skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, he was a guy who

- carried out his orders blindly and without thinking ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Rzhev where he blindly sent several hundred thousand troops into fortified German position - if you send your forces up the same road for two months straight without gaining any advances, wouldn't you at least try to find an alternate route that the enemy doesn't expect you to use? ) ,

- was very hungry for fame and glory (I can't find references now, but it was his initial reports to higher command during the first few days after 1941-06-22 that led Stalin to believe the German invasion was already mostly contained and delayed Russian defense deployments. In addition, Stalin demoted Zhukov later, citing "attributes others' achievements to himself" as a significant reason.), and

- was generally vain, sadistic and incompetent. Several high ranking officials and civilians reported his attitude towards his subordinates as nothing less than disgusting.

- He was also in charge of Totsk nuclear testing ( http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radevents/1954USSR1.... ), where he had over 40k soldiers split into two teams and engage each other moments after a nuke had been detonated above the battlefield.

Also, he had nothing to do with the German defeat at Stalingrad - he was still too busy headbutting Rzhev: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_for_Velikiye_Luki_(1943)

For more details, I suggest looking up Viktor Suvorov's "Shadow of Victory". And other Suvorov's books for a different view of WWII in general.
It took me about a decade to learn the lesson of eighth grade dances: you can be a wonderfully witty, intelligent, charming gentleman, and if you stand there in the corner waiting for a young lady to recognize this, in all probability you're going to be a very lonely witty, intelligent, charming gentleman.
A lot of people might consider it to be poor value to put up $99 for a ~1/50 chance (47 submissions being voted on) that someone might start the development of their idea, which if it ever actually makes it to market will offer them a 12% revenue share...

With that kind of expected ROI, you'd better have an idea you believe is worth tens of thousands of dollars, in which case why would you leave the chances of it actually being developed to a popularity contest...
Lol. Gee dude you really are angry about the telly huh?

I think the TV is just a symbol to communicate a bigger picture. It is not about the TV per se, but the fact that you can afford the TV. So if you can afford such telly, then you can afford a great house too, so that your kids won't have to share a room, you would not have to worry about making trips to the pedriatician or pre-school education, basically, finances would not be a problem.

Having one problem less is not such a bad thing. Sure life is more than money, but not having to worry about money gives you more time to develop friendships, send your kids to a good school, etce...
Aah the great "good engineers don't need marketers" debate. I guess the only point I can really make is, what if you had someone proactively reaching out to others that didn't write about you, but would have if they'd heard about it, since SproutRobot is so awesome? By your train of logic, then, you could've gotten 100x the return on a marketer's efforts, and their job would've been an easy one because they wouldn't have to do any convincing.
I hope they go ahead and build these, they look awesome.
The + operator is overloaded. You interpret it automatically as addition; the SE read it as "search (or: tell me about) 2 and 4."
Very cool, but can Iceland afford it? Last time I checked their currency nearly collapsed.
Using Sass with django-mediagenerator
Google Storage accounts now available -- S3 Competitor?
As an employer I would want good (or "great", but I prefer the term good) programmers. I don't really care why they are good. Maybe they are good because they program 24/7 - okay. Maybe they do not use a computer outside of the office, but are still good programmers - okay.

Really, why should I care? This all sounds more like "I want people who are like me" than "I want good programmers as employees".
Android’s Pursuit of the Biggest Losers
Click the down button: it'll knock them down another karma point and fade out their comment more, but it won't display lower than -4 to prevent pile-on downvoting to -50.
Entrepreneurs Who Launched Companies for Under $150.com
>>Also, how many games have really been ported directly to Android from iPhone?

I assumed the standard business model was: See what was popular on iPhone and copy that to other hand held platforms. (Preferably with outsourced cheap programmers.)

The market haven't matured yet?
I did a related post w/ a video answering exactly your question: http://go.Danielodio.com/wsj

Here's a sample email - note that he'd written an article about iPhone tethering, which I referenced in the subj. line:

Subject: Re: Chris - re: iPhone Tethering + AppMakr

Chris , just saw your write-up about iPhone tethering. I've always wanted
to be able to do this!

Thought you might be interested in a related topic: A self-service tool we
just launched in Jan called AppMakr that lets anyone build an app for as
little as $199. We've been covered by WSJ, TechCrunch & many others, press
at http://go.AppMakr.com/press and you can see a video and details of the
service at www.AppMakr.com/learn_more

Let me know if you'd like to tell your readers about it!

Regards,

DROdio

____________________________________________________

Daniel Ruben Odio-Paez
Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer, PointAbout.com
Creators of www.AppMakr.com
Using iSCSI On Ubuntu 10.04 (Initiator And Target)
He had good history of attacking places without Russian approval, so most likely he would have attacked Poland either way. The pact with USSR was tactically advantageous, but unlikely deciding.
> its only profitable for Spammers because it costs pretty much nothing to send millions of emails.

And because there are still idiots that buy spamvertised goods and services.
> The problem is that "degrees C" is overloaded here, to mean both a position on a scale, and the size of a unit on that scale

I understood that Celsius always referred to the position on the scale, and the unit was always Kelvin. At least, that's how I use the terms.
Actually, they're allowed to discriminate on anything that isn't in a protected class, as far as I am aware (well, unless you have state or local laws which are more stringent).
I'm proud of such button I've implemented on http://imageoptim.pornel.net/

Here's unminified CSS: http://pastie.org/1097542
Arrays for Classes
As someone who has logged a lot of time meditating, I can state pretty confidently there is something more than pure placebo going on here.

Many years ago (7ish) I tried using a program that generated these sounds/music with different touted effects like 'sleepy time' or 'morning coffee' .. whatever. Didn't make as grand of statements as maybe are being made now, but the idea was the same.

Observably, your brain pulses EM waves at certain frequency ranges depending on your state of mind, pretty much the calmer your mind, the slower your waves.

Now, if you've meditated with any type of success, you will recognize that semi-deep meditation is definitely similar in some ways to being on drugs.. the way marijuana treats some people, and I think even closer to how opiates treat people; a very relaxed, accepting feeling that is distinct from normal beta-wave activity.

Disclaimer, I have not read the wired article nor listened to any of these 'digital drug' mp3s; but.. I am pretty confident our brains can be strongly encouraged to enter the different brain-wave states based off the pulsations of sound at the intended interval.

That is, by overloading our senses into a pulsation at a certain frequency, our brains have inertia to pulsate at that frequency, thus putting our selves in the different states of mind associated with the different brain states.

My guess is that is what is happening with these 'digital drugs' and the ones that are supposedly 'the best' will have overwhelming rhythms matching probably alpha/delta wave frequency.
>>finding that someone posted something dumb online will be akin to pointing out that they probably had a bowel movement over the past 24 hours.

He, one of the top hits on my name was when I sent in a bogus error report to Ubuntu. :-)

(I don't keep a log of what I do on my personal computers and had forgotten that I had bungled an install earlier of a DB I just tested.)
Being an entrepreneur = Bending the rules, carefully
The Universe Splitter App (For Many Worlds Adherents)
It's just like hypnosis, it works if you want it to. I wouldn't call it placebo, but I can see why some people would.
It is an absolutely wonderful idea. I think it's definitely desirable to add form if function is not sacrificed. It looks like whoever designed these figured it out.
Isn't this because of all the obfuscation you're adding? Extra scripts, split font files and data: URIs can't be good for performance...
Don't forget the "paid only" auto complete (that supposedly is a bug but I've noticed it on other installations): http://community.xobni.com/xobni/topics/dont_try_to_sell_me_...
W3C Backs the WOFF WebFont Standard
The title should be "to carry", it's just a design proposal not yet implemented.
Upvoted because I understand that not everyone has this desire to produce something. I'd wager that the default mental state for most people is idleness.
Ask the submitter: do you know what Reddit is?
I agree, we do need to construct more pylons... like this.
Accessing IP from the big end of town
TorrentFreak: Don't bash Google for Net Neutrality, it never existed anyway
The evolving definition of AI
I think a better title for this article would be "How monstrosities get written".
Then the world would turn into a Monty Python sketch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f_p0CgPeyA
Nokia X3 Touch and Type
How to crawl through the last month at the day job?
Hi,

in about one month I will leave the company for a 6 months sabbatical. I would like to travel and start working on my side projects (not necessarily about programming and techy stuff).

My motivation in my daily job is underground. My head and heart have already left. How can I face this?
Age of Empires Online
For some of us, our job fulfills our passion just fine, and affords plenty of opportunity for ongoing education. I've always thought that many (not all, but many) people program for fun because their job isn't sufficiently interesting.
You're a professional. Your duty now is to your successor. Just as if you joined a company, you'd appreciate your predecessor tying up the loose ends.
I think iTunes is the only place where I can skip a password and choose not too, out of fear of buying things by accident. I could go or a confirmation dialog instead, though.
MIT Spin-out Lyric Semiconductor launches with probability processing logic gate
An early Clojure implementation in Common Lisp
You should read the articles. The behavior they're describing really doesn't fit with your assumptions. I'd be willing to admit that there is more to meditation than placebo, but meditation is not what's being referenced on these articles (and corresponding youtube videos).

Not to suggest that there are real narcotic effects. My vote would absolutely be "Placebo Effect" with a helping dose of "kids can be weird".
When it sucks to have a big boat..
Because the others are huge
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1608566
Prediction: Icelandic children will have recurring nightmares about robot invasions.

I do like the idea of artistic designs of mundane structures. In Portland they decided to combat graffiti and vandalism on bus stops by sandblasting motifs into the glass:
http://trimet.org/publicart/busshelters.htm
This was addressed in the first part of the article. It doesn't need to be a full time endeavor to start.
An economists view on making life's big choices and gut instinct
It means that you can now write plugins for Vim using Python 3. It's worth noting that you could already write Vim plugins with Python 2.x.
Tesco Clubcard couple on track for a $1B business
Good lord don't do it again then! More seriously, yes Iceland does still have enough money and borrowing capability to keep the infrastructure going. They're not all on the streets.
There must be some SEO firms specialised on cases like this already? Create n fake hits for a name and push them to the front page?

Although if a potential employer googles for "name+criminial record" it would fall apart again.

Instead of names, we could just use social security numbers to prevent confusion...
Wilco Angel Network (Austin, TX) – New Funding for Williamson County businesses
They don't look very trustworthy to me.
Updated Ask HN Archive
I do like the idea. They've taken something ordinary and thought beyond the conventional interpretation. Looking at those images, though, I did have the strange anthropomorphic concern that their arms would get tired. Couldn't they hold the cables on their shoulders?
Google Chrome version 6, 7 and 8 by this year end
5 billionth device about to connect to the Internet
I respectfully disagree.

First there are several jobs which require an ongoing education requirement (outside of work) in order to maintain the correct licensing for their fields. My mom's a nurse, my wife's a lawyer, both have ongoing education requirements. To take your bookkeeper examples, CPA's at least have Professional Education Requirements.

I consider programming outside the office part of a programmer's ongoing education. We may not need to be licensed but we do need to continue to keep up with technologies both in and outside our direct field of work. I'd be hesitant to hire anyone who doesn't keep up with what is going on in the environment around them. In my particular case the vast majority of technologies that I use now in my work I started working on outside of my direct work projects. Thats the nature of our industry.

And there's nothing illegal, in the US at least, about asking about activities outside of work and using that as a basis of hiring.
Frost Giants do not get tired, puny mortal! Bring on Ragnarok!
Did everyone forget about this??
http://xkcd.com/137/
Key phrases from the press release:

"announces the development"

"announces the internal development"

"inspired by the best-selling Flight Simulator franchise"

"bring a new perspective to the long-standing genre"

"Reinventing these franchises with social, shared experiences"

So it's vaporware, bearing no resemblance to the original, without any of the original developers, which, if it's ever released, will be filled with griefers.
6 Coolest Things Made With Legos
The beauty of Legos is that you can build anything - anything at all.
My experience with outsourcing QA using oDesk
Agreed, for the most part. I've got an N1 and a serious case of iPhone game envy. But Angry Birds is coming to Android, PopCap is committed to Android, and Unity 3.0 will support Android.
This is brilliant, but didn't I see it submitted just a day or so ago? And yet I've looked, and not found it.

Regardless, I've added it to my ante-pre-alpha "Great Articles" project.

Thank you.
I can't help but think that if you don't know where to start (different from having too many places to start), you don't need to. If you need it, there should be something obvious - some programme that really needs to be written, and simply must run on such-and-such a system, and that will inform you on what to learn.
Cape Town has very little to do with the Africa most of the world is thinking of. OP's question is about Nigeria. Not so long ago, Nigeria wouldn't even let you in if your passport had a South African stamp.

The problems and opportunities in Cape Town for startups have, in my experience, no relevance to Lagos, Kinshasa, Abidjan, Accra ...

As you're from Cape Town, you know this is the real problem:

http://sewayoleme.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/africa-in-perspec...

Most people have no idea Africa is larger than US, Europe, India, and China combined, but without infrastructure on most of the continent and so tribal that even greed takes a back seat to boosting a friend from the village.

These aren't bad things, they're just different--and Kaapstad, Africa's first permanent European settlement and now considered the most entrepreneurial city in South Africa, may not offer the best model for addressing the OP's problem.
Would it be possible to get a unique url so that I don't have to send an email ? (ex : if I want to send it by GTalk)
I agree, this is scary stuff. My girlfriend worked at an ad agency who had a campaign that involved finding people who looked like you based on their Facebook profile photo. It's only a small skip and a jump to a plugin for Google Goggles that allows me to snap a photo of the cute girl on the train and know everything there is to know about her.
given that he left France out, one assumes this is a case of a missing I.
It's a neat idea, but I wonder how practical this is from a build/serviceability perspective. They say they are only "minor alterations" from standard designs, but each one of the towers looks unique (I'd guess they have 6 or 8 total "poses"). But I'd also think there is a lot of value when all the towers have the same design in terms of service and maintenance. These must undergo regular inspections to ensure that no load-bearing components have been compromised.
Case study of a great facebook page (on budget)
Ask HN: How much billing info to ask in Subscription form? Best practices?
I'm in the process of getting a SaaS app ready for launch, and one of the last components is the billing module. We're going to be using Braintree for our processing, and our expected subscription rate will be $10 / month.

To reduce the likelihood of fraud, credit card billing companies say you should get lots of billing data, like the user's address, their CVV code, the name on the card, and so on. But the more fields that are present, the more friction there is for the user to enter in their data. Also, the more opportunities for fat-fingering the entry and creating validation errors of some sort.

I notice that 37signals only asks for three pieces of information: credit card number, expiration date, and billing ZIP code. This is going to put their charges into the "unqualified" rate level, I believe, as it's not getting the billing address, CVV, or other elements that reduce the likelihood of fraud. At the same time, my understanding is that most business credit cards are considered "unqualified" anyway, so it might be moot. I know that, as a user, I'm much more of a fan of the 37signals approach, where I don't have to fill in loads of data.

Have any of you experimented with different amounts of data-collection and seen how that's affected either your chargeback rate, your conversion rate, or your bottom line? This seems like the kind of thing that would be a "known problem", but I can't find any writeups that cover it.

Would love any anecdata you have.
That is incredible....
And he does it without any sort of magnifying glass. Wow.
Ask HN: Who said you can work for 25 years and take the rest of your life off?
It seems more frequently every day I read about peoples' retirement plans going to shit. Doomsday predictions about social security, woefully underfunded pension plans, and unexpectedly bad 401k performances. I'm no economist or financial expert, but do these ideas seem flawed from the start to anyone else?
Orange buttons than red buttons, but an interesting case study nonetheless.

I wonder whether red buttons would have been less effective, given the association with warning / stop (at least in some cultures).
Microsoft Flight -- now under development by the Office Team! The easy-to-use new "Ribbon" interface takes the complexity out of flying a plane.
"Everyone" was wrong when it comes to SICP. The standard environment for that is the MIT Scheme distribution (http://www.gnu.org/software/mit-scheme/) which includes a version of EMACS named Edwin which runs in the same process as your Scheme. It's trivial to install (at least on Windows, haven't tried Linux) the whole package and get up and running for the purposes of SICP, which have almost nothing to do with LISP/Scheme (at least in the first few chapters).

SLIME is supposed to be the way to go for a complicated LISP like Common Lisp or perhaps a richer Scheme or Clojure, but SICP is trying to teach you programming, CS and the like, and what you learn from about Scheme is incidental (well, until you get the the metacircular interpreter magic).
"What, objectively, is so much better and easier under Linux? Note, we're talking dev machine here, and not deployment serv"

Tool chaining. For me, the ease with which I can bang out scripts and makefiles and have the tools easily check out versioned code from rcs/svn and that I can pipe and redirect and have a host of efficient tools like grep and nm and objdump and more, and they all work together piping and redirecting to make exactly what I want in so many easily altered configurations. Release and debug and partial debug and static-checking build and more, with all the makefiles just text - so easy to alter and tweak and copy and share (and even have them configure on the fly, reading the output from the compilation and rerunning with extra warnings or debug symbols) and have them run commands themselves like sending eMails to everyone who is listed as an interested party on the source controlled spec list, and so much more. Valgrind is so useful that if I have to develop on a Win32 machine I get a version of it going under MinGw, and sometimes I run a Win32 debug under Wine on Linux so I can use Valgrind on it.

I sound like the biggest *nix dev env fanboy ever.
The German invasion of Poland is commonly seen as the start of World War II, which other places do you refer to?
Ask HN: Which developer portal is the best? why?
We're redesigning our developer portal (remix.bestbuy.com) and are looking to the experts to tell us which developer portals are the most useful, easy to use; and what specifically makes them the best. We've looked at Twilio as a nice example as well as Etsy and the usual suspects (Amazon, Ebay, Google) but would love to hear from HN readers what they think.
Ipad product name
What if someone writes you the question "what is 12, Park Avenue + 34, Park Avenue?" Wouldn't you assume that this cannot be about addition, and instead tell him who lives in those two places and perhaps the walking distance?
All the components, e.g. struts and joints, can be interchangeable, just arranged differently in each one. You would never need to keep complete pylons in stock for each design.
I have used Microsoft Flight Simulator, quite extensively (all the way from CGA graphics up through DirectX 10).

And while it's a great program, and other than the nicely crafted missions in FSX... X-Plane beats it hands down. I haven't looked back, especially since I can run it flawlessly on Linux.
Back by Popular Demand: All You Can Jet
Writing medium-sized projects in Javascript, I often look toward the sky and thank the originators of that language that they had the foresight to include closures and first class functions. I use them all over and save a significant amount of effort. Because my time is extremely limited, they make things possible I couldn't otherwise do.

If there are a handful of problems where they're the perfect solution, then any language should have them, simply because the overhead in implementation and linguistic style is so low.
Will it include a YMCA combo?
Try this:

http://en.akinator.com/

It's pretty good at figuring out who you think about (fictional or real) just by asking yes/no questions.