. Anything that's different from these false alternatives is assumed to be one of the false alternatives, will be viewed as kook material or will take several hours to explain. There is also plenty of genuine kook material mixed in to all of this that makes it hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.

The only thing that can really knock the average American out of this is long term exposure to alternatives that exist in other cultures. Ever notice how people who are well traveled often have a more nuanced understanding of most contemporary topics?
I've never been clear on whether stating Godwin's Law is equivalent to it happening? All of these Internet Laws can be confusing.
The original title is downright dishonest. Who really cares about awesome canvas text-rendering, when most text will be outside of canvas?
Absolutely. That's the big idea here. Flowshark will help everybody really think about the user experience and how to optimize it by providing a collaborative high-level view. We're working hard to make it what I'll call "playfully intuitive" enough that pretty much anyone can get started using it right away, including your non-programming clients.
This is part of the reason I don't like working in PHP anymore -- this reads to me like a clear case of an overengineered solution. For example, see the list of sanitiziation
filters: http://www.php.net/manual/en/filter.filters.sanitize.php

Who wants to wade through that when (for most cases) regular expressions are easily available? Not to mention the lack of any whitelisting support, which is by and far the best validation technique in a developer's toolbox.
I recently decided on Ruby as the next language to tackle and my first impressions of the beginners resources available online were not so great. Ruby seemed a little more spammy than other languages when looking for beginners documentation. I did end up finding your book a day or two ago and was VERY impressed. Every single one of my questions I had regarding if I should read on or not was answered in your intro, and the first two chapters have been well written, concise. Thanks a bunch for your hard work!
Conclusion does not follow.

IV does much more than just buy up other people's patents and license them out. They also put considerable resources into researching and developing new inventions. How do we know that it isn't the latter activities that are responsible for the low return?

If we want to know whether patent trolling pays or not, shouldn't we look at firms that only do that? For example, Acacia Research? Acacia has done quite well financially.
A link to the actual torrent file: http://www.skullsecurity.org/blogdata/fbdata.torrent
iPhone Pull to Refresh
Same deal with Windows 7 - I believe that all flavors of Windows do a horrendous job on html5 fonts

Here is a screenshot (using Chrome 5.0.375.99): http://imgur.com/aLGBk.png
My startup is a BizSpark startup http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark so we're going to get tied up in the Microsoft stack pretty quickly.

We just started a few months back and are working on our first project.

I really like developing in .NET so this was a no brainer for me. Other people would disagree with me and want to focus on open source.

Different strokes for different folks I suppose.

Even with BizSpark the point of entry for open source sartups is much lower which probably accounts for most of it.

Either way, you can be successful and profitable with both, it's just a matter of finding what works for you.
Microsoft officially unveils key Office 2011 for Mac features
Lean requirements - Who write spec documents anymore?
Apparently, there are powerful people in the world who have taken these novels not as warnings but as textbooks.

More like these people have taken on these Orwellian characteristics on their own rather than read about how to do EVIL.

There are human beings who are very good at manipulating people, but it doesn't mean that they know the science of manipulating people.
> Downvote the articles you don't find relevant.

You can't down vote articles.
Or is it?

Even ignoring that the idea may be very original and still be a very small modification to existing products, validating or implementing an idea takes a lot more effort than coming up with an idea whether or not it is a small modification to an existing product.
true; anything I see from the US is seen as one point or exactly the contrary, never as the way more complex reality it really is...
It doesn't take conspiracy to implement 1984. All it takes is bureaucrats doing their jobs and letting bureaucrats to tweak their job description.
FTC Guidelines for Bloggers; What They Say; What Bloggers Need to Do
You've got market and non-market all mixed up.

Public education isn't a market good, it's a public good. Toilet paper and oatmeal are market goods.

The labor market for teaching is in fact a free market. Any given municipality can pay whatever they want to pay, and get the talent they're paying for accordingly. The fact that teachers are getting laid off in something like 80% of municipalities the last few years means you don't even have to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

Agree on the statements about professors. All the same. If you were working on something more qualitative as part of a team, and not a lone trader, we both know there's no quantitative way to assess your work. Lines of code is a joke and other metrics invariably bring in subjective measures.

EDIT to add: If you're pro-free market, shouldn't it be up to municipalities to choose which teachers they want to keep or fire as they see fit, without some bureaucrat telling them that according to some BS test scores they have to do such and such?
I don't hear of many startups using Oracle, IBM mainframes or proprietary Unix either. I think there is a general aversion among startups to using expensive technology, and I think the reasons are fairly obvious.

If you're interested in the startup world, learn another software stack or three. Startups generally need people who learn new things quickly and use the best tool for the job. Flexibility is key; don't be a one-trick pony.
As a counter-example, I have always had much better luck with fglrx than with the closed nVidia drivers.
I've also run into regressions on older hardware that no one cares to trouble-shoot because not enough people are on the setup (e.g. the soundcard on a PowerBook 667MHz for example).
Who made the iPhone app for that? A Medical Doctor..
Personally, I have a BA in English with a minor in CS. Except for my first year out of college (performance analyst at a pension consulting firm -- I had applied to their computer department!), I've spent my entire career in computers. I've ticked most of the boxes -- coding, junior DBA work, junior sysadmin work, spec / doc writing, system architect, team lead, Director of Programming, and now Co-Founder.

I am incredibly glad that I majored in English and not CS or something "more practical." English in particular and Humanities in general teach you the most valuable skill there is: effective communication. Everything else you can self-teach or hire, but it's really, really hard to find a more efficient system for learning good communication than by writing 5-10 page papers 2-4 times a week for four years, while having to participate in class discussion (frequently on things you haven't actually read but were supposed to, which teaches you a lot about active and reflective listening).
European VC funding has bounced back
For the record...I also found these:

http://launchsoon.com/gallery.php

http://dzineblog.com/2008/05/27-cool-coming-soon-page-design...

http://www.blog.exxcorpio.com/2009/06/01/25-best-coming-soon...
I think the author makes a valid point re: emotional design, but he also seems to confuse "pleasurable" design with his own personal taste (which appears to be bright and bubbly with heavy illustration). I'd say that sites like Reddit (and HN), Basecamp, Craigslist, Teuxdeux have their own visual personality (that their users enjoy) despite lacking animated cartoon birds. Pleasurable is subjective and will vary widely depending on audience.

I like the modified Maslow's Hierarchy, but I think he's overemphasizing the top piece in this article. Businesses have enough trouble achieving the bottom three pieces (Functional, Reliable, Usable), and often skip them to aim for Pleasurable. http://carsonified.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/maslow-hie...
I agree with you with the fix, but saying that's the primary reason for the military to shave your head...

I don't think so, military shaves heads because long hair brings you a lot of problems in war. From hair in your wounds that will bring infection(the reason pro cyclist shave), to all kinds of parasites that attach to hair in non first world countries, to the time it takes to clean it to be presentable, to making people look different(that's the reason of uniforms too, everybody feels part of the same whole).

Hair is a status symbol too.
A severe influenza pandemic will kill many more Americans than died in the World Trade Centers, the Iraq war, the Vietnam War, and Hurricane Katrina combined, perhaps a million people in the USA alone. Such a disaster would tear the fabric of American society. Our entire country might resemble the Superdome or Bourbon Street after Hurricane Katrina.

Is anyone else tired of these doomsday prophecies? Everyone was hysterical about H1N1 and it turned out to be milder than "normal" flu in the end. I'm not trying to say anything about the rest of the article, I'm just really tired of the attitude.

It's estimated that, in United States, about 40,000 people a year die in highway accidents. If we adopted the same sensationalist attitude, we could compare it to the Vietnam War, which (according to Wikipedia) claimed the lives of 58,236 US soldiers, over the course of several years. Obviously, highway accidents will be the doom of United States, right?

Sorry, rant over.
Awesome. I'm very glad that there's a free online version, as well. Oddly, that makes me much more likely to purchase the pdf.

Now, if only Rails 3 were finished.
Loopt, a YC-startup, used Microsoft technologies to build out at least part of their infrastructure. Note the aspx extension:

https://app.loopt.com/loopt/termsOfUse.aspx
I don't think iPad magazine apps are a good solution. Seems like just another hack solution for publishers to charge money for something. I don't see how an iPad magazine app has another to offer that an HTML5/CSS3 site can't.

So in that sense, I can see how Apple simply doesn't want things to go down this route for the best interest of the users. It's an extra layer of complexity/technology/payments between the user and the content that is simply not necessary.
Please consider using the Enter key once in a while.
Like others, it's unclear to me exactly how far the product goes.. Is it a way to lay out state machines and make notes, or will it actually allow me to mock-up a user interface within the tool? If I'd still mock up the UI in OmniGraffle, screen-shot it, and upload so that your app will let me lay out the 'flow'.. that's not compelling enough to me to make it worth the trouble. If it somehow takes OmniGraffle/Visio out of the equation.. I'd be interested for sure.
Have you seen http://productplanner.com
There's also a growing market for people who engaged in making thing entertainment and electronics hacking entertainment.

There's markets for low-brows, which everyone use. Then there are "high-brows" market in which people can engage in their perspective curiosity/sophistication.

For every mindless entertainment, there are niche hobbies which people engage in and put enormous amount of energy into.

For example, my hobby is to speculate on currencies. The side effect is that I learn about money emerge naturally in a free market economy, security schemes, and P2P networks. (Yes, I actually do that.)
The Startup Experience by Matthew Pontoles
This is an exceptionally well written and accessible essay (I wish I could write like this!). There's another great issue dealing with ultimately inability to scale atomic distributed transaction across rows by Pat Helland "Life Beyond Distributed Transactions":

http://www-db.cs.wisc.edu/cidr/cidr2007/papers/cidr07p15.pdf (warning: PDF)

Amongst the points discussed, it talks about how real life transactions from getting a coffee at Starbucks to buying a home aren't atomic but are rather based on "workflows" with promises and budgetting for worst cases.
That's the only experience I've ever had with Dell and I always thought their CS was fine ;) When you're buying 100s or 1000s of computers from them the level of service they give is much better than the person buying the single $300 laptop.
Senator Baucus Speaks in Favor of 0% Capital Gains Tax Rate for Startups
myspace

The server infrastructure consists of over 4,500 web servers (running Windows Server 2003, IIS 6.0, ASP.NET and .Net Framework 3.5), over 1,200 cache servers (running 64-bit Windows Server 2003), and over 500 database servers (running 64-bit Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005) as well as a custom distributed file system which runs on Gentoo Linux.