skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks so much, that's awesome to hear.

Collecting the venue data was definitely a bit of a challenge. We used a combination of publicly available seating charts, google earth (believe it or not) and our own transaction data. It's easy enough to get a rough idea of the section sizes/layout. Getting row counts and names was a bit tougher, and our transaction data was a big help there.
Well that was fast! It would seem the goal has already been met. Nothing more impressive than a strong community.
Houellebecq borrows from Wikipedia, never cites
If, like me, you're not sure which use of MVP he means, it's Minimum Viable Product.
Dare I say it? Good.

Bloglines has been a crappy product and user experience for years, and I honestly don't think that Google Reader is that much better (anymore -- used to be awesome).

I much disagree with the assertion that RSS is dead, or even that RSS aggregators are dead/dying; I just think that Bloglines (and others) have really crappy implementations of what a news reader ought to do. Frankly, I always though that treating RSS feeds as email was the wrong way to go.
If you don't mind sharing, what kind of position was it? My feeling is that being a founder and then going back to apply for an engineering job is difficult, but trying to go from founder to a "higher level" position the experience might be advantageous. A lot of upper managament positions are looking for people with technical background and P&L experience, now with a failed startup you have a lot of L experience but I think it would help.
We built a model that takes every seat in a stadium and assigns a fitted price to it ("fitted" in the econometric sense, meaning what the price should be for an average game). That's based on long-term historical transaction prices for each section and scaling factors for things like the row, number of tickets, angle to field, and some other inputs.

Then, for each ticket we compare the actual price to the fitted price and look at the deviation as a percentage of the fitted price, i.e. (acutal price - fitted price)/fitted price. The tickets with the biggest deviations are ranked as the best deals.

We certainly need to add an explanation of this to the site; thanks for the suggestion.
It didn't load for me either. It seems to be just that game though because this one worked for me. http://seatgeek.com/event/show/457428/green-bay-packers-at-p...
Depends on your way of hashing. If you're using linear chaining (basically, hashing a linked list of entries) you can get away with N buckets for N items if you have a good hash function. If you're using open addressing, you'll usually want your load factor (the ratio of filled slots to unfilled slots) not to be much higher than 2/3 or so. It may appear on the surface that open addressing uses more memory, but don't forget the overhead of linear chaining (an extra pointer for every element in the hash table, many more cache misses relative to a low-load open addressed table).
Do you guys plan on having data as granular as how many seats there are per row?
So would now (now that everyone has left the market except the winner) then be a good time to create a new, better, nextgen kind of RSS reader product (or something similar)? Something to disrupt Google Reader, the new market leader? Will the pendulum swing back from centralized (twitter, fb) to distributed (rss)?

Similar question: is podcasting ever going to go anywhere? Would now not be a good time to create a product for that market, now that it's been abandoned by everyone for a few years?

Or are both these technologies/markets evolutionary dead-ends, ie. never going to go anywhere anymore?

Edit: I did a quick mockup :) http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2010/09/10/4765/time-f...
If this were in another state that enforces post-employment non-compete agreements, and Mr. Hurd had signed such an agreement, then the $33 million would make a huge difference.

The problem here, though, is that the $33 million was presumably paid in connection with a broad settlement by which the parties mutually would have release all legal claims against one another. There is no formal non-compete obligation here (as this would be unenforceable under California law). Of course, part of the settlement is that Mr. Hurd honor its confidentiality terms by which he cannot disclose or misuse HP's trade secrets. That commitment, however, is governed by the California law that protects the employer from threatened breaches of that obligation upon a proper showing of evidence but that does not enable a court to block the employee from taking a position with a competing company simply based on the notion that he would inevitably disclose such trade secret information by virtue of the position he holds with the competitor.

The California law applies whether or not the employee has the ability to ride out a non-compete period in terms of earning a living. It is codified in the state's statutes and judges cannot make an exception based on the fact that a particular employee got well-paid on his departure (especially since the payment was not in fact given in exchange for a non-compete but for other reasons).
Cool shit..
Education is the most beneficial for those who can do the economic an social leap from a hard background (Kudos by the way). I would like to add that in college in a same major or field you are more likely to find people who are similar minded. Who knows your next co-founder could be sitting right next to you.
I'm not going to pile on college, or defend it for that matter, but I will make a couple observations.

First, if you just spent many years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars on something, it's going to be a great thing. This is "mountain climber" syndrome, which says that after you spend all that time and pain climbing the mountain, it's going to be the best experience ever.

Second, if the cost of college is rising faster than the cost of inflation, the question isn't is college worth it, the question is is college worth it so far. Because at some point it's not going to be worth it. The only question is when.

I'm a huge fan of education. Personally I wish that everybody had the equivalent of a 4-year degree in liberal arts before even starting on the rest of their education careers. But I think it's painfully obvious that the idea of college as being a simple ticket out of anywhere has gotten a lot more complex than it used to be. Lots of factors to weigh. Hard-working people who self-educate do well with or without college. Other folks may be thinking that college is giving them something that it isn't.

Not only is the cost an issue, but technology is moving so quickly that having a little stamp of approval isn't going to hold weight like it did even back forty years ago. If you're in the technology field and your degree is more than ten years old? You've got an ancient history degree, sadly.
It's very appreciated. Thank you very much.
This indicates that students from different SES should be taught differently, not that all students should be given an education that might help some statistical average, but doesn't necessarily help them personally.
There was an article in I think the Washington City Paper (probably not worth looking for it) a couple years ago about a couple of burglars who would just knock/ring the doorbell.
Also, I agree that it needs to be made more obvious that the "dots" appear in rows as you zoom in. Also, making the zoom work with the scroll wheel on a mouse would be key.
I don't understand how this objection would defeat the clause in question?
40-bit addressing is probably enough for a lot of applications that Intel isn't a significant player in yet, also -- like console gaming, streaming video, and that sort of thing. That would also explain the target 2.5 GHz clock speed, 8 cores, and media and vector instructions.

I'd also guess that limiting the addressing to 40 bits is partly for power consumption, as mentioned elsewhere.

You're probably right about not wanting to start an open fight with Intel, but it's hard to not see this as a shot across the bow, especially compared to Atom. If nothing else, it should make the competition between Atom and Bobcat more interesting :)
I agree that rubber ducking is a great technique. I also think that you can "have" both stress and the subjective affective state of happiness simultaneously.
Ask HN: Would an apprenticeship prepare you better than college?
In the old days, professions were taught through apprenticeships. A carpenter would teach a young person the craft in exchange for the labor of the person for a mutually agreed upon period of time. And completing this arrangement would give potential customers some assurance of competence.

Would this work for software development and how do you think it would compare versus the college experience?
Try this http://www.ProgrammerMeetDesigner.com
1. Great job! The one thing I found missing is zooming in and out with the mouse wheel.

2. I'm amazed how ridiculously better this is than the flash version :)

3. Thanks for letting me know about Raphaël - it looks like a very cool tool. I'll definitely toy with it now :)
If I recall correctly, the standard FSF copyright assignment form lets you choose between assigning copyright on a particular set of changes, or for all (present and) future changes.
Strange that you would pick that one. My school district has experienced a school shooting (with 1 fatality), threats by a crazy hater stockpiling weapons whose plan was foiled by local law enforcement, and a nutjob deliveryman who used a pellet gun to snipe at children waiting for the bus. I hate to say it, but sniper attacks have earned a justifiable place on my list of parental worries.
Open vs. closed is perhaps misleading, but at the very least it's obvious that MS targeted high-volume sales with Windows while Apple targeted low-volume sales with the Mac / Mac OS. Apple built in a huge profit margin on its end-to-end system, putting it out of reach of much of the market. MS built in a smaller per-unit profit on its OS, but since the incremental cost of software is negligible this put them in a much better position since increased volume increases their profit margin almost without limit.
"You don't have any choice but to drudge along."

You don't have any choice but to drudge along, but you have a lot of choice in what you do with the rest of your time. Start knocking on doors and you'll find a lot of receptive people for all kinds of things. And you'll find part of the reason they're so receptive is that nobody is ever knocking on their doors....

I'm strongly of the opinion that conventional universities are all but doomed on the 20-year timeframe, and I am of the opinion that it will broadly be a gain, but I do not deny that we will lose some things. This is one of them. But already virtually nobody takes advantage of this, so I can't find it in myself to cry to much about it. (Can't say I did as much as I could have, either.)
Ask HN: Should you pay your formal advisors?
As an early startup with little revenue, should you pay your formal advisors? If so, how much?
Well, I would dispute the numbers then. It doesn't look at all like the iPod touch is really given consideration.

I could see that if Dell was a bigger android player, but it really takes a vendor with sales / support leading the charge. HP would be a probable except for the Palm purchase.
Herb Sutter's Effective Concurrency columns
Did they let you get away with it? I've failed a college course based simply on the fact that I got As and Bs on tests but didn't do homework.
Do you account for seats behind pillars etc? How about asking people to enter their height and then discounting seats behind tall people? :-P
I think I get it, so when you said "shell out some cash to keep your exposure to the company's upside" you mean buy the options for the value you were granted them (the "strike price" I think). Is that right?
Eh, a lot of the complaints just strike me as not understanding a tool in terms of its context; Objective-C is, intentionally, a strict superset of C, so it carries a lot of baggage in order to not break C code. It predates most of what we now think of as C++. It managed to bring Smalltalk-style dynamic messaging to C in a manner that wasn't insanely slow and didn't depend on heavy-weight virtual machines.

Are Python's dictionaries syntactically a bit cleaner? Sure. But Python is much newer and had the advantage of not having to maintain compatibility with a vast corpus of C code, and not having to care about achieving very very very good native code run-time performance on very resource limited machines.

It's just a tool. One that makes a completely different set of tradeoffs than, say, Python (Python might win in terms of cleanliness of dictionary syntax, but it's orders of magnitude less suitable for bringing high-level, dynamic OO to low-resource programming). The people who whine that these Apples aren't Oranges and that they refuse to do work in anything that isn't citrus-flavoured strike me as having come to rely too heavily on familiar crutches to truly learn to appreciate the other advantages that can be found in tools that make different trade-offs.
Here in the UK the iPhone is on all carriers and 20% of the market is Android.
Ollila has stated that he will also exit after a short transition period.

The analysts think that it will happen in Spring 2011 at Nokia's Annual General Meeting.
It's a rather thing wrapper around SVG (I don't mean any disrespect with that statement), so learning SVG is a good start.
Seems to be a caching bug, we've redeployed and all is no longer lost :) Please try again, we definitely appreciate finding edge-cases like these.
but I don't consider farmville gameplay fun which I think the previous commenters were also implying.
Thanks for the shout-out!

Unfortunately, we don't do international (non- U.S.) transactions...yet
no, but paypal wanted me to scan some form of identification to prove my identity. since my driver's license is expired and i'm no longer living in california, all i have is a paper driver's license that they mailed me, so i use my passport for identification purposes. if i am ever traveling in a foreign country in the future, it will be useful to have a digital copy of my passport in case i lose it and have to deal with embassy issues. i have not requested the dmv mail me a new driver's license since the picture was taken when i'm 15 and the inevitable "you look so different!" conversations are kinda lame
Paypal is a bank in Europe, as stated. I was one of those who lobbied to
achieve this. I was burned by this odious outfit more than five years
ago. You don't get two chances with someone else's money in their
lifetime.

You can't be a bank "in nominal terms only" in Europe. Once registered
as a bank you are bound by EU and Member State laws. There's no
sidestepping that. Governments can't sidestep them.

The fact that Paypal is registered as a bank in a European Member State
means that they must abide by these laws and the regulation that goes
with it.

Remember, loser pays in European courts. So when a bank steps outside
the law, it will be liable for costs and "damages". It is not in their
interests to break or even "stretch" the law.

Regardless, I wouldn't do business with Paypal if you paid me. Well,
perhaps I would, but pay it straight to my bank, and not via Paypal.

P.S. My fight goes on: this week I have been active again in the
European Parliament with MEPs fighting to get the appalling ACTA spiked.
Something we should all be aware of and striving to kill.
Thanks for the suggestions.

Mouseover on the whole section is definitely nicer but unfortunately it caused some performance problems in IE (rendering a ton of paths is slow). Hopefully we can figure out a more performant way of doing that.

One disadvantage of closing the popup on any click is that you might want to drag the map with the popup open, though it would be nice to not have to click the 'x'. Certainly something to consider.
Hmm, the SSD is a good point. I don't think my interactive desktop usage is very often CPU-bound, which is one reason I don't notice much difference between the older and newer machines I own. But an SSD might make some difference, because I'm guessing some stuff (esp. app startup) is I/O-bound.

I do often take a software approach to speeding things up, though. For example, my solution to Firefox taking a few seconds to start up was to switch to Chrome. ;-) And thanks to the amazing JS compiler advances over the past few years, my old laptop runs JS much faster today than it did when it was new!
OAuth Sign-in Controllers for iOS and Mac OS X Applications
Awesome job guys
I guess this is the literary equivalent of "sampling".
filed under "useful but morally grey." It makes me wonder though would people be satisfied? It seems that there is always something shinning but you are not to grasp it ever. I don't think I could work this way if I were in such situation I would probably quit. I do understand though that there are constraints that keep such mechanism at work, but what can we do about it?
Where to learn Ruby on Rails
I have no technical or programming background/education.

Where's the best & quickest place for me to go to learn Ruby on Rails?

Thanks in advance.
http://snail.dustincurtis.com/ is one such app. I don't recall seeing any revenue numbers on it though.
This is slightly toungue-in-cheek but why can't all of the actual manufacturing be outsourced? Why not? Corporations do it successfully, why can't countries specialize in design just like they used to specialize in certain crops?
This is always how I've done arithmetic. It falls naturally out of the distributive property you learn in algebra, so it makes a lot of sense to teach kids this early, I think.
Right. If you don't give the company (say) a couple thousand bucks when you leave, you're going to be walking away from your equity grant forever.
Good devs, sweet devs, let me not stir you up

To such a sudden flood of flame-baiting.

They that have written this post are honourable:

What private griefs they have, alas, I know not,

That made them do it: they are wise and honourable,

And will, no doubt, with reasons answer you.

I come not, devs, to steal away your hearts:

I am no web guru, as Sarah is;

But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man,

That "get" the Walled Garden; and that they know full well

That gave me public leave to speak of them:

For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,

Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech,

To stir devs' blood: I only speak right on;

I tell you that which you yourselves do know;

Show you Apple's app sales, tall tall stack'd bills

And bid them speak for me: but were I Sarah,

And Sarah user Towle_, there were a user Towle_

Would alter your thinking and expose the methods

To all the madness of Apple that should move

The foes of the iPhone to rise and applaud it.
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,

You'd be amazed how things change when you get into your 30's and start having kids. ;)
Your first step should actually be to learn Sinatra (http://sinatrarb.com). It's less "magic", and will help you get your head around what's going on. Then, after that, Michael Hartl's free online Rails Tutorial (http://railstutorial.org). Also, although some of the older ones are dated, the screencasts at http://railscasts.com are great.
Did a mockup for a new type of reader: http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2010/09/10/4765/time-f... Probably a dumb idea :)
"I can't control a drunk that decides to cross four lanes of traffic, so beyond driving defensively, I don't worry about that."

You can control that risk in a vague, statistical fashion just by driving around less. Of course, you have to cost-benefit that against certain lifestyle choices, but there are actual tradeoffs that would be affected by this. For instance, the actual risk of a child getting abducted on public transit is probably a lot less than the risk of the child getting killed in a car accident, but most parents ignore the car accident risk and drive their kids around instead of letting them take the bus[1]/train/subway/monorail.

[1] Trains in particular, but even buses are likely safer--they're driven by professionals who tend to drive more slowly and conservatively. They also have a higher profile so other vehicles are more likely to see them, and on many buses, passengers are elevated above bumper height. It seems like an ordeal to get the statistics on buses together, though, so if it makes it more convenient for you to understand my point, you can just pretend I didn't mention anything about buses.
Not the main point, but why would google.com search list google.com in the results for "Search engine"? You're at google already, so it isn't really a helpful result.
Wow, on target already. Congrats Rayne! Wish I was attending :)
I don’t care about your corporate perks
Does not compute. Linux too uses dynamic shared libraries, and you can also link programs to a specific version of a .so, or bind it with your binary distribution (see Firefox, Chrome), such binding posing problems to distributions : Debian just dropped chromium from Squeeze exactly because of that.
I live in Nashua. I think we're still ranked 27th safest city in the US.
Right now we are in a period of flux and I am willing to bet that 20 years down the lines. You will have USA based automated manufacturers that do just this. Right now, due to misalignment of interests manufacturing has shifted to other countries, but the world can't be a sweat shop too long. So, the reverse trend will start kicking in sooner or later to equilibrium.

Moreover, unilateral hegemony is something that no country will be able to maintain in this system. Earlier the British were "outsourcing" their work to the colonies and getting raw materials from them at substantially cheaper costs. Today, we have moved beyond that and instead you have entities existing in different pieces of land to get the optimal yield.

So, in this interconnected world those realities are harder to maintain. What lies ahead is anyones guess, but something fascinating is happening around us and we are witnessing the start of a huge shift that no one can predict right now. The times they are a-changin'.
Why do you want to learn RoR?

If this is for a single project that you have in mind...better off to outsource the development or partner with a developer & focus on marketing, sales and other revenue generating

If you want to become a programmer, check out book "Learn to Program" by Chris Pine. Be warned though, its not just RoR you will need to learn but also database design, HTML, CSS, JavaScript at the very minimum before you will really be able to do anything.
Depends on your talents.