skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
maybe they weighed their options, and found that buying the company straight for 7 billion is cheaper than suffering through more downtime caused by McAfee software.
Erlang continues to kick some ass.
I think its way more likely that if/when twitter launches a location product similar to foursquare that /that/ will do them in. Facebook is for a different type of relationship (at least to me) whereas 4sq/twitter is more selective- Who do I want to follow. I feel that twitter could completely replace 4sq, as their is nearly 100% overlap in that space anyways.
The utility of location based services has a strong network effect. For finding friends, they need to be on the service. For coupons & deals, business development is far easier with a larger audience.

Interestingly, one way to be ubiquitous is to open up the service as a platform. That means that it makes sense for Facebook to let Foursquare & Gowalla use the platform. Those using Foursquare and feeding into Facebook make Facebook more useful.

It also matters whether location is a way to drive engagement for Facebook, or if they expect deals to be a major revenue driver. I highly doubt even a large effort on local deals and coupons would earn significant revenue for Facebook relative to their astoundingly successful ad system. They aren’t mutually exclusive of course, in that they can have hooks for their ads to leverage places. Ignore for a moment that mobile ads are universally horrible and Facebook doesn’t have any (yet).

This makes me think Foursquare can still grow by being the best place to find deals. From what I’ve seen, Foursquare’s business development is rock solid. Also, Foursquare’s mission isn’t about location based checkins but to make cities more useful. So I think everyone will be just fine.
It's the same answer that Ev Williams gave about an early critical review of Twitter: "how useful is ice cream?"

Just because there's people that use Groupon-like utilitarian services doesn't mean that they won't have fun with other stuff too.
I wonder how much in total did you make off of your experiments? The micro-idea/implementation model is very interesting by the way.
You could invest in a gold ETF
http://www.google.com/finance?q=gld
Pedal to the Mettle: The unbelievable, true story of Automoblox
I interpreted that sentence to mean that the decision was not accidental but purposeful on Spamhaus' part; if it's accidental then it's slightly different (actually it makes me think somewhat less of Spamhaus, because it's sloppy).

Either way I'm not sure that the outcome is going to be good. I'd like it if there were a way to pressure Google into being more responsive about spam issues, but they have little incentive to, beyond keeping it from clogging up their own systems.
And why is this even called Infer? It's not doing inference...

BTW, Infer.NET is written in C#, but there is an F# wrapper.
Intresting - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin_(Scheme_implementation)

When do we expect Hitler, Churchill and Roosevelt?
New Book--Billion Dollar Company
Is there an equivalent in any of the other libraries out there (e.g. jQuery, Prototype, etc.)?
Why nobody is buying your product: startup founder's dilemma & behavioral change
Even if you do have the domain, it may be worth knowing that a lot of US-based CAs will refuse to sign SSL certificates for .ly domains.
Perhaps Confreaks could be convinced to cover it: http://confreaks.com
While the probability of failure is nearly a function of the number of drives, the MTBF/MTTF calculations do not work that way.

For example, if there were a probability of 5% that the disk would fail within three years, in a three disk RAID0 array, that probability of failure would be:

P=(1-(1-.05)^3)=.14263

In other words, 14.3% probability of failure within three years. That doesn't mean it will fail in that time frame. It means if you have a large population of that configuration, that is the rate you would be dealing with for drive replacement planning.

The MTBF and MTTF calculations apply to populations of drives (e.g. a given model) not to a given drive. The values provide no predictability for the failure of any specific drive. Using the values for that purpose is a common misapplication. A drive with a MTTF of 1,000,000 power-on hours can fail in 15 minutes or never during its useful life.

As a result, a three drive array will have a higher probability of failure over a given interval, but the MTTF/MTBF of the drives is essentially unchanged.

Think of it this way... The probability of winning the lottery is one in 20,000,000. The probability that someone (anyone) will win the lottery in a given week may be one out of ten - 10%. In other words, some person wins the lottery, on average, one time in ten weeks. That doesn't mean that your probability of winning the lottery is 10%. It also doesn't mean that the average probability of winning the lottery is 10%. It also doesn't change the probability of winning the lottery; it's still one in 20,000,000, even if three people win in a 10 week interval.
The Economic Recession and Customer Value
Ask HN: Why do we not have a Wiki yet?
The format of this site is great for news, but I've been thinking: this community could really compile some very high quality information related to technology and business.

If I built it, would you come?
I would ask myself this: If I'm just starting out right now, do I really want to hop on the .ly bandwagon?

It's trendy right now, and while I don't think you'll necessarily regret it later, it will ultimately end up looking a bit unimaginative like all the .us domain-hack names do now.
Tonido gets interesting - Now streams videos from personal cloud
Short term bonds?
Unfortunately that would also mean getting our money in pound sterling, something we'd rather avoid. If there are no better options out there we might settle for it, but I'm betting HN can come up with something before then.
PS3 Jailbroken?
But 0 to the first 750 horsepower is a very important step.
The author isn't saying things need to be perfect from the start, just that he's frustrated by imperfection being introduced by people other than himself, especially when it's the result of compromise or design by committee.

The argument is inherently selfish -- I want to own everything -- but I think it's pretty natural for some people. The thing I hated most about contracting for other people was knowing that I was being hired because I'm good at designing and building apps, and still being forced to do something I knew was a bad idea because the client demanded it. I think the best contractors instinctively know how to pick clients who trust them and can be convinced by compelling arguments, and are themselves good at arguing their case in the face of opposition.
Bzip may do yet better, though it will take longer. 7z may be worth a try too. You're getting into the range where you could just toss the whole thing up somewhere without much hassle. If you're not trying to make money, I'd just throw the whole data set out there on a torrent. Why take the time to write an access service when you don't even know what people are going to want to do with it? First thing a serious researcher is likely to do anyhow is just scrape the whole thing off your website, at much greater expense to you.
I'm always shocked when people on the witness stand recall with crystal clarity what happened on a night two years ago. You know some of that is made up. Facebook Places would certainly take the guesswork out of such things.

The impact of location-based services on the legal system reminds me that the root meaning of "alibi" (in the Latin) is "elsewhere" (from the broad idea of "other there," ibi being the Latin word meaning "there").

This to me is a somewhat creepy reminder that modern technology does not necessarily mean unalloyed progress. With the good comes the bad, and the bad here is a long-term trend by which people can be traced more and more easily in where they are and what they do. In the right hands (true friends), this can be great; in the wrong hands, maybe not so good.
Looks cool, and I'd love to try you out, but I need a production-ready service whereas it looks like you're still in beta.
I think it would only be dishonorable if the guy:

1. Was slacking off for months and just being a dead weight until he vested--and if the entire time you kept him around out of loyalty.

2. Left you high and dry at a vital moment that just happened to coincide with the vesting period.

Maybe a better idea is to rework vesting.
git-flow reminds me so much of maven.
There's nothing unethical about making the decision early; it would, however, be unethical to make that decision and then not continue to put in the required work while you wait for that vesting day.
Observer App: Beta Phase 2
Thanks! Good eyes, fixed!
We'll see how it goes! Thanks for the encouragement!
I'd assume just like Farmville and everything else, with one click you can hide all Facebook Places updates. You just can't pick and chose who to receive which updates from. It's either hide the person or hide the app, not 'hide this app for this person'.
Responding to the grandparent's edit.

I disagree with your premise that a vesting cliff exists as a "getting to know you" period. It is a guarantee of a minimum investment of time for a given amount of equity. The person put in the required time and now wants to do something else. This is not dishonorable in the least.

You seem to be confusing personal relationships with business relationships. This might explain why you see quitting as a sort of betrayal.
If the employer can't find a way to offer any incentive other than money to earn an employee's loyalty, then they're going to lose talent that way. The vesting cliff isn't a probationary period, it's deferred compensation. Leaving after vesting isn't any less ethical than having a vesting cliff in the first place.

A better question is, if good workers leave after they hit the vesting cliff, what's wrong with the company?

Based on my experience, I'd say that this is endemic to the ass-in-seat... I mean, IT industry.
I can sympathize. I've been at plenty of jobs where my ideas were uniformly ignored--not rejected, or outvoted: ignored. That's deflating. It makes work not just menial but downright demoralizing. And it causes the employee to stop thinking and stop trying, which is bad for everyone.

Now I wanna go watch Office Space.
100% agreed. I don't work for MS but I honestly didn't run av software at all until MSE. It's the Google Chrome of AV software.
Do you think the "crappiness of most apps" is because those apps were just too well-loved by their creators or because the people behind the app didn't care enough to do it properly (or even learn how to)?

Turning programming into mindless drudgery where you just go down a checklist of best practices is the reason so many programs are crap. The apps by passionate solo developers who really pour themselves into their work tend to be better than the just-barely-passes-tests work you'll get out of a cog-in-the-machine enterprise coder who just wants to go home.
You think that a site named "PC Mag" would have noticed that they survived all the "Internet Crushes Magazines" hype.
The question was intentionally vague. I'm looking for interesting threads of thought. Thanks for your post.

libFirm is the only compiler which does not deconstruct SSA form

I thought that continuation-passing-style compilers didn't use SSA, and that most Scheme implementations were CPS. No?
All data is securely encrypted. And we offer data sharing by public/private key encryption. There is no online storage offering a higher security standard so far. If you need convenience, use Dropbox. If you need security, use CloudSafe.

Money will be made by offering extra storage and some company features. But you will always be able to use the free account. So any person you want to share data with will be able to access it without paying a cent.
The Psychology of Nature?
A critique of Hacker culture
Ask HN: Designing an effective email notification system for a forum
Most of the forums I've used/subscribed to are vbulletin or IPS based forums. Every time you make post and someone replies, you get an email notification. Once you get even decently active, the no. of notifications just rocket up. If 30 people replied to your post in a day, that is 30 email notifications. Damn.

Has anyone gotten email notifications for forums right? Any ideas?
Recovering deleted files using grep
RE: Google/Verizon - Al Franken apparently talking to FCC live tonight
The report website at Spamhaus: http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/sbl.lasso?query=SBL95011

Some more (older): http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings.lasso?isp=google.com
Simplicity vs. Choice
Change Management – Current Thinking for IT Leaders
Gabriel's archive is a great starting point I think. Lot's of labour has gone into that already, use it as your base.

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

Take the initiative and people will support you.
My question is, why is this (develop/master) better than master/release branches? Or master/qa/production? Or do you view that as just an arbitrary choice of names (since there's nothing special about the master branch in git)?
Yeah, this is why I don't use Spamhaus blacklists.
Yes, definitely, because is hard to look after all great content and "save" it for later reading and use.
http://remembersaurus.com/askhn.html

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive
Crazyegg, Visual Website Optimizer, Clicky, and more discounted on AppSumo
Excellent Linux hack. I hadn't ever heard this before.
i used Infer.NET: buggy as anything, horrible syntax.
it's for doing inference in graphical models using EP; these are the same techniques as those MS use for trueskill.

this (Infer) looks like it's for a different kind of inference: classification (essentially linear, but with a few bells and whistles).

(not graphical models right now; probabilities.clj is very much lacking.)
I own a .ly and bought it at http://libyanspider.com/
FB vs Foursquare
I wonder, which compilers does Google use?
I'll follow up on this XSS. I sent emails to your personal address and HN username @yahoo-inc asking for some details.
This is very exciting. I am hoping to attend (Hopefully the pricing fits within my reach).

Maybe we can have a HN Users meet in Durham? They have already listed some HN'ers like stuarthalloway, fogus, technomancy, lukev, liebke - Perhaps a "Ask HN" is in order when they finally announce details?
Here's one for jQuery:

http://www.appelsiini.net/projects/lazyload
Ask HN: What options are out there for Graph Databases?
So far I know of:
- InfoGrid (http://infogrid.org/)
- Neo4j (http://neo4j.org/)

I'm sure there must be others, so which are your favourites? Thanks!
While I understand your concern, a feature of gitflow IMO is that you can switch between git and gitflow as you wish. Personally, I like the constraints that gitflow creates because it simplifies the process of pushing out releases.

Since time is my number one constraint right now, I'm taking advantage of every tool that makes me more productive. Yes, you can certainly implement the workflow with vanilla "git" but if you're going to follow the workflow model, why not use a tool that excels at that workflow? especially when said tool allows you to see what it's doing.
What a depressing story.

The guy had an offer from Brio, a very reputable partner, to take over the manufacturing responsibility, and passed on it in favor of dealing with some shady, fly-by-night Chinese firms he stumbled upon, because he "wasn’t willing to let Automoblox out of my control at this point; I still wanted to achieve my dream of being a manufacturer."
10-Year VC Returns Turn Negative
7 tips for making company shirts that people will actually wear
This gist is literally the most helpful thing I have ever read in under 5 minutes :D Especially with all mistakes included and averted. Thank you! :)
Allegrograph -> www.franz.com
No thank you! AV software is not security, it's a stopgap measure for when you have to "do something" but are too lazy to implement real security measures. And McAfee is one of the lowest quality AV vendors out there (remember when they pushed out a definition update that made XP instances unbootable? that costs a lot of people a lot of headache, and millions of dollars).
You sound like you need some Peter Schiff. His idea is dividend paying foreign investments. You want the return on your money to be paid in a foreign currency, because the dollar will continue to lose value. http://www.europac.net/
Hmm I am pretty sure on quite a few of them (eg. mobileread.com) I have the option of a daily thread digest of subscribed threads. Not sure what the underlying platform is.

Off the top of my head I suspect what I really want is for any thread I mark or reply to to be added to my RSS reader. AFAIK most platforms only offer per-topic RSS subscriptions.
Clever stuff, thanks for sharing.
Seven Reasons Tech Start-Ups Are Setting Up Shop in New York
These are insights that I can relate to easily. Question: How did the companies you worked for end up down the road after you left?
this is one which will send you more than all the others
http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/
Where Google stands 6 years after going public
Quitting after you've vested is 100% honorable. It's unethical to fire someone the day before they vest because that makes it clear you did not intend to ever hold up your end of vesting agreement; it means that you entered the agreement in bad faith and planned to manipulate your way out of paying up.

But in the case of quitting after your options vest, the employee never made any agreement - explicit or implicit - that they would continue working after options had vested. If the agreement is that the employee will receive 1,000 options for 365 days of work, the employee is not obligated to work for 366 days any more than the company is obligated to release 1,001 shares. Somebody who works 365 days has already held up their end of the bargain. They didn't cheat.
Very cool, just purchased an job ad spot, keep up the good work.
I'm working on something related - a repository for "Great Articles". It's currently in early ante-pre-alpha, and sitting partly idle while I use it for real and assess its shortcomings.

If you want to have a look at what I have, email me.
Is Facebook stifling innovation?
Check out the jQuery plugin Lazy Load:

http://plugins.jquery.com/project/lazyload
http://www.appelsiini.net/projects/lazyload
http://xing.com does it pretty well...

Perhaps more or less like this: Build a notification-queue for each user; store the time of the first item; every x check the queues if the first item is older than x send all items as a batch and flush the queue.
What exactly do you mean when you say "I make what customers want, not what they say they want."

If what they say they want isn't actually what they want,, then how do you know what they want?
Blogspot allows arbitrary javascript I believe, including redirects. I don't think that's a vulnerability. It's just run of the mill spam.
I've amended the blog post, the release is out. Get it from http://hackety-hack.com
22 Excellent HTML5 Tutorials
HTML5 is giving web designers and developers new capabilities in the world of web development. With the presence of HTML5, web application development will be more fun.
Ownership not as a percentage of equity, but as a measure of your ability to change things for the better.

In any company it is difficult to find ownership and recognition at the lowest levels of the corporate hierarchy. If you only work for the company for less than a year, as the author proudly admits to, then you should not expect to be given substantial influence in the company.

Influence and recognition must be earned, and that takes time and hard work. The bigger and more established the company, the more time this will take. If you're impatient, then you're going to have to work at a startup or start your own company.

From my experience, the trick is to get engaged and routinely demonstrate that you care. If you begrudgingly implement or design every request that comes your way from the confines of your cubicle, of course you will burn out. If instead you ask your boss about the customer's needs or take the initiative to track down and talk to the sales person in charge of the account for some additional detail, you've effectively taken a small piece of ownership and showed some initiative. This rarely goes unnoticed, and definitely factors into decisions involved influence, ownership, and recognition in the future.
The question is what the purpose, do you want to preserve the capital against currency risk than you can look to convert some money into other currencies or look at commodities like gold, silver (ETFs) ...

If you just want to preserve capital with some appreciation short term bonds (look at Vanguard or Pimco offerings) or money market accounts can be a good idea.

Even a high yield saving or a CD ladder (both FDI insured) could be nice depending on how much cash you have and what kind of liquidity you want (between 1-2% return for 1-2 yr CDs and 1-1.5% return on high yield savings)
6% seems a little high given the current climate, no? Take that down to 3% and you're in the neighborhood of the deal price.

Still not sure if I agree with the deal, and it does seem driven by a bunch of cash burning a hole in Intel's pocket.
Except that templates give you runtime speed and our customers care about runtime speed, not compilation speed.
Oh, he's not confusing it at all. He's just so used to being able to take advantage of the average employee being the one confusing the biz & personal that when an employee acts like a businessman, it challenges his entire exploitative hustle.
I know non-coders might downvote me for this, but github's recently open-sourced Gollum engine might be a good basis.

http://github.com/github/gollum

Contributors could write their articles independently, send a pull request, and have their writing merged into the central wiki.

There's also a (minimal) web UI for easy edits, or for users who aren't comfortable with git.
Creator of market indicator says crash is coming
As entrepreneurs, our big "risky" returns come from investing in our businesses. In order to counterbalance that, my opinion is to be very conservative with your cash.

Keep it liquid and safe- earning 4% safely seems fine to me these days. FOREX and Gold are scary.
Startup Bootcamp at MIT -- A free conference for hackers this Sept
how can I get 4% safely in current market?
Well it sounds like you're extremely risk adverse so your best bet is to find a bank with the absolute best APR and just hold your cash there while you wait until you feel market conditions are a bit better.

Something to think about: Diversify your holdings. A good 80% of what you have can milk a high rate from a savings account (domestic or foreign). 10% could be put in a couple of low-moderate risk ETFs/Mutual Funds (formed by companies that really arn't going anywhere, like healthcare), 5% into CDs or Bonds, and the remaining % in minerals (gold, silver).

When you start hearing good news (job market improving, ipos, companies returning healthy profits), you can start re-aligning your portfolio.

Best bet is to get in touch with a financial adviser.
While this is mostly true, not everything of his was in git. I would give almost anything to have a copy of the source code for hackety.org, for example. I had to reverse-engineer the calls Hackety Hack was making to the site.
Either that, or stock market prices are much less connected to business fundamentals than one would hope.
Capistrano-gitflow: using git tags to manage multi-stage deployment
Negotiators confirm ACTA not really a "counterfeiting" treaty
Why hasn't anyone figured out neighborhood social networking?
I always said he was just burning his guitar.
Tired of Document Clutter? Consider the Paperless Office