skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
if a business can't be run profitably it means its potential customers don't value its product at a price that covers the cost of production + overhead.

don't confuse the shitty government collusion in the education industry with a free market in education.
Certainly the fact that the driver is completely traceable (more so than a yellow cab driver) would dissuade most criminally inclined cabbies.
Tool of the Day: QuicklyCode
i suspect that most hacker minds are cool with raw data but i found that the storyline made it easier to digest. if you were to ask me about the company and #s tomorrow, i'd still remember.

but maybe that's b/c the Princess Bride is one of my favorite movies.

either way, props on the creativity.
You are right. And what I want to do is automatically label the email in arbitrary ways just like POPFile does. Hmm. Maybe I really should work on this since it would work for anyone who has an IMAP accessible account.
I am not concerned about the tutorial sessions, but heck my main concern is labs. How can you have a Bridge construction or fluid dynamics lab at our home?
The NBA has a soft cap. The soft cap is better than no cap, but it's not at all the same as a hard cap like the NFL or NHL.
As I posted on the OP blog, for $13, we got a 4' x 8' sheet of Melamine board at Home Depot. They even cut it for us, into three smaller (4' x 32") sheets for us for free. We got 3 dry-erase markers at the Dollar Store.
I know this is a throwaway account and you cannot get too detailed about the nature of the work but if you do decide to start over, I might be interested in applying if my skills fit the job.
via cloudomatic.com I've looked at hundreds of pricing pages. holy shit, there are a lot of similarities. I've always wanted to do a deep deep analysis there.
It's like a factory factory.
The comments on that comment are the most childish things I've seen in a long time.

(Side note: I can't believe people would think HN is turning into reddit, come on people)
The real power of GA is watching it scale to handle 100mm+ monthly pageviews. Can Piwik do this?
Which I've used, but it's a PITA rather than any real aid, especially w/o an Android phone. It also slows down and mildly annoys anyone who is calling you (maybe not a bad thing, but certainly not the same thing). And it's only really useful for people not in your contacts list, which is probably significantly less than 1/2 if you're not using it for work.

Plus, anyone not annoyed enough will still make your phone ring every time they call, demanding attention now to at least see who called. But I could do that before, with caller ID.
Agreed. In some ways the browser actually lowered people's expectations of what "computers" can do.

Perhaps the focus shifted.

When I first saw Wolf3D as a kid I was amazed that the computer could do that. Same when I first used a GIS.

These days when people get "excited" about something like Facebook, it's not because it's a technical achievement. It's something more human. Which perhaps is why I don't get it.

Maybe browser technology is "good enough". Perhaps the point is to be able to get apps out to people as simply as possible. It's just a URL.

Due to the fact I don't feel a point coming on any time soon I'll end here.
Language Shapes Thought
Law firms (at least in the UK, I imagine it is probably the same in the US) exist in a pretty well defined hierarchy - the "up or out" principle often works within this hierarchy as well.

Having said that - over the last couple of years a lot of lawyers in areas like commercial property have simply left the profession.
It's a voting system. If you don't have anything to show, people probably won't vote to let you in. You need a minimum number of votes to get in, so I'd get crackin' on those impressive projects 8)
Disagree. The policies behind medallions may be stupid and unfair, but their existence provides a mechanism of accountability (you can lose them, and they're hellaciously expensive) that doesn't exist with iPhone dispatch.

It doesn't surprise you that cab drivers in Chicago basically never drive you to random destinations, or change fares midway through the ride? The goodness of cab driver hearts isn't what's preventing it.
The read/unread state of each email is obviously stored to construct the ui. That seems like data you are already asking them to store.
A good font can make you more efficient. A font which is just as readable as another, but at a smaller size, gets more code on the screen. A font where you can more quickly distinguish 0 from O saves you some tiny sliver of time, yes, but more importantly, if the difference is great enough it can prevent distraction/context-switching.
I've worked remotely for about four years now: two as a part-time remote worker, one as an employee telecommuter, and one as a freelance developer and manager.

Yes, it truly does take a special kind of person to be successful working remotely. <b>It requires a strong work ethic<b>: an internal sense of accountability that persists in the absence of coworkers.

However, let's be realistic here. Most people that you will hire don't have this.

Those people who have that internal drill sergeant can get be successful by themselves. They don't need you. If you have people like this, you need to do everything in your power to enable them, make them happy, and get out of their way.

Management "tricks" that you cite in the comments (e.g., "time tracking, semi-micro management, constant reporting or leaving them more space, trying to get excited with new technical bits, giving them bonus, cutting their salary etc., pep talk, pissed-off talk") just aren't going to work.

Here's why: you don't understand what motivates these people. This is not your fault. Understanding people is hard. I'm no guru either. ;)

About a year in, this is where I found "Agile Retrospectives". This is a technique to actively engage the whole team in solving the team's problems.

Essentially, these are brainstorming sessions, sometimes emotionally charged, that give you and the team the opportunity to air tough problems and feelings, come up with plans to resolve them, and check on the progress of their resolution.

Management is a skill; it takes time and many errors to learn how to do it at all well. Can you afford those errors with this team and this project? If not, "fire yourself" as the manager, as you suggested at one point, and find someone who can do it for you.

If I wasn't completely booked right now, I'd love to help you and your team on an ongoing basis. Still, if you want someone's brain to pick, feel free to mail me at evan AT tripledogdare DOT net.
Not serious winners, marginal winners. IE they made the playoffs every year and got promptly defeated. There's a big difference.

While every hacker loves to believe that scrappy upstarts with data will conquer the good old boys every time, the reality of baseball seems to be the opposite. Sabermetrics just hasn't delivered. (It was a great book though).
Top Unique & Unbelievable Lamp Designs « Lighting Universe
Privileged westerners are getting their knickers in a twist because someone from a foreign country is drowning a litter of puppies. While they continue not to care about less cute farm and dairy animals being grown on a farm near them.

What else is new?
You mean something like Cyc or Open Cyc?
http://www.cyc.com/opencyc/

I am not sure that I fully agree. Even without that, Prolog is very useful for many problems.
Ruby Summer of Code — Benchmarking CI
If the cabbies complain loud enough I'm sure they can set up a sting. Nothing stopping them from downloading the same app and hailing a ubercab. When you can't present a medallion or commercial drivers license you're busted.

And there is nothing stopping them from going into court and throwing water on the whole thing with an injunction.
I am pro-Internet Vigilantes when they restrict themselves to digging up relevant information and reporting it to the authorities.

Has anyone watched the video that spawned this post? There's no way someone's anonymity should be respected when they do something so blatantly horrible.
You think the police are unwilling to hail a cab over this service?
First impressions are that it is really clean and simple to use. I agree with others that you should have a facebook login as well as twitter. One minor thing I noticed is that if you do a search the conference results aren't in date order. For example, if you search for "Berlin" the date order goes 2010, 2007, 2010 which, IMO, is a bit counter intuitive. Apart from that, all good so far.
Bitstream Vera Sans Mono 4 evah! :)
Has a dot in the center of '0' which differentiates it from 'O' but is more readable than a slash.

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/ttf-bitstream-vera/1....
Freemium: A business model startups can’t ignore
FYI, you really undermine a decent point with a loaded phrase like "Privileged westerners".
Think of it the other way .. Should you fire yourself for doing a bad job of recruiting and building team?
Agreed. I've been using it for close to a year as my default in Eclipse, I like it a lot.
I don't have a huge claim to fame, just the design work that I am doing for my as of yet uncompleted web app. To make a long story short I don't consider myself to be a really professional web designer, but I would like to learn and get feedback on my design efforts.

I can send you an email with examples of my design work. Should I send it via the contact form on your site?
In many countries political dissidence is a crime. If you want to allow only the 'good guys' to be anonymous you need a perfectly trustworthy party to decide who the good guys are. Various governments have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted to do this

You can't prevent libel and slander without encroaching on free speech.
10 Stupid Reasons Why I Use Google Adwords
Pretty cool, potentially very handy, though I wonder why they didn't synchronize scrolling.
W3 Giftcards is a no brainer for small to midsize businesses that would like to reach a wider audience on the internet to help grow their business. W3giftscards is connected on facebook as well and reaches new customers on all the social media channels. It's easy to use and free to sign up and get going.
No (speaking from experience - we've had no end of issues with piwik and larger websites)
I really like the idea. I would also be interested in your advertising program. I have a promotional product eCommerce company that sells Lanyards and conference items.

Everything seems to work great.. I would not mind seeing a short description about the event under the URL of the conference site. --- Looks Great!
I don't think I've seen anything like this but I don't get it - why a spreadsheet specifically? Generally for note taking I'm more looking at free text stuff, not cell-based stuff.

For free text, I do that with SnagIt and just use the text writer for notes then save as PNG.
Using the Speech Attribute Feature in Chrome 7
Although it is good that reddit is taking this hardline stance against "internet vigilanties" I don't think it will do much good. Even if they start banning people for doing these actions I don't think it will deter people from taking part in these actions.
It doesn't take very many prostitution arrests to encourage the trade to move elsewhere. I imagine that a group of officers with iPhones could arrest thirty or forty uber-cabbies in an afternoon. It could be _very_ lucrative for the city if the statute was modified to allow the police to confiscate the vehicle used in the "crime."
$needle, $haystack

or

$haystack, $needle
True, isn't really new, I use it since January.

Though, there are two best "programming" fonts according to me:
- free: Droid Sans Mono ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droid_(font) )
- paid: Pragmata ( http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragma.htm )

One thing I like about Inconsolata Pro is that it supports Cyrillic fonts (the other two also support), there are many good monospaced fonts which don't have Cyrillic support, and there are lot of programmers who like to make the comments in the code in their native language.
Ask HN: An email from god - technical issues 
If god wanted to communicate with humanity today god would arguably send an email to humanity. If god indeed did an email blast to humanity and that gmail's spam algorithm flagged god's email as spam and someone tried to open it what would happen?

I have 1 possible scenario here http://makebelieve1.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/marketing-a-new-startup-religion/#mechanics but I do not believe that it is sound from an engineering point of view. I would appreciate your technical advice and comments. Thank you.
I don't know about other places, but here in NYC, in the poorer neighborhoods in Brooklyn at least, there's a thriving system of taxi alternatives. You'll frequently see cars or vans packed full of people getting rides for a buck or two, and the cops don't seem to pay much attention to it.

In Manhattan or other parts of the city, I don't see how this kind of thing could compete with the yellow cabs or the car services. People have the money to pay the higher prices, and there are enough horror stories (true or not) floating around that very few would see it as worth the risk.
Productive Programming
Embedded mobile broadband versus dongles or tethering: Which is best?
I've been using reddit long enough to recognize warning signs. It used to be fine...then bad one-liners and left-wing conspiracies started getting voted up to the top, at first infrequently but more and more until 4chan comics on the front page became the norm and /r/politics became the mess it is today.

I think when people say HN is becoming reddit, they mean the reddit of 2-3 years ago, not the reddit of today. At points, I've seen some of the same warning signs I saw on reddit. I was more worried about HN a few months ago than I am now, but every time I see a weak joke with 60 upvotes (maybe 5% of the jokes I've seen in HN comments are actually worth of upvotes) or someone's perfectly reasonable comment getting to -1 within 5 minutes in a vaguely political thread, it makes me a little nervous.
Live link: http://makebelieve1.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/marketing-a-new...
I used bad performance to define:

Not doing their job which is tickets assigned them (coding, testing, building, buying groceries etc.)

So we do have a clear definition of what needs to be done, and it's also clear that who's doing it and who's not. Only question in here might what's the accepted amount of tasks done. Like does this ticket takes an hour for X and a day for Y. In either case (Y is slacking or it takes a day for him) he's an incompetent employee and needs to go. Am I missing something?
Gates is ueber-rich.
The 'flag' link is your best bet. If enough people feel the same way, the post won't stay alive for long.
I've been watching Piwik for a bit (they do analytics software, we do analytics software) and I believe they set aside their scaling work until after version 1.0.

I would love to see an independent open-source analytics company with a services / enterprise business model, along the lines of OpenX for ad serving and the pre-acquisition MySQL. Not so sure the economics justify it, though.
Does the openness of the spec even matter when effectively only one party can write and ship a usable plugin for it?
Responsibility is key for me. I'm motivated when I can make a decision and the team is relying on me to follow through on my word. It's a matter of professional pride.

Give them ownership over their work. Give them responsibility and accountability. Give specialists control over key components and more generalized people doing design, issue management, and supporting the specialists. I find that I perform better when I feel like my reputation is on the line.

On the contrary, I've been on projects where the responsibility and decisions were made by the managers. Any criticism, idea, or suggestion I had to contribute didn't really matter. We eventually did finish these projects through, but not without a lot of resentment. In these types of situations its easy (and justified) for employees to blame management when things start to go wrong. They had no say and therefore have no reason to feel accountable. If you're a manager and you start firing people in this situation, the rest will just end up quitting. Those who stay will have nothing good to say and are probably only there because they have dependants. So good luck with that route.

Telecommuting generally isn't the issue. It's only an issue for people inexperienced at it: they don't realize that the wife may ask you to do chores in the middle of the day or that their pets will continually break their attention. Experienced people know to keep a separate room as their office and let the people they live with know that they're not to be bothered during working hours and especially when the door is closed.

So obviously I recommend shifting the balance of ownership and accountability to the team. If there are still people who continually fall through on their promises or whose decisions continually fall short of their expectations, then you know who to talk to and possibly fire; and so does the team -- so if the axe does fall, everyone knows why. This will go a long way to protecting morale.
That was a fun read, especially the history of Admiral Inman setting up MCC. He was on the board of directors for my company and for years I had to pitch to him and a small committee to get IR&D funds. I also got a brief tour of MCC from him when it was getting set up. He was in a really good mood because he had just arranged the hire of Douglas Lenat.

As mentioned in the article, Feigenbaum's and McCorduck's book on the Japanese 5th generation project had caused quite a stir in the USA, and I think that it made it easier for me personally to get IR&D funding for anything AI-ish.

Perhaps off topic: I view Prolog as almost a scripting language because most programs I wrote in Prolog were short and solved one little problem. The only long Prolog program I every wrote was a quick one week rewrite of a 5 week IR&D project that was a prototype battlefield simulator that I wrote in Lisp. I can't imagine writing a million line system in Prolog.
It seems like those sites are exactly the kind of products I prefer to look at In Real Life, and not just as pictures on a computer.

Due to broken bones which forces me to stay at home, I've bought clothes online and it has resulted in a significant number of unpleasant surprises which are trivial to avoid in a physical shop. My (Danish) experience is that the shops that provide the most useful information are the shops that avoid Flash and uses plain html pages (e.g. Amazon, smartguy.dk).

Flash-based sites almost always makes it impossible to add "I probably want to buy this" bookmarks in the browser, so a lot of items don't get bought by me. So even when the browser supports Flash, the site starts out with a significant handicap (looking at you, H&M) ... and I don't have the patience for the transition animations that most Flash developers think is a must-have.
I was hoping not to get into a detailed design critique-- but go spend some time at http://sortfolio.com/ or http://smashingmagazine.com/ and see if you don't agree with me.

The concept behind the site is a useful one-- I think you could make something of it. But you need to be credible to your target market (designers).

(PS If you really do want a point-by-point I can do that).
surely the correct adjective to describe Fortran is procedural

No, the original FORTRAN that the author is referring to wasn't procedural. FORTRAN II, a few years later, added subroutines to the language.
Of course sites are still going to produce content in Flash, but nowadays they at least have to consider that by doing so they're making it impossible for an ever increasing market segment to view their content.

I ran Debian on a PPC machine a few years ago so I couldn't use Flash. Back then only very odd setups like that didn't have it. Nowadays millions of people are buying new top of the line devices that don't support it, so the tide is turning as a result.
Do they know that they are in danger of being fired? The prospect of unemployment is definitely something that can focus the mind.

If you haven't given them a clear indication that their performance is unacceptable and that a continuation of said unacceptable performance will get them canned, do so. Hopefully in some of the cases, you'll see an improvement. Others you'll probably have to fire.
Not really - just that I'm in the middle of doing something with CouchDB on the server side and my own lightweight MapReduce engine sitting on top of the in-browser SQLite database in Safari (for the iPhone/iPad). So everything looks document oriented to me at the moment!
Driving a gypsy cab (which is what ubercab is) is a dangerous business. In the 90's, New York averaged something like 2 murdered cabbies a month. And those drivers were only being robbed for a small amount of cash.

This application could be very attractive for car jackers. A bad guy could simply place and order for an out-of-the-way alley or warehouse and know that the cabbie they hail is going to be driving a really nice car.

A would-be car jacker would need to use a stolen iPhone and credit card in order to keep from getting caught right away, but that's hardly an insurmountable barrier.
Well I guess this is buried in the site but there is a link to http://raphaeljs.com/ which explains what the raphaeljs library is all about. I see your point though.
Information is a Commodity
Louisville Insurance Quotes
To be honest numbers are slightly less I put 8/5 by scaling the current technical team to a little bit more to keep it anonymous (I might be paranoid but my team mates reading HN as well!)

But still it's clear that my management skills are not top notch and I didn't hire right people.

We are building a (fairly expensive) desktop software in a quite niche area, releasing about 4 updates per year and it's been about 2 years we are doing this.
Blogger Buzz: Introducing Blogger Stats
You can even have it replace tt in your LaTeX files. Download and \usepackage{inconsolata} in your preamble.
I really like it - the interface is very clean and exactly what I was expecting (which is good)!

It's nice being able to track a conference, but how about being able to track a topic too?
I can't really give you a reasoned answer. But using a `wrong' font just bugs me enough, that I feel irritated all the time.