skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was researching button colouring the other day and contrary to expectation red is actually normally more clicked on than green (yes, despite the go-stop metaphor).

Depends of course on specific implementations but might be worth trialling shades of red down to white (best down to worst).
In my opinion, Apple & the carriers are on the same side of this fight. Who controls your phone? The user or some big corporation?

The difference between Apple & the carriers is that Apple is far more competent in its control, carefully avoiding short term gains at the expense of long term gains. Locking crappy adware apps into your phones is an obvious long term mistake that Apple would never make.

Being more competent, Apple is much more dangerous.
it is, but you have to walk a bit farther from the main road :)
And, like I just said, table sugar breaks down into fructose during digestion, and "HFCS" isn't "HF" compared to "all other sweeteners"; it's "HF" compared to plain corn syrup, which is unpalatable.

HFCS alarmism is knee-jerk wishful thinking from people who want to blame some boogeyman industrial process for all the nation's health problems. The problem is our addiction to sweetness. HFCS obviously abets this by making it cheaper to sweeten things, but get rid of HFCS and it'll just get replaced with some other sugar. Sugar is bad for you.

http://www.ama-assn.org/ama1/pub/upload/mm/443/csaph3a08-sum... -

The primary difference is that these monosaccharides exist free in solution in HFCS, but in disaccharide form in sucrose. The disaccharide sucrose is easily cleaved in the small intestine, so free fructose and glucose are absorbed from both sucrose and HFCS.
I interviewed with Google for a SRE position earlier this year and their screening process sure is tedious: Lots of grilling on obscure UNIX trivia and data structures/algorithms but nothing on the broader picture, like how to write good, maintainable software. I like nerding about graph traversal algos as much as the next guy, but not for 90 minutes on the phone after a long day of work.

I'm sure the screening process filters out duds but it's bound to generate a lot of false negatives as well. People that would otherwise be a perfect fit but who get fed up with the interminable interviewing or simply don't do well under that kind of stress (for me it was both).
Is this the Haystack that forced 37signals to change Haystack's name to Sortfolio?
I didn't "forget" about it, I contend that case is already handled by GB; "one child is a boy and one child is a girl" is the same as "one child is a girl and one child is a boy" and can be expressed as either GB or BG, making GB and BG equivalent.
Android is only free of carrier abuse if you're geeky enough. However, Apple is only free of carrier abuse if you're affluent enough. The average joe is getting shafted either way. (Though, to continue the class theme, note how offended people are that it's NASCAR apps that they can't uninstall, as opposed to the stock market apps they can't uninstall from Apple). Remember when Sony charged more to remove the junk they themselves put on their machines? The subsidies earned by these bits of software lowered the price for those who would struggle to afford them otherwise and for the geeks who repave as an automatic response, similar to how people spending at the overpriced hotel minibar reduce the room prices for everyone else.

If this is actually considered important for folk in the US, then they're going to have to stop the Apple fanboys in the media using it as a stick to beat Google with and face up to the reality that Apple has failed to change the carrier business model too, just as Google's Nexus One failed. I seem to recall that just like the Nexus One, the iPhone was supposed to be sold direct to consumers at the full unsubsidized price.
Thanks. I haven't seen many published accounts by SecDB. When I joined, there was literally zero. I now note there are some descriptions on Wilmott and the like. Seems like word is seeping out. All of my description is on the Web in bits and pieces.
Invent the internet.
Please.... No more acronyms... I can't take any more...
VoltDB is focused on mutating an in-memory dataset at ultra-high speed with full transactions and ACID.

SciDB is focused on analyzing petabytes of scientific data in array form, where people care about things like data provenance and accumulated error bounds.

Almost polar opposites in use, but similar in philosophy. Both believe specialized systems are the way to handle specialized workloads.
Meaning that you received offers?
> It's very much a British (actually English) idea that countries are eternal and inviolate.

France is pretty nationalistic too, no? They're one of the harshest countries in Europe in terms of minority languages, if I recall correctly.
Yesterday I gave a friend's Galaxy S a spin and was mighty impressed. It's light as a feather, the screen is gorgeous and it's an order of magnitude more responsive than my old iphone 3G. I was all set to buy an iphone4, but samsung's device game me pause. So I asked about the apps. What good stuff was there on the Android Market? "Well", he started, "there really isn't one, because the carrier doesn't allow it. I just get the apps my carrier lists on its website". I think that's preposterous, so as impressed as I am with the Galaxy S, I'm afraid I'll be sticking with Apple's product (I live in Portugal... experience will probably vary from carrier to carrier and country to country).
another excellent product originating in Finland

not sure why you got downvoted...
They're rebranding it to "sugar". Good for them. Sugar is the problem. Singling out HFCS actually does everyone a disservice, by making them think that if they just seek out "HFCS-free" foods they'll be fine. No they won't.
They aren't diametrically opposed. They are different aspects of the same thing.

At the end of the day, it's all just tables. NoSQL gives you one table and all sorts of scalability and robustness and tools for working with that table. RDBMSs give you many tables, and all sorts of robustness and scalability and tools for working with those many tables, and for putting them together in interesting ways to get answers to your questions.

NoSQL allows for much greater scalability for your one table because it doesn't have to assume you are doing anything too complicated with it. Usually, you just want a few records at a time. That can be made fast, even if there are billions or trillions of other records, and they do make it fast.

RDBMSs trade that sort of scalability for the ability to easily ask very very complicated questions and get answers reasonably quickly.

And here's this guy in the article talking about RDBMSs with column oriented tables instead of row oriented tables. And then he bashed MapReduce, which is about transforming data, and has nothing to do with tables or storing and retrieving data. So NoSQL and RDBMSs are not diametrically opposed. Talking about them is like comparing apples and oranges, which are both fruit, but not equivalent. Throwing MapReduce in there is like comparing apples and oranges and blenders.
Twilio Slashes Prices As It Looks To Further Boost Growth
How about 'Reliability'. Their API is constantly changing in what seems like random ways, and after updates there are always a couple weeks where everything is incredibly flaky.
Heh it was written by somebody with a PHD in Physics or so.. but my point was that a lot of highly intelligent people are loosely paid (for example think about a lot of post-doc positions in academia) while some other less educated people get a lot of money it seems..
Metaconginiton or as the author calls it, "thinking about thinking" sounds like intelligence to me.

Self-control is mentally controlling yourself. It takes an active, thinking, controlled mind to put off what is self-indulgence now for one's own greater good. This may be subjective but I find that most intelligent people are self-controlled by definition.
I do believe that Narcissism is worse today, but I have a hard time believing that the Y'ers are any more narcissistic than the X'ers and the Boomers. If anything, society as a whole has shifted.

I have a somewhat different perspective, perhaps, because I see a lot of this is the various churches, where what is said in the pulpit is more and more about the preacher than about the message. Thing is - almost all of them are X'ers and Boomers.
Over popularity...
Some examples of the extreme fake tan style that peaked around 2000 (ganguro): http://www.yopress.com/japanese/japanese-style-extreme-tanni...
Trying to eliminate what I consider "bad" foods from my diet is becoming harder as the producers change the name. I really don't care if it has been proved beyond a shadow of a doubt to be bad - because that process took over 100 years for tobacco. I want X out of my life, I should be allowed to detect items containing X.
(From my comment on another thread)

VoltDB is focused on mutating an in-memory dataset at ultra-high speed with full transactions and ACID.

SciDB is focused on analyzing petabytes of scientific data in array form, where people care about things like data provenance and accumulated error bounds.

Almost polar opposites in use, but similar in philosophy. Both believe specialized systems are the way to handle specialized workloads.
I see, and I agree, both terms are overly broad.
"The reason they chose to hack instead of watch movies goes to the heart of what really separates people with self-control from people without it."

I hate stuff like this. When people say that their being is the only right thing.
Good. Now that it's easier to say, maybe it'll be easier to get people to rally against it.
"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Was is the correct tense there. The current round of bank bailouts have been pretty crippling. We aren't quite Iceland or Greece but we are up to our necks in debt.
First off, the Outer Richmond is a pretty boring place to live. There is some stuff to do (it's better than the outer sunset...gah!), but not nearly as nice as living closer in.

As for mexican food...you tried two chain restaurants. People here (generally) don't eat at chains. I don't know where you were when you tried them, but if it's the outer richmond then you aren't likely finding good mexican. The mission is (oddly enough) packed full of very yummy taquerias. It's where the latino population lives and all.

Cost of living. It depends on what you want I guess. I had a place in the inner richmond that was $1675 for a 700ish sq foot place. It was perfect for a single guy. It was cramped for me, my girlfriend, and 3 cats. It was in a great location too. Now I pay $2200 to live in a huge loft in SoMA with a parking spot in the garage. Love the location. Check craigslist to see how housing prices are in the city (and surrounding area actually).

Coming from DC, food is the thing that I notice as being more expensive. Not necessarily at safeway...it's about the same, but restaurants are more expensive. Lunch out for me in the DC burbs was $6.50 or so (Potbelly, Baja Fresh, etc.). Here it's $10, but there aren't any chains around. Similar pricing happens for dinner. In DC (again at chains in the burbs mostly) I'd spend around $20 a meal. Here the average is probably $30. Not huge, but noticeable.

On the plus side, my gas and electric bill is super cheap. We pay $35-$45 a month for electricity and gas. Part of that is having huge west facing windows so we don't ever have to turn on the heat even in the winter. The other part is obviously not having A/C. My condo in virginia averages $161 a month for the year...I save a ton on electricity/gas here.

Cable cost the same. Renter's insurance is about the same. Car insurance is higher, but not unbelievably so (at least for me), gas is in the $3.15ish range right now per gallon.

If you have specific questions let us know and I'm sure someone will chime in.
I've seen this increasing trend of narcissism with each generation in professional settings. Usually that narcissism comes with a healthy sense of entitlement, and it is a very disturbing trend.

I've seen countless Gen Yers who work in consulting firms who have no sense to put themselves in the customer's shoes.

They think it's OK for them to be taking personal calls and browsing Facebook in front of a client who is paying their firm $200/hr ("who cares what they think, as long as I'm getting my work done" is the most popular response). When they are customers, however, they have no problem berating a Starbuck's barista for taking 30 seconds too long to make their $3 latte.

Seems like every conversation I have with my peers from GenX inevitably degrades into a rant about how annoying it is to manage this new generation of workers. Maybe we're just turning into cranky old geeks, I don't know.
What are Zynga's weaknesses? Every one of them hits Facebook, because of the huge proportion of revenue FB gets from Zynga (and businesses which are Zynga-with-worse-execution).
Actually I think the opposite. Google and MS will exert more control over carriers. MS in particular.

The problem with Apple is that they signed an exclusivity agreement with a single carrier. I'm sure that if Google told Verizon, "The only place an Android phone will be for the next four years is Verizon", Verizon would jump through hoops for them.

But by getting the phone on all carriers, yet still doing 90% of what Apple is doing on a single carrier is impressive.

And MS has taken this a step further with the hardware requirements and no skinning, and one centralized market. Yet, they're doing this across all carriers.
A lot of US companies put their HQ in Ireland because, they speak English (mostly), they have very low corporation tax and lots of golf courses - the Irish government also did an excellent job of marketing Irish-American links.

Unfortunately as soon as the EU cracked down on the corporation tax scams, eastern europe became cheaper and US companies cut back on golfing holidays they realized they didn't actually have an economy.
But it was a great place to work for 10years - as long as you didn't buy a house!
The problem is that while they're happy to sell you 5GB, they will do pretty much anything and everything they can to make sure you don't actually use 5GB.
its groupon
This sounds like a very zero-sum model. Do you know, that dollars don't get destroyed by spending them? (And that this doesn't even matter, because it's wealth creation that matters (supply) and not demand?)
It's now up to $91,400 (http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,...).

Plus if your income is in, say, Europe, it's effectively all excluded, because you can offset the European taxes (which are usually higher) one-for-one against U.S. taxes, ending up owing nothing.
Palm design VP Joins Nokia as VP of Ux for MeeGo
Exactly. The process is designed to reduce false positives. The downside is there will be some false negatives.

It is not 100% accurate and it can take months to get through the process, but if we do it right we will be spending years together. So, it is worth the investment in time.

Don
Off-topic: Is it common to get paid every fortnight in America?
I don’t think local government contradicts freedom of movement. It seems to me that both is possible, with little federal oversight. The biggest problem is inequality – the EU is perfectly happy to open the borders between its very similar member states but will vigorously protect its outer border.
IBM Chief Slams H-P
Very interesting, thank you. This is the most concise description of this product that I have yet seen.
It has intermittent latency too. The new "like" button doesn't work right on FireFox either.
Google "fantasy investing" to find a good online trading simulator and then trade, trade, trade. Nothing compares to trading a real portfolio with "play money". Books are good for teaching basics about stock research but they don't teach you about your own psychological biases, risk tolerance, individual stocks' trading volume, etc.

At the same time, subscribe to some financial channels on YouTube (like Peter Schiff's for example) and watch them every day. Whenever you hear something you don't understand, read up on it. It'll take time but it will be worth it. (Just make sure you don't end up with all-bull or all-bear channels, like I said you want to keep your own emotional biases in check).
I wonder what http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/ would have to say about this article.
I agree with the main arguments. Although as others pointed out this is mostly an american problem (though it still occurs abroad, but less so).

But I find this argument naive:
"But this pipe dream is being crushed quickly. The carriers, after giving up ground initially, are fighting back. They are using Android’s openness against the company."

The point is: if Google hadn't done that, the carriers may very well not have supported it. Let's remember that although now we consider Android a strong contender, at the time Android was neither that strong, nor the only contender. I'd be ready to bet that other carriers supported Android as much to hurt Apple as because they knew they could control it.

Personally I'd go as far as to say that Google developed Android the way they did fully aware that this could happen: the bottom line is that Google doesn't make money from Android, and as nobody holds the market in the palm of their hand Google is happy... even though it may mean basically subsidising other companies fight against Apple (at the time).
Don't despair. Engineering is a nice lifestyle -- you can work at any size company, you can travel if you want, and you can switch to independent consulting or join a consultancy if you want. You can do a startup at any time, too; engineers create things people want. I don't know of any other background that will give you as much flexibility with your career.

Sudden jumps in income tend to stress people out; the key to happiness is a gradual lifelong rise in income, so you're always comfortable. Engineering will accomplish that for you. Personally, I felt like I'd solved the "money problem" with my first two engineering jobs -- there was nothing I wanted that I couldn't easily afford, and I liked the ratio of business trips to staying at home.
I am the CTO of Zeo - we make a single channel dry EEG product for sleep phasing (www.myzeo.com). This is a fascinating project and the discussion around it has been really fascinating for me - we are thinking about many of the same issues.
We had Zeo 'hacked' last fall - and decided to embrace the trend. We hired the hacker - a Cornell student - on as an intern and had him help us write libraries to open up the platform. The Zeo Raw Data Library is in beta now - check out more details here:

http://developers.myzeo.com/

So we took the open approach and can't wait to see what cool (and strange!) things people use the platform for. This was an easier decision for us since we sell to consumers (for sleep - not EEG per se) and don't have a big research business to cannibalize (like Emotiv) - I certainly understand and respect their point of view on the matter.
If anyone wants early access to the API sign up and let us know you want early access when you do. We have a forthcoming grant program as well - we will be giving out a bunch of free product to whomever suggests the coolest uses - email me ben@myzeo.com for more info.
Mdda is right. What was perhaps intended as a cautionary tale instead became a recruiting anthem. After reading Liar's Poker, I wanted to be right there with the Human Piranha hearing him say 'the fing frogs are going to fing get f*cked!' The swaggering cowboy-ness of the whole thing was so tempting, as was the untrammeled greed. Who wouldn't want to be a Big Swinging Dick?

It seemed like such a different, more exciting world than the petty, effete, and monastic world of academia.

Incidentally, Lewis' column on Bloomberg is the best read on the terminal, in my opinion. His writing is among the best reading anywhere, in my opinion. My piece is obviously a riff on Liar's Poker. I'm only poking along on his well-trodden ground.

Now...you know what would be a unique? A Liar's Poker for startups. That hasn't really been written yet (that I know of). Hmm...there's an idea...;)

Actually, on second thought, Kaplan's 'Startup' might be that. I re-read it again recently, and it's starting to sound a bit dated though.
I thought the "High Fructose" was an earlier attempt to make it sound good to the consumer.

Fructose = fruit,
fruit = good,
therefore "High Fructose" = good
Sarcasm is a subset of irony.
I wasn't worried about paying them too much for Appointment Reminder, but I certainly won't refuse getting a few hundred bucks knocked off my expense projections.

Now if I can only get to paying them $10k a month to get the bulk rate... crosses fingers
Note that running the Adobe Flash Player uninstaller may not disable Flash in Google Chrome (which integrates a separate Flash). You need to use the 'chrome://plugins' manager to disable that Flash Player. See here for details:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=1095...
This comment may offend some bloggers, but I think anyone writing something that starts with a warning about how it might offend people is simply writing it for the shock value.
This is what annoys me so much about AT&T and their data plans that don't allow tethering without an additional fee. You should either restrict what I can do (e.g. no tethering on basic "unlimited" plans... I understand that) or meter what I use and charge appropriately. Doing both just seems greedy and wrong.
A Conversation With Loopt's Sam Altman
There may be some upside to renounce a citizenship to do with avoiding extradition. But unless you plan to get involved in criminal investigations, it's probably not worth it.

If America would get a draft again, could a dual citizen be drafted?
I love this article and after working nearly five years in big brand advertising, I have to agree that the startup way is the better way. Ad agencies may not be identical to Goldman, they have their own fallacies mind you, but the big lumbering giant feeding money does sound quite familiar.
Ask HN: Are any of you using Windows Azure?
If so, what's your opinion of it? (Especially curious to hear about SQL Azure experiences)
Yeah, but it's been what, 60 years since they stopped trying to invade each other? I don't think it's a foregone conclusion either, but I think it's definitely the trend the EU is on.
You make it sound easy. Apple would have loved for nothing more than having their phone on every carrier. But at the time they were a nobody in the mobile arena, and not only was their phone a huge departure but they also wanted to keep the look and feel untouched and have the carrier implement some ad hoc changes for things like visual voicemail.

By the time Google had to make a deal, Verizon was seeing their customers moving to AT&T and needed something to rival the iPhone. Before the iPhone Verizon is said to have told Apple that its contract (to have a Verizon iPhone) were not acceptable. I doubt Verizon would have replied like that had the roles been inverted.

Anyway, the exclusivity will hopefully end soon. What will be your stance at that point?
A study by UC Davis also found that fructose causes more intra-abdominal fat buildup (around the organs) relative to glucose.
Apparently also causes man-boobs.

The paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2673878/?tool=pu...

highlights: http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/goodbye-fructose.h...
Whenever I read about these interviews, I get the impression that they are designed for recruiting students - that is, they are loaded with theory and don't test experience.
Blocking the Market is something Google really should put a stop to. I've never seen this, though, myself. Then again, buy unlocked and it's not a problem

Still, if you you liked the phone, then get one via another carrier.
Overheard in Startups