skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I always wondered how they made any money - then I did some work for the US DoD. Nearly every desktop has a licensed copy of WinZip!
My new firm has WinZip licenses as well - while Windows can do zip files natively now, it still cannot (as far as I know?) encrypt them natively.
I think that Atkinson probably thought that roundrects would be a useless addition that would bloat the library. (Remember, the entire Mac OS and applications needed to fit in 128K!)

It's easier to dismiss something as "entirely too hard" than to get into an argument about whether it's worth implementing.
Exactly what about the swiss naturalization process makes it "pretty much impossible" and what is obnoxious about it? There is a residency requirement, a language fluency requirement, and you have to show that you have integrated in swiss society. It's not an easy process compared to many other countries, but also not impossible.
Inception: A Hackday Dream (The Story Of GroupMe) (YC 10)
Not to be a downer, but what's the good of being sponsored? A blog doesn't exactly require a lot of hosting power or bandwidth, even at moderately high loads, and I'm sure most developers already maintain a VPS or cloud server account for $5-10 a month.
Careers as Efficient Markets
Thanks imp! I'll take a look and let you know what I think.
Is the Relational Database Doomed?
If you check the actual tables you'll see that a lot of countries share the same spots, that graph was just a selection of countries.
I have no idea why they don't use something dynamo based like Riak or Cassandra which actually can automatically shard data and scale really well...
CouchDB only supports replication, no sharding unless you use third party libraries.
With Riak they could use the internal map/reduce support and with Cassandra they might be able to use Hadoop to analyze data and split the workload over several nodes.
>You know, it’s 50,000 dollars for tuition at NYU and it’s zero at Humboldt University in Berlin. So NYU adds catastrophic amounts of GDP per capita and Humboldt adds nothing

GDP = private consumption + gross investment + government spending + (exports − imports)

So unless the government is managing not to pay the professors or pay any other money to make Humboldt happen, Humboldt is adding to the GDP, just as government spending rather than consumer spending.

Now, it may not cost the government $50k/student. But it doesn't cost them 0 either.
I'm one of those lucky people that is apparently innocent-looking enough that I never get messed with by customs. And I've been through lots of weird customs checkpoints.

Returning to the US you have to fill out that annoying form on the plane but other than that it's just a rubber stamp
NoSQL doesn't mean NoDurability. Many of them offer better multi-datacenter durability and availability by dropping ACID for BASE. I suspect that most data by volume belongs in a BASE database. Some of them also support a mixture of immediate and eventual consistency in the same database.
likev,

No other $5 or $10 vps service has our features :) I'm sure of that.
Don't forget Greenland or the Faroe Islands
It really looks like that's a preferable future than the one we currently suffer with: large, immovable conglomerates that lobby for an upper hand in the market, have an open disdain for employee culture (i.e., the "take all the fun out of making video games" quote from Activision CEO, who probably wouldn't be anything without absorbing the then small-company Blizzard for World of Warcraft), and will outsource core competencies for the quarterly concall to sound 10% better over same quarter last year.

I think the larger advantage is that, because of smaller nimbler companies, there is keener, more increased competition, leading to better products and more reasonable prices. Because of the lowered overhead inherent in smaller companies, more of them can be spread out. If you look at the wasteland that is the midwest right now, they could really use smaller companies dotting the landscape that work on all the sexy (hell, even unsexy or staid or sterile) industries that were heretofore dominated by gigantic conglomerates like Micrsoft, GE, Medtronic, EA and others.

The days of "get big fast" is over. It caused web 1.0 to crash and burn; but from that there is a more mature 2.0, which companies like Facebook, 37 Signals, github, twitter, Valve represent and who are starting to inspire others.

If small business truly represents the largest employer in the US, we have almost a national moral imperative to eschew building (and supporting!) large corporations and multinationals in favor of small ones, don't we?
Fine, here's the source file. http://github.com/jrk/QuickDraw/raw/master/RRects.a

Edit: Luc already linked to the source archive in this thread, so I changed my link specifically to the RRects.a file.
> I don't know the specifics of the case in question, but in general it should be considered legal and ethical to repurpose blighted property, whereas you seem to think it isn't.

You're assuming that blight means "poor condition" or somesuch. The problem is that the operating definition is "property owned by the politically weak that is desired by the politically strong". That's how blight condemnations actually work.

Note that the person trying to defend Columbia says that the property was in poor shape but the current owners have fixed that. His argument is that they're engaged in the "wrong" sorts of biz, not that it's actually in disrepair.

Their reward for fixing actual blight is to have their property taken away....

> Well, it's been a fact of American law for a long, long time.

Since when does that make it good?
Perhaps I wasn't clear. Let me try again:

When I think of firms not dependent upon nor beneficiaries of the government's largesse, the government's market manipulation, and government's anti-competitive barrier raising, AT&T isn't what comes to mind.

And of course the firm's resistance to market forces is not binary, but rather proportional to how close the firm is to the government corpus. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac more so than AT&T more so than Apple.
Ryan Dahl works for Joyent, so I would assume they have a pretty good feel for how to run Node apps there.
Doubtful, look at the profile in the patent. They need to hit a tightly specified current vs time profile. And a cap would be a separate component, and they are failure prone.
No mention of SICP - the CS classic that's not only decently rigorous, but actually inspires the fun and joy of programming, as it promises in its Preface:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-4.html
How Many Hours Should a Startup Employee Work?
I found some numbers to support and condemn my earlier statements.

http://www.russellsage.org/chartbook/householdform/figure4.5...

Shows that poorer households on average have more children.
However, it also shows that that population is shrinking in unison. Relatively.

However, addition graphs on the website show how many dysfunctional households there are in poor communities. Which have been growing, so I stand by the original argument.
I agree, it is fixed. I have had both and I no longer have to cover the LED when I go to sleep.
Really? "I'll pay you to put my ad on your site," is on HN? Is it 1995 again?

Flagged.
For anyone else whose jaw dropped at "the sum of a sequence of odd numbers is always the next perfect square", Wikipedia has a helpful visualization:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_number#Properties
There was an article posted here a while ago that talked about this "scene vs p2p" dynamic, but presupposed the audience knew what "the scene" was. I'm still confused as to what it refers, is "the scene" just private file sharing / piracy?

Also, wintermute - great username. Had a momentary "that's familiar..." before it clicked.
>Take over healthcare and beat back prices?

I guess you didn't really grok my point about prices not being exogenous entities.
Goodbye Digg Power Users
With the new Digg, the power users are becoming irrelevant, and the new "power users" will be the news sites that ask their readers to follow them on Digg.
Lively Wiki: Hackable, Scriptable Wiki for Illustration
Downfall of the Jr VC
I chose sqlite, one concurrent user and I. Had this:

Warning: sqlite_open(): file is encrypted or is not a database in /var/www/database/sqlite/common.php on line 10
Sorry to hijack your thread, but I've had some questions from cofounders about screen scraping.

Am I allowed to scrape information from their websites and use it to populate my system? Isn't that effectively what google does?

Is there a limit to what is considered acceptable/not acceptable? E.g., is it OK to scrape for email addresses that they publish on their site, but not for their part numbers?

Thanks!
Descriptive Essay – the Importance Of Order
A descriptive essay needs to be written in the most vivid manner possible. It needs to be written in a manner which allows the reader to “see” what is being described. Knowing how to successfully do this is an art which needs to be perfected if you wish for a good grade.
I think books like this sell because the subject matter is easy to understand, but brings about some sense of superiority in the reader for knowing contradicting theories. These books succeed due to the shock value of the information they contain. This is in a similar vein to the Penn and Teller show "Bullshit". If you say something loud enough, and sound relatively intelligent in the process, people feel smarter when they hear it. I feel that the same is true about Malcolm Gladwell's writings.

The only problem is that the shock value of the content is in no way related to how valid the information is. "Bullshit" is terribly biased towards the presenters opinions, whereas books like these are biased towards whatever makes headlines, which results in varied levels of validity.
If a "license file" is acceptable, this works great -- you can use a human-readable text file describing the license (expiration, features, etc.) and sign it inline with PGP. I've seen Citrix XenServer use this approach, for example. However, even just the signature is really too big to use as a serial number replacement. ECC might work.
Sounds like a typical coder's week:

1. accomplish something pretty darn tricky to try to impress the boss/client

2. boss is only impressed for a split second before giving you a harder to accomplish task
Sudden Severe Headache - Causes
Oh gawd... I had to use it in high school, I've got B on that test. what a horrible thing it was
Wait hasn't anyone else noticed how big a PR job this is for intellectual ventures?

In fact, this is the one chapter in the entire book (superfreakonomics) that was too hard to stomach. It's just too fake.

There are a lot of rants on HN about this. Pointing out that Intellectual Ventures is just a patent troll;

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134762
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134743
and more.
Our Worst Nightmares About the Government Tracking Us Just Came True
Creepy.
"In fact, during this period, the travel industry lost over £2.1 billion in profit."

Does this even make sense?
If you read the case study you will see that building apps rapidly was a huge win for them. CouchDB gets compared with other DB's but it is a full stack app dev environment. The other NoSQL DB's need a Rails or PHP or Python or Java or C# or ... stack in front and app dev is nowhere as fast as with CouchApp.
I work at a start up and I treat my job like a 9-5. It depends on what you do during those hours that matter.
IIRC the sensor uses optical flow and hence doesn't measure speed "directly" -- in spite of the fact that the article states so at its very beginning. Anyway, this technique is kind of promising and I'm curious to see the future results.
I've found it useful to have a very lightweight version of a business plan in a wiki. The purpose is to help get the team on the same page - at least in the onset - and to keep track of some of the conclusions we've made from our research.

By "lightweight," I mean including a pitch statement (business summary), the core problem statement we're trying to solve, a bulleted list of types of competitors (direct & indirect), some info on the target audience (sometimes as personas), some market size & financial info, etc. It all fits onto one page and is easy to scan.

The wiki also means the plan can be changed anytime - as it often is & should be. We're constantly tweaking our story, our audience, our competitor mix, etc, as we go through the customer discovery process.

This document is somewhat close to Marty Cagan's Product Opportunity Assessment, though we've paired it down over time to the info that we found to be most useful. I don't know if our approach would work for others, but we've found it pretty handy so far.
So basically Digg is dropping the Reddit model for the Tumblr model. Let's see how that works out for them, there is a lot of competition in that space already.
"How many man-years did it take to write QuickDraw?", the Byte magazine reporter asked Steve.

Steve turned to look at Bill. "Bill, how long did you spend writing Quickdraw?"

"Well, I worked on it on and off for four years", Bill replied.

Steve paused for a beat and then turned back to the Byte reporter. "Twenty-four man-years. We invested twenty-four man-years in QuickDraw."

Obviously, Steve figured that one Atkinson year equaled six man years, which may have been a modest estimate.

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Mythical_Man_Year.txt
If it's only hosting and bandwidth, how does this differ from wordpress, blogspot and other blog hosting solutions?
"Everyone in the room agrees that the Earth has been getting warmer and human activity probably has something to do with it."

---

No direct evidence of this exists. Humans may have something to do with it, and they may not. There is still debate on what the causes might be and much research still needs to be done.

I find it ironic that scientists can act so religious-like on this topic and have faith in the belief that humans are the sole reason behind global warming without solid scientific proof.

Edit: Spelling. No comments, but lots of down votes. Do please cite the evidence rather than just throw stones.
This story was posted not long ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1608302). Also, Halliburton has not been awarded the patent. They have only submitted the application.
I have been an entrepreneur for over fifteen years, with one mild success and a few spectacular failures. And I must say I enjoy this article more than the rest of the articles combined in terms of explaining why entrepreneurs become entrepreneurs. The reason has nothing to do with hardship, wealth or upbringing. Anyone can become an entrepreneur. You must first possess a demon deep inside that needs to get out. The author clearly has one and my own experience is that entrepreneurship is his only cure. Good luck.
I'd add a few that might be a bit dated, but I still think they're still great today:

Introduction to Algorithms - CLR(S) - other people already suggested this.

The Soul of a New Machine - feels old now, but it's still a fairly well-written glimpse into real-world (hardware) projects, or at least where we came from. Ahh, maybe it really is too old now to be that educational, but it's a good read.

Programming Pearls - I think this book still teaches as much practical knowledge about the field than you could get in 5-10 years. If you really "get" everything in here, you should be well on your way to being a super-star code hacker, if that's what you want to be.
I don't understand why I am downvoted for saying I liked the humor!
It's more comparable to virtualenv with virtualenvwrapper. Also, it manages multiple versions of Ruby (AFAIK virtualenv was coupled to a single version of Python) and has a per-directory dotfile (that way, when I switch to ~/Projects/something rvm automatically switches to correct ruby and gemset).

It generally feels more 'complete' to me.

I didn't do any serious work with virtualenv in quite some time, so this may have changed.
Kepler Telescope Detects Possible Earth-Size Planet
First Question: Initially it would decrease my efforts on the iPhone. But once it's in place, and my summer job is over, I think I will have time to support 2 platforms.

Second question: Yes and No. In particular for Android I don't think the growth path would be different. If I were to expand I would probably expand into facebook right now. The reason being that an umbrella category like facebook will also include a subset of iPhone users. Supporting a big category like facebook apps will indirectly help the other channel as well.

Those are the answers to your questions... and I generally agree with your core answer. I guess my only issue is that one of my biggest advantages as a small company is my ability to be nimble and it seems like I am throwing this advantage away. That being said I'm not sure how much that argument stands up to the argument of "get significant traction in one area before expanding".
Here's one then from a 15-year Mac user:

The printing system sucks. I have a large selection of printers, most of which cannot print the same paper sizes that the others can print; one of the sizes most commonly lacking is a #10 envelope. Because of this and the way OS X remembers your printer settings, printing and envelope is a very tedious chore. To do something as simple as this in Pages, I have to open the template, go to Page Setup, select the target printer, select the target paper size, change the page orientation to landscape, go to the Print dialog, select the target printer again, and finally click Print.

The OS will not associate the source document size with the actual matching paper size in the printer driver. If I don't go through all those steps, the envelope prints rotated off by 90 degrees. Saving a template with the Page Setup stuff configured does not preserve it either.
Do you know that these routers work fine on other people's networks?

Did you see different results in router latency when you connected via wired, vice wireless? (Sorry if you answered it -- your question had a lot of info in it, and I couldn't see if this was addressed)
G.E.B.? Fun book, yes, but to make a list of 10 books to substitute a Bachelor's degree in CS? nonsense.
Our last child was born during our start-up. I had to learn to compartmentalize. Your wife will need your help, and that usually means a solid focus as opposed to a I'll-listen-to-you-while-I-tap-away-on-my-smartphone kind of focus.

My schedule has remained the same since: I make breakfast for my family almost everyday, and I block out 5:30-8:30 every night for the kids, and 8:30-10:00 for me and the wife. After she goes down I get back to work and plug away until around 1 or so.

So far so good. No divorce papers have been served yet. :)
The fact that it is called "Rapp" and you have a black character speaking the way only a RACIST would expect them to, with tattoos and a mouth not un-similar to typical racist cartoons (see: http://wwwimage.cbsnews.com/images/2005/06/30/image705615x.j...) is of poor taste.
I think he is speaking about "silently updating" the downloadable installer that is in the web page, not about "silently updating" the installed version in the user’s computer.
Adolescence Acne
Handy! http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&esrch=RealtimeLaunch%...
virtualenv -p python2.5 will create a virtualenv with the Python 2.5 interpreter. I like the per-directory dotfile approach for autodetecting/activating a virtual ruby setup.
Capturing packets in Javascript using node_pcap
Relevant comment: “Please keep in mind that NASA's idea of an 'intriguing planetary system' is probably very different than the general public's.” (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1628763)
Hygroelectricity
That would nearly cover all my expenses, including rent, food, and tuition.
not really adding to the discussion.
There are surely a lot of very smart people there, but the ones I worked with had all drunk the kool-ade that Raid 10 on 15K spindles with ZFS was so awesome that there couldn't be IO problems.

When you have a company that is using technology that is essentially beta (like ZFS) and you have to pay large amounts of money to Sun every time you need support, that creates an incentive to pretend the problem doesn't exist. Joyent also showed some signs of serious cash flow issues (half off if you sign up for a year) which may explain why they couldn't pay Sun enough money to identify and/or address the issues.

Note: Switching the app that I mentioned to a $100/month slice (off of a $400/month zone) resulted in a massive speedup and noticeably faster disk IO, db performance, etc.
thank you for that link..It was totally worth the 1/2 hour i spent looking through the other cartoons as well.
Don't forget Bundler. There's a lot of ambivalence to Bundler because of the painful journey to 1.0, but it's totally proportional to the difficulty of the problem, and I think they've really nailed it for 1.0.
A lot of publishers offer DRM-free ebooks if you purchase directly from them.

For example:

http://oreilly.com/ebooks/

http://pragprog.com/frequently-asked-questions/ebooks
The "clever way to do the circle calculation that only used addition and subtraction", which the article attributes to Apple employee Bill Atkinson in 1981, is in fact a variant of the Bresenham algorithm, devised in 1962 by Jack Bresenham at IBM, when Bill was still a kid.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bresenham_algorithm
Yes, this story is very old. Look at the comments: they're from 2008!

It's good to know they weren't awarded the patent.
Insiders Doubt 2008 Pentagon Hack Was Foreign Spy Attack
Could we stop pretending that "NoSQL" refers to a homogeneous set of technologies?
It's not a huge win though, because most of the time you still do have some relational data, and there's no reason you can't dump documents in an SQL database. The fact that the interface is new, shiny and slightly more elegant for this simple degenerate use case doesn't carry much weight with me.
Most of the top programs strongly recommend that you do have several years of professional experience before applying.
As many as agreed on during the signing.

In my case, the company said it was a regular 8-hour day but I was expected to put in time during 'emergencies'. I agreed, and for the most part, that's how it went.

Occasionally they would schedule time on a Saturday, but they almost always gave me time off to compensate. When they didn't, something else was done.

And occasionally, I would put in a little extra time to finish off something I was working on.

On the other hand, other employees have put in massive overtime and generally worked themselves into quitting. Management put pressure on them to do so, but didn't force them. (I'm proof there wasn't force, since I'm still here.)

The key to working at a startup is understanding that they need flexibility first and foremost. Their problems are going to happen at odd times and there won't be many people to fix them. Of course, as I noted above, the company has to be flexible back, or it doesn't work.
Google RealTime Launches
Also, mind sharing what type of work you do that you get to use AppEngine on the job?
How I did it. From nothing to prototype in three weeks.
Thanks! Ordered.
Most of the story isn't about that. If that's the center of the story, then the first half of it is merely going off on a tangent. It's a badly-composed story.

Nor do we need more "I told the programmer we needed this thing he said was problematic and he did it" management just-so stories.
This is hilarious:

"Why not write to /dev/null? It's fast as hell"

"Does /dev/null support sharding?"