skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems they are not counting iPod touches / iPads. For a developer, total ecosystem size and probability that owners will buy apps is a little more important.

On a tangent, Nintendo Wii had really good sales numbers, but I wonder if the number of games bought per console was around the same amount as the PS/3 or XBox 360? I have my doubts. I think the game console market shares is a more probably predictor of phone market share than PC sales (i.e. no highlander).
Yes, they're wrong, because one was too many. Fifty is a travesty, not simply 'enough'.
Zooming would be even more awesome if the symbols (+ -) were not covered by the info bubble on certain seats. For example, Shea Stadium section 325. The map is fun.
The article reminded me of Tom Lehrer's 1960's song "New Math."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8aW4YuFSiY&feature=chann...
(3 minutes, song starts at 1:15 but it's all relevant.)

So I guess the way I learned in school would have been considered "new math" in the 60's. If a new method really is better we should go for it.
I've had the need on dynamically assigned IP addresses to share files with people when the file too large for email, and I didn't want to take the time to upload it to a server on a slower uplink and then have the recipient download it, taking twice as much time.

Being able to open up an Apache or Nginx server without using a confusingly long hostname (eg 127-0-0-1-dhcp.node01.someispdomain.net) which would be easy to misspell over the phone, to let someone grab whatever they needed directly from me makes this a very optimal service for such a small use.

I can see a group of people working on a webapp building a list of subdomains using this service so that a project lead can instantly see how each developer is working on a problem on their local machines.
Bloglines is shutting down. End of an era.
Bloglines joins the deadpool
Sounds neat, but is a subsidiary of EA really considered a "start up"?
Rather than a link to the current video, I'd like to see a list of history.

E.g. how do I get to what I saw two videos back?
I started typing "drum video", saw something interesting as an intermediate result as I was typing, but as it processed more of my query, it had jumped to a new video before i could click.

Granted, I just retyped my query letter by letter to find what i was looking for ("dru"). But I don't know if a fixed query always bringing back a single result or if that's desired functionality vs limitation vs bug.
I'm in the Annapolis / DC area, if anyone's interested.
I remember coming across this one

http://www.calendarsquick.com/printables/index.html

no clue how much money it makes, but I was thinking can such a simple service make money?
They are rare, and generally only go to people who are perceived as having a future in academia. So if you don't get a paid spot, that's the career fairy telling you this may not work out...
Funny, that sounds like a recipe for the sort of social structure they were trying to break free of in colonial England. Just goes to show how 200 years of politicking and beatification has distorted the images of the founding fathers.
Very pretty, fun to play with.

The rollovers are getting chopped off for most of the right side of the map -- they run off the right edge of the page. Can they be pulled in?

At least initially, I was leery of clicking -- but it turned out to stay on the same page, and doesn't have the same problem as the rollovers.

Nice job.
Depends. At the best, you're being paranoid. At the worst, he could be developing schizophrenia. Is he in his late teens or early twenties, does he sound agitated or paranoid? Is his thought process coherent? What is he talking about? A young, paranoid male talking gibberish to himself without regard for who's around would be concerning. If you want a great portrait of schizophrenia, watch "The Soloist": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0821642/

But if he's not acting like that, then maybe he's just helping you expand your definition of normal.
At the very least, click to play/pause and a volume slider.
Memetic Hazards in Videogames
A new kind of stock-price chart
I've found you get questions about anything non-standard you've done for any institutional like job. I used to teach English in China, it was fun, but I'd never do it again. Still, it's come up in a negative light in interviews years after the fact: "How do we know you won't just leave for China?"

(I want to be generous and think it's because in large companies the how-we-do-it-here knowledge has to be taught, so it's more valuable than the how-to-get-it-to-compile knowledge and they need long tenures)
Another way to describe some of that community effort is 'work very hard to bury conflicts so deep that, ideally, nobody will find them'. As an extreme example consider ./configure
3d rendering isn't what I need. I need 3d models for games.
This is an incredible app. Seriously. Well done.
> When you leave the company, you'll be required to shell out some cash to keep your exposure to the company's upside

I'm not sure what that means. He has to purchase the options in order to exercise them later? I thought once something "vested" it was yours to keep.
And I HIGHLY recommend you don't purchase any of the vested shares until the company is public, and only then when you intend to exercise them immediately (which is generally a cashless transaction).

Usually true, but not always. There are situations in which purchasing shares over several years prior to a pricing event can avoid AMT screwing you. It is rare, but it happened to me once. It happens when the details of the pricing event count as income under AMT, but not under ordinary tax rules. If you have large deductions under ordinary tax rules (the most common is the federal deduction for taxes paid to the state), then AMT can hit you.

If you think this might happen to you, discuss with a competent accountant. The rules are complex, I don't know them, and all I can usefully tell you is that it is possible, it is rare, and I very nearly was in a case where it would have happened. (I was careful to purchase options early so that eBay's purchase of Rent.com with stock would not trigger AMT consequences. Then the deal was changed to cash and it didn't matter.)
Wait. When did making more and more stuff become a gauge of national production? Just because something is intangible doesn't mean that it isn't wealth.

Moreover, the 1800 Britain he talks about in which technology roamed free was a horrifying place to live in if you didn't belong in the right categories. It was a time when the world of Charles Dickens wasn't a fantasy.

The problem over here isn't the fact that the USA is moving from technology or innovation. It's just that the shape of it has changed. Instead of dashing off a patent for a new harvest machine. Today, people apply themselves in creating digital enterprises(not just software, this includes algorithms, hardware, AI, media, etc). Yet, the metrics that plug those super policies don't take this into account; if there was a measure of the total lines of code written in the USA then they might start taking things differently.
The HTC Desire on Telus HSPA only -- that's likely the direction everything will go. Both CDMA and GSM are previous generation technologies.
Physicists Build a Memory that Stores Entanglement
Does that actually happen much (the lack of jobs, not the NYT articles)? Unemployment is low among people with college degrees of any kind--- the big rises in unemployment we've seen lately are mainly among non-degree-holding former blue-collar workers who've been unable to find new work as factories have closed. The people I know with art and art-history degrees seem to have no problem finding work with design and advertising firms, among other things.

Now, they aren't all doing their first choice or what their degree exactly is about, but that's also true of many technical people. Probably the worst group for that is people with only a B.S. in a basic science--- nobody I know with just a B.S. in physics, bio, or chemistry has been able to get a job they're particularly happy with in science. Some have gone back to grad school, and others have treated it as just an "I'm smart" piece of paper to get them in the door to other, not-very-related careers. So I don't actually see a huge difference between an art-history and a biology degree from the practicality perspective (the average starting salaries are comparable, too).
> Meaning, if you exercise your options (purchase them at the strike price) you do not have to pay taxes on any profits you make on them.

Huh? You absolutely have to pay taxes on any profit you make when you sell the shares. In addition, you may also need to pay taxes at the time of exercise on the difference between the strike price and the fair market value, in the form of AMT.

http://fairmark.com/execcomp/isoexer.htm
If you use another base a lot, then yes. But when you're facing problems in a half-dozen bases at once, then the learning curve of keeping that many times tables separate is not worthwhile.
I've been similarly support by the community before (future ruby, what what).

This is awesome. Donated. Good luck Raynes!
Steve Blank (who you should read if you haven't) has said "No one can kill you in your first 18 months except for yourself".

Two easy ways to kill your startup:

1. Give up. No one has a smooth ride at 6 months. Everyone struggles for years, whether you see it from the outside or not.

2. Don't iterate quickly enough. Bitspace (great design, btw) might be the wrong product. Talk to customers and try different things. When something works, do more of it. When it fails, kill it.
Reading through the replies, the generic answer tends to be 'overestimate' or 'multiply the time you think by x', and honestly, those aren't bad answers.

Getting a feel for estimation is the hardest part of consulting, and it gets worse, as every customer is different. I've had customers who came in WAY under deadline (which is a problem, because it means I have empty calendar days and am not getting paid), and I've had customers in came in WAY over deadline (which is a problem, because it means I'm pushing back other obligations or start dates.) I tend to average somewhere around 'on time', but there's no magic bullet for it, and even if there was, the customer would likely either eat/break/object to your use of a magic bullet, or expect receive ownership of said bullet at the project's completion.

In the mechanical industry, this is mitigated by extensive knowledge of how long things take, and on averaging. If I call the local Jeep dealership, and ask how much it will cost to replace my transmission, they have a database they look in, which is effectively an average of how long transmission replacements have taken over the history of however long they've been replacing transmissions. They know the material cost, and they have a good average on the labor time (and of course they know the labor rate). They have experience in estimating that sort of work -- without it, their system would be largely useless.

Aside from that, until you get that experience, the best advice is the oft-submitted (multiply by 'x'), and make x as generous as you think you can get away with until you get some more estimating experience under your belt.
Bloglines to close
Nope. Vesting gives you the ability to purchase the shares. Once you leave a company, you typically have 30 days to purchase what you vested, else you surrender them back to the company.
Am in Singapore too!
Yes mean shift would do it nicely, heck most clustering methods should give good results - but I think they will need a paw model of some sort (even if it's just a basic template) to get up to the 98%+ accuracy levels.
Two UI suggestions:

- mouseover the section should display the popup, not just mouseover on the dot

- after a click on the dot, clicking anywhere else should close the popup

In addition, it wasn't immediately clear to me that zooming in would show more detail.

Very cool, great job.
I stand corrected (though the one I've used most myself -- Max -- isn't on Linux). I'm not a 3D artist; I just use 3D models in games, and so have only really looked at free options. Which, when I last looked, were somewhat shabby. I just want someone to make a decent but free 3D model editor that supports skeletal animation (sorry, Sketchup).

The remainder, however, are still unchallenged. Photoshop is considered unchallenged on the PC (though for what I do I like Corel PhotoPaint), so I think it would make quite a splash if it were challenged on Linux.
How did you learn Raphael? The documentation seems a little thin but I'd love to use it to build some graphs.
what's the difference between this and bit.ly?
Consumers can reverse credit card payments up to six months out.
If they don't ask you are under no obligation to volunteer.

As a rule though, those that have worked for start-ups and/or were founders will not normally go back to big-corp to do a 9 to 5, and in the age of google even if you don't disclose it you may be found out anyway.

Yes, that's illegal in plenty of places but it happens quite frequently regardless of that.
If they felt this way, it should've been negotiated in the severance agreement.

That's their problem; what HP actually wants is illegal in California. So they are trying to get the same thing in a different way. (And will likely fail, because hey, it's illegal.)
>>There is no conundrum. People simply don't want ketchup that isn't ketchup.

That IS the conundrum - why are people fine with mustard that's not mustard. Is there something inherent in the taste ? Can some tastes be universal and some customizable?
The bad deal/great deal scale made me wonder what that calculation is based on. Is there an explanation somewhere?
They probably also make a fortune on the interest accrued. I wonder if they defer to freezing accounts so easily is because they realize that it's easy money.
Neither here nor there, but I've found government programs that only fund people under 30 (Canada's Youth Employment Program) for enough that it would be foolish to look at anyone over-30 for a lot of positions.
As I understand it, with ISO's, the options generally need to expire within a small number of months after an employee leaves. Regardless of the particulars, in every case I'm familiar with (myself and friends), leaving the company requires you to exercise options or walk.

Vesting gives you the right to exercise. It doesn't do anything else for you.
That 5gb is 20gb on my vista 64 bit machine. I have tons of different 64bit, debug and release dlls. Could be from the fact that I have 3 different versions of studio installed? Anyway...it does not serve it's purpose, and only wastes user money - 20gb cost a lot on a latest SSD drive
You can buy before the IPO, but you won't have anywhere to sell them. Buying before IPO is risky because you may face taxes on the difference between the strike price and fair market value, but not be able to turn any of the paper profit into actual cash to pay the taxes.
You have a right to know why you're fired. You can't be fired for legally protected reasons. If you're fired for revealing your wage, your employer is in a lot of trouble.
Why are new pharmaceuticals so hard to bring to market?
google does many things well. customer service, not well at all. i had a torrid time dealing with them when i bought a nexus one when it launched.
Also if for some reason you would like to deploy debug version along with release. Normally you don't have to, but sometimes to inspect a problem on coworker's machine (say he's an artist, and the dll is some plugin for some editor) and then you end up with installing studio on his machine :(
I hope they are well stocked with smokes and not stun grenades when the snipers come looking. Lets hope they have cold-blooded pro as a perk too.
Because once you've worked for a 10-person startup, you'd be crazy to go back to working for "the man"
I think what isn't mentioned in this article are some of the unrealistic expectations posed from employers as to what a "skilled" software engineer is.

I have countless times seen job requirements demanding X+ years of some acronym when the technology has only been around for half of X.

Also, candidates are rejected by the people who interview them, each with a particular bias as to what they expect. Typically, a technical interviewer (i.e. fellow software engineer) will be heavily biased towards their own preferred technologies, philosophies or approaches. Anyone who doesn't share them with equal enthusiasm or depth of knowledge just isn't "skilled" enough.

Software people, and especially programmers have A LOT of ego, and it comes out especially strong when judging candidates.

I think startups probably do need an all star team to get off the ground and succeed. But once a company goes into operations mode, you need a mix of both stars and "average" programmers. The stars will probably tackle the new and untried while you also have a stable of people who don't mind doing the day to day boring maintenance bit without complaining too much.
Wheres the hand icon that lets you know you can drag the map for a better view? The tags at the end were cut off and it took me a second to realize I could drag the map.
Agreed. 10 years in Silicon valley, I have never had need to submit a cold resume for a decade. That includes 5 job changes including 3 startups.
At my company, bonuses are based on a standardized bonus earnings target. The target is unpublished, but the company keeps people updated on the approximate chance of the bonus meeting certain percentage benchmarks. Keeps people from being unpleasantly (or pleasantly) surprised by too great a degree.

When bonuses are paid out this way, I see them more as a way to sort of vary compensation based on market health, while still guaranteeing a fixed salary. They're performance incentives inasmuch as employees are compensated based partly on performance and partly on how well the industry is doing, making compensation market-driven in a loose sort of way.
Not if you are on SSD. Also not if you want VMWare image of the OS to run all simualtenously on the same machine
That sounds exactly like what I wrote about in 'the start-up from hell the other week'. Uncanny.
Ask HN: Where can I find someone who makes info-graphics?
Hey, I am interested in collecting data then having it displayed neatly in an info-graphic. Has anyone hired a designer to do this? If you have a recommendation feel free to pass it along with an example of their work. Thanks!
Great observations and advice! I guess as you say, one of the conclusions we have drawn so far is that the music industry is hard. There is simply not a lot of money there, and most of it is focused on a few big players like iTunes.

Nonetheless we have some fairly good ideas for how to grow the business and how to broaden it. So I guess you persuaded me to at least give it a fair chance.

Disregarding the meager financial returns so far one of the biggest highlights have been all the interesting opportunities that the project has created. It has resulted in a few collaborations and potential projects/consulting jobs already. So I guess that's one aspect of why it can be rewarding to not give up on a good idea/project too easily.
Thanks for the advice. Will look into it.
No, a country without a solid manufacturing base cannot stay dominant in the world forever. Manufacturing is not low tech; it is high tech, and requires extreme amounts of innovation in technologies like robotics, chemistry, automation, etc.

You can say everything will be digital and that's fine, but until we have nano machines replicating material goods, who's going to make the things we use every day, or the things that store all those digital bits?
To provide another example, there's reddit. Pop-up lightbox style. I've always appreciated it not taking me from what I was reading.
Wow, who designed that site? It's so pretty.
Newsday's iPad ad
The article clearly mentioned, "mobile operating system". iOS powers iphone, ipod, ipad, etc.

On a tangent, there hasnt been much talk about how the corporate policies have evolved since the smartphone era. I bet we will see companies rolling out custom android OS deployed on stock hardware such as EVO given out to employees, with restricted permissions and access.
What does that have to do with skills? The GGP wrote that your skills are not applicable, not that you'd be crazy (with that I agree).
It's not a real business if they can't find $10 in their budget for design work.
This is no guarantee. There is no standard lib library/dll on Windows. Not everybody would install it in system32, and sometimes it's compiled with flags the standard distribution is not.

On Linux at least people some how agreed that system version is for the better, and works there.
Not loading for me - Chrome, OSX.
Hmm... I can't see that being terribly useful. I think having it there as a default would be a distraction.

If anything, should be a button or something for "use my ip address". But I imagine the 95% use case being people with cloud servers, not trying to get a hostname for thier current computer's ip address.
Not loading for me as well - Safari 5.0.2, OS X
This is an honest question from a childless person: how much time does your 3rd grader spend doing math homework per night?

Naively, it seems reasonable to me that there is going to be a fraction of the necessary practice which must be done under the supervision of the teacher, and a fraction which can be done alone. Now, as people move up the academic ladder and, presumably, become better at teaching themselves, the amount of class time decreases and the amount of self-directed time increases.

At the 3rd grade level, where they spent 6-8 hours in class each day, it seems plausible that the correct amount of homework is roughly 30-60 minutes per night. It also seem plausible that the homework teaches a student not only the material, but also how to learn on their own.
It's also worth pointing out that if your goal is to be a Professional/Certified Engineer, AFAIK you must start with a university degree before you can even begin the certification process.
I'd also be interested in hearing how and why you do this.
Isn't it surprising that Android marketplace sucks too? I thought that would have been a point of pride for Google, but if anything it is worse than the iPhone.

But if you think about it, there is little in common between web search and app search. App searching really boils down to correct descriptions and quality reviews. You aren't just trying to find AN app, you are trying to find a good app. How do you do that without links? Reviews can be gamed, ratings can be gamed. The only thing that is objective are sales/downloads. Which means blockbusters rise to the top and new apps are buried. It isn't an easy problem.
It's pretty hard to buy an Android phone in Canada actually. I live in Montreal and I'm an iPhone 3G owner, and for the last month or so every time I walk by a phone kiosk in a mall, or a Bell or Rogers store, I ask if they sell Android phones. The answer is usually "No", but occasionally "Yes". I think Bell is the only company that actually let me look at an Android phone itself, all others have told me that I'd have to buy one without seeing it first.

It's almost like the carriers here are trying to hide the Android phones. Anyway, I am certain that low Android adoption in Canada has more to do with it being difficult to get than about consumer desire.

If a developer and nerd who knows about Android (me, for example) has a hard time buying one, think about the average consumer. There's no way an average Joe would buy an Android phone in Canada over an iPhone.
What's Next For Oracle?
I love that quote because his son went on to study politics and war anyways: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Quincy_Adams
... and then FSF changed the license. GCC is under GPLv3 now, no?