skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not just more access. This is a case where FB has, for some reason, signalled that they want to work with YC companies, and specifically YC companies. As some people pointed out already, maybe this is them outsourcing R&D. So let's accept that for a second, that this is a way to get them to outsource R&D b/c the FBfund isn't working. If that's the case, that means that they're looking to acquire companies. And not just any company, though that's always the case with any company anywhere with sufficient resources and an eye on growth, but specifically YC companies.

If we presume that the odds of an exit of a YC company before this interview were even across all industries (i.e., that no matter whether they were into working in travel or B2B or whatever a company's odds of being acquired/going public where the same) that is certainly not the case anymore. The odds of an exit for a YC/FB company probably just went up dramatically. In actuality, it seems like it went up dramatically; it's too early to tell if it actually did. And maybe not just b/c the YC company is not going to get acquired by FB, but b/c the YC company can get revenue quicker with preferential access to FB's revenue making methods.

But here's what the cynic in me thinks: based on the RFS[1], this seems really like a way for a cheap and easy way for FB, which has has major credibility issues with Connect, etc. to get good publicity for Facebook Instant Personalization. Since YC is super, super hot right now and just came off their demo day, the tech news was all about them. I don't know if money switched hands -- after all, if YC took a million (cheap for this buzz) that would be enough for them to invest in 66 companies at $15K a pop but with absolutely no risk to them since it's other people's money. If so, it probably wasn't enough.

In addition, YC's other RFS have been generic and in fields that have been buzzworthy enough that they didn't need YC entrants to attack the problem. In other ways, "The Future of Journalism," "Things Built on Twitter," and "iPad applications," -- these are not solving obscure but lucrative problems[2]. It's simply a way for YC to signal their interest in a hot space and that they want to work with the best of the breed in this space. Now, I presume, they're getting paid for it.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/rfs7.html

[2] I'm assuming that there was no similar deal announced with Twitter or Apple, which I feel like I would have heard about, but I could be wrong.
This seems to be a bug in Google Groups -- if you have an expired session, it forces you to log in. But you were never signed in (or if you signed out) it doesn't ask and goes straight to the article.
That sounds about right
I've just started listening to the episode, but on the subject of public-radio-for-developers, I've always thought it would be interesting, or at least possible, to do a "Car Talk" for programmers, where people call in with thorny bugs and the hosts help them solve the problem (or at least give them a hint on where to look).
The greencard system is a mess in this regards. I'm surprised your friend actually tried to travel to the US since one of the first things they tell you once you've started the application is not to travel to the US until you have your greencard.

It's some sort of twisted logic where ICE thinks that you'll try to jump the line if you travel to the US on a non-immigrant visa.
The Command Line - The Best Newbie Interface?
This might be old news to you, but it took me a while to discover after I started using OS X:

Cmd-Tab switches between applications (as I'm sure everyone knows), but it's less useful on OS X than Ctrl-Tab is on Windows or Linux because it doesn't switch between individual windows in those applications.

Cmd-Tilde (~) was the missing link for me. It switches between windows in the current application. Those two are probably the most important keyboard shortcuts I know on OS X.

Plus, another endorsement for Quicksilver. That's always the first application I install, and I now find it really frustrating to use any computer that doesn't have it installed.

And maybe you should set your Dock to auto-hide, so you're not so tempted to move the mouse over there to monkey with things.
8 in 10 Americans Say Economy Is Bad
UTorrent Quickly Patches Windows DLL Vulnerability
I worry. The whole update reminded me of when I move out of an apartment and think I've got one more load to go at 9pm... Just a few lamps and the vacuum. Three loads and four hours later and I'm still almost done.
I am sure that intelligent life exists out there. It's just a numbers game. However, if they are intelligent, based on how long we have been around, chances are they have been so much much longer. Millions of years would be more likely than thousands.

So, I don't think we would even recognize them, or they us. I am pretty sure they would have cast off their biological bodies long ago, and probably have gotten to a point where time and space aren't as limiting either. I could see us doing this in a few thousand years. As any given intelligent life in the universe would likely be ahead of us by much more than that, I think we are akin to fleas on a dog wondering if there are other dogs with other fleas on them. Where in fact, there is much more going on all around us, and we aren't yet capable of being a party to that conversation.
Lol, I work on a Ruby app that is entirely internal and processes an incredible volume of information. The key here was the ease of adding a few key C modules.
The solution is that IE 6, 7, & 8 won't load Flash for the HTML5 video tag either, so the same Flash fallback (probably delivering the same H.264 file given to HTML5 browsers) works for all of these highly popular browsers which currently account for something like 80-90% of all browsers between them.

Firefox only has to worry about niche, tech-forward sites that feel they can disregard all pre HTML5 browsers and also actively choose to ignore Firefox (and Opera) as well by not providing a WebM fallback video. No ordinary business can afford to simply refuse to deliver a Flash video to 1/3rd of their audience when they've already built it and are serving it to another 1/3rd on older version of IE. (This obviously occurring at some future time when the HTML5 video delivery is preferred over Flash for any platform other than the Apple ones that don't have Flash, otherwise the Flash would be going out to 99% of browsers anyway).

There's not much downside for Firefox except pissing off people who really passionately hate Flash, but are quite happy with H.264's patent situation. I'm thinking the crossover is pretty small on those two populations and probably shrinking greatly now that Apple has let Adobe use their hardware acceleration API for H.264 decode, certainly not big enough to derail a browser used by tens of millions of ordinary people.
You can also make anything callable in Ruby: just provide a call method. The parenthesis will still work as may be expected in Ruby, but, as several folks said before: in Ruby parenthesis are not used to call anything. A method is called simply be mentioning it. Anything that follows is an argument and sometimes parameters are needed for disambiguation of the parameters. This is counterintuitive, only because it differs from most other languages. If you want to postpone evaluation, you have to wrap the method call in a closure that you .call later: in Ruby a method is not a closure and not a function pointer. It's different than in many other languages, but that alone doesn't make it inconsistent.
PHP had some poor defaults early on, but that was fixed long ago. Any decent PHP framework deals with SQL injection or XSS in the same way decent Ruby/Python/etc framework does. Judging from the fact they already released code and have experienced devs, I'd tend to trust Appleseed's PHP more than Diaspora Ruby. (Personally I prefer working in Ruby)

At the end of the day, the hip new app with the latest fashionable framework might still send your plaintext password over HTTP.
>I've heard that gaelic and latin for example don't have a real word for "yes", but instead the answer repeated the affirmative form of the verb or similar.

Then they have a way to express affirmation.
http://www.missingkids.com/missingkids/servlet/PubCaseSearch...
>> I've heard that gaelic and latin for example don't have a real word for "yes", but instead the answer repeated the affirmative form of the verb or similar.

That is commonly used the same way in Chinese (at least on the Pimsleur beginner lessons). The answer to 'do you want' is 'want' or 'don't want'. I asked a native Chinese speaker if they have a way to say yes and no without referring to the action involved, and he said that they do.

I have notice that people who have gender-neutral pronouns have a lot of trouble mixing up 'he' and 'she' in English.
no thank you , android has one of the best mobile browsers I have played with so far. Appreciate the effort thow.
The "vectors" aren't installed, vectors are the way that they get installed. Training people to install codec packs when prompted in order to see a video is considered risky, since the next time they see a similar message it's likely to be someone up to no good.
Welcome to Web 3.0.
In China, I think you can look at some interesting historical contingencies which led to more engineers getting into politics. See also, the unique nature of CCP party membership and political life, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinghua_clique
The biggest difference here is that Blockbuster and Movie Gallery which was #2 and has already Chapter 7 liquidated earlier this year are in a fairly zero-sum market. To a significant extent the success of Netflix and Redbox was taken out of their hide. Another very big factor was the development of the sell-through market for home video (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sell-through), which was pioneered by Disney and by the time of the DVD was the model by which they were sold.

"The Wealth of Nations" as Adam Smith put it is not overall a zero-sum game. We're on very solid footing in a lot more areas that software development, e.g. aerospace (Boeing) and heavy equipment (Caterpillar); our manufacturing output has not declined at the same time our manufacturing employment has.

That said, we are excessively complacent in a number of areas where, irrespective of competition from other nations, we simply can't continue a lot of our current ... luxuries. NIMBY has become BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything). Unsustainable 1.5 trillion dollar annual Federal deficits and compensation for public sector employees at all levels of government. A figuratively criminal education system that was clearly so in 1955 (publication of Why Johnny Can't Read) that just keeps getting worse with each new top down nostrum. And I could go on and on.

That said, we have some advantages that are simply not shared by many of our up and coming competitors. The rule of law (or why you didn't include Russia as is usual when describing the BRIC countries). The world's best universities (Feynman conceived of his cargo cult science meme during his stay in Brazil). A society and culture that's friendly to startups.

Heck, start with the theoretically simple detail of starting a company, any company. Here's the first site I found with Google: http://www.doingbusiness.org/economyrankings/

Look were Brazil scores, 126th "best" out of 183 countries in which to start a legal company. China is at 159 and India is near the bottom at 169 (the License Raj has not hardly been dismantled) and all are across the board quite bad (China is the only country to partly surmount these problems where guanxi makes all the difference).

As for the "large segment of the U.S that are nostalgic to a past perceived American glory" the last thing they're doing is "yearn[ing] for even more complacency". A whole bunch have been pushed too far and are holding Tea Parties with the explicit goal of changing the system (back to a past "perceived" American glory, yes, but perhaps we should give it a try again, seeing as how the new ways are abjectly failing?).
A lot of interesting offhand tidbits in it -

Our team has been through a few acquisitions

So we know they were not babes wandering the woods.

But then -

They went to shop the offer which seems logical enough but seemed to believe this process can really be all that 'discreet'.

Then

we heard rumors that Cogswell had previous acquisition processes that started and didn’t complete, which made us a bit nervous.

and

At the last minute, around midnight on Tuesday, Cogswell said yes [...]

These seem like overt red flags, although, of course, they are made much more obvious with the hindsight provided by the author.

We called Spacely. Our contacts there were really unhappy. They wanted to do the deal, but in the months since we went silent [...]

Ouch, months.

Long story short, if you have just two bidders of which one did not choose to bid unsolicited and maybe has a history of less than good-faith bidding, you're navigating treacherous waters. And you might end up navigating them even if you do (or think that you do) know what you're doing.
Click settings on Google News and choose the sites you want less content from.

Blacklists are awesome...but no one but "us" knows how to use them.
It's my impression that the genetically modified crops lack in taste. It's true that we can end up producing more food per acre with them but it seems that one price is on the taste. My anecdotal experience in Germany is that organic food there tastes better than organic food in the U.S. and is much better than the standard supermarket food in the U.S.

As a farmer, what are your thoughts on this? Also, I wonder if we are getting into a chemical arms race with nature. Roundup resistant weeds now exist. Now there is a new Roundup. Does the ecology suffer and us from this arms race?
Very interesting to read. And it raised the question in my head about immutable types. I like functional languages a lot and I like it if just everything is immutable. Also, I like C++ where I just have everything mutable. But to have both immutable types and mutables types in one language always felt very inconsistent to me. Are there good reasons for this?

I put this question also on Stackoverflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3584945/non-technical-ben...
Help his people live? They were living fine up til then; he was helping his Emperor attempt to conquer the world.
Every experienced entrepreneur has this happen to them at least once in their lives, usually many times. You think you are so close to being acquired, only for it to fall apart. A startup CEO tends to spend all his/her time either raising money, or talking to a firm about being acquired.

The lesson would be not to sign exclusitivity agreements with a potential acquirer. It is not that uncommon to do this, in fact, I would say it is more common to not have an exclusivity agreement as part of an LOI than it would be to have one.

With multiple parties at the due diligence stage, it gives the startup CEO leverage to close a deal quickly, and to negotiate the price up. Acquirers are also reassured by the validation that other interested potential acquirers provide. If you are set on being acquired, speak to multiple companies and have them press while the iron (ie. their motivation) is hot. Always be prepared for due diligence.
Maybe stating the obvious here, but you can just remove the search box from Firefox and they look pretty much the same.
I wonder how many companies do this. My first place after college locked you away in a hotel for three weeks of non-stop training (which they also called bootcamp).
You're right of course but I believe science already has some inroads in FTL communication (quantum entanglement, some exploit I read in New Scientist about a sweeping beam traveling faster at the the ends than the pivoting centre) whereas from what I've gathered FTL space travel is still a non-starter.
To clarify this comment a bit: The conventional RDBMSs people refer to as relational databases (Oracle, Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, etc.) shoot for compatibility with the SQL standard, which diverges from the relational model. For example, you can have duplicate rows in a table, which doesn't make any sense in the (set-based) relational model. SQL is not "purely" relational.

If you read Chris Date's books (I recommend starting with _An Introduction to Database Systems_), he really hammers this point.

There are people who hate SQL because it's too relational, and there are people who hate SQL because it's not relational enough.
"acquired" by some Russian men in power, I guess. ^_^
ShifIt (free) seem to do almost the same thing as SizeUp. http://code.google.com/p/shiftit/
First, I highly recommend "Deployment is just a part of dev/ops cooperation" http://www.kitchensoap.com/2009/12/12/devops-cooperation-doe...

Second, this isn't a question unique to the dev/ops relationship. What about the dev v. project manager? If you have a good team of developers, why have a PM? Having worked as a dev, a system engineer, and newly in the PM department, everything I've done since being a 'code monkey' is motivated by a desire to make the dev's jobs easier. Maybe that's because of my roots, but I think it makes the most sense.

Where I work, we have a useful distinction between Sysadmins and System Engineers. Broadly speaking, admins are the i-dotters and t-crossers and do things with well-defined processes while engineers are responsible for everything else. As an engineer, I wanted to make as much information about the production environment available to the developers as possible. I also worked to make sure the dev environment would mirror production as closely as possible given that we only had one dev sandbox (requests for a staging environment were declined). These two things, combined with being a good teacher, meant I rarely had requests for CLI access to any of our environments.
>They don't have the money to pay for it,

I find that hard to believe. They get a whole bunch of money from Google and last known, were paying their CEO about $500k an year even in the days when they were asking donations for the NYTimes ad.
> You think you are so close to being acquired, only for it to fall apart.

I've had it happen once, signed letter of intent, due diligence was passed etc, terms agreed to.

Not a funny experience by any stretch of the imagination.
That's a straw man argument.

The argument doesn't exaggerate anything. It strictly adheres to the Kaldor-Hicks criterion and shows that it can be used to justify all kinds of immoral policies because, as the OT states, it doesn't take into account 'who Jack and Jill are'.

If you use the Kaldor-Hicks criterion to claim something is good, you are implicitly assuming the good of the collective is the good of all and imbuing your argument with morals. As MichaelSalib's example shows, those morals can have consequences many others consider immoral, which is exactly what the OT argues.
If the only thing your sysadmin is doing is 'looking over the shoulder' at code they may not (probably don't?) even understand, you need better sysadmins. You should be sanity checking with peers, whether that be other devs for a code change or other sysadmins for an environment change.
Visor http://visor.binaryage.com/ hasn't been mentioned but it's how you should be opening and running your terminal.

Turn on and spend a few minutes learning the keyboard shortcuts in GMail if you use it (conveniently, they map nicely to vi). This alone probably has saved me days of mousing, plus it can make ripping through your inbox kind of fun.

I also strongly second vimperator (the only reason I'm still using Firefox) and sizeUp.

Finally, just try unplugging your mouse occasionally to see how you're doing and what is still causing you to reach for it. Then sharpen the saw :)
Thanks for the info. I was ignorant of the author and post date.

I seriously did not want to imply (the incorrect fact) that the author was ignorant in general, but of a single matter (which is kinda unknown, so I'd expect most be to be oblivious to it).

I am equaly sorry for the bad choice of words...
Annie Rupani was crowned Miss Pakistan World 2010
I am always fascinated by agriculture, but know very little about it. Do you know any books or other media that would be a good introduction to agriculture? I'm looking for something that explains what crops are good where, how many times you can plant a year, etc.
Two years for Canadians? Citation?

The lawyers that I've talked to have told me the backlog is about six to seven years long and have not mentioned any special treatment for Canadians.

I've heard that you can get through faster if you have advanced degrees, but nothing about nationality.
Ask HN: What's up with all these services charging $10/$15 a month?
More and more frequently, I notice that online services charge $10/$15 a month. For example. I just saw a service that tracks your laptop/phone, and they want $15/mo to track more than three devices.

B2B services are more excusable, but still, the fees are pretty high. It seems to me that you need to spend $150 a month to subscribe to the 10 services you might find useful. $2/$3 a month sounds much better to me, especially for services for which users aren't very expensive.

What are your experiences with this (from either standpoint)? How much do you pay a month for various online services?
FTA: "menus made entirely from image maps"
Wasn't Loopt a single founder start-up?
great that they shared the story. no way to know going into one if these deals if it'll happen to you or not. yes, there were red flags, but there are almost always red flags. and when there aren't red flags, it can still go south. you see it happen with the big boys, too.

i love their user growth curve graph but wonder why it's over a year old...?
Having lived in the US for many years and then returning to Canada recently, it is absolutely stunning how few people here have cell phones. The primary reason is in the US, nation-wide plans are standard, whereas in Canada they simply do not exist. So you pay long distance for calling from one small city to another small city which drives the price of cell phones through the roof. Even if someone does own a cell phone, there is stigma attached to using it -- "can I call you back on a landline..." sounds ridiculously archaic in 2010.

The top iPhone plan ($100/mo) includes 500 local minutes:
http://mobilebusiness.bell.ca/rate-plans/combo-plans-for-iph...

Here's the competition ($80 for 400 min.):
http://www.rogers.com/web/Rogers.portal?_nfpb=true&_page...

The Canadian telecommunication industry is a cartel by any definition.
The bit about specifying the gender of one's neighbor sounds like the work of somebody who knows just enough to be really wrong.

My French and German are weak, but Spanish has vecino/vecina, and you can equivocate easily enough by saying that you spent the evening with "una persona que vive cerca", and I'd be very surprised if you can't do similar in French or German. ("Une personne qu'habite ne pas loin" in French?)
Nurph raises angel round
Just to clarify, the period of time it takes for a green card application to process is a factor of:

a: which kind of green card you're getting (employment, family or lottery based are the main ones)

b: where you are applying from (some states will process stuff exponentially faster than others, some processing centers are slow right now due to office re-orgs, and finally anything overseas is going to take you x*4, where x is the time locally)

c: the quality of your lawyer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter#Naval_career

It doesn't look good that two of America's worst and most hapless 20th century presidents were the two who were engineers.
They put up the announcement last week and it said a new version would be released "tomorrow". Obviously, that didn't happen, but it seems like a new version is immenent.