skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're removing your rear from the seat while leaning forward, then maybe. The point of squatting, besides the angle of the innards involved, is the pressure on your bum. Leaning forward, or raising your feet of the ground, as is mentioned, won't decrease the pressure. That motion is more likely to increase the pressure. There are a number of articles regarding this rectal pressure as it contributes to hemorrhoids. IANAD...just my 2 cents.
Freemium ;) it's currently an option on the table. Thanks for saying it tho.
How safe is offshore drilling really?  The answer keeps changing.
It is a known issue with Google Chrome that Google is addressing. See: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9182918/Gmail_promo_f...
It gets harder, because you have lots more overhead managing all those new people and their tasks. But in general, if you hire well, a team can do more than one person can.
Geez, I didn't know that linking to Reddit from the Digg front page was that big of a deal.
That's a very old scam. It's also a very old article (2007!) It's still happening though.

As a rule: if you didn't initiate the transfer, it's bogus.
Flash games vs. the box office
What tool do you use to build an optimal syntax for all your needs?
This is the final straw. I've been considering convincing my work to switch to git + GitHub, but I've just written up my proposal and I'm pitching it tomorrow, this is too awesome to pass up.
you mean read > 50 comments ? Sorry but no. But thanks for the update tho ;)
Well, I had a more holistic open source agreement in mind. In such an agreement any configuration information should be included with the source code. Also any custom hardware should also be specified and all rights provided as part of the agreement.

Regardless of how incidental the software is, if the software and configuration is all open source, then it is always possible for a talented engineer or group thereof to pick up the services where the previous contractor leaves.
I always thought the vast majority of apps that are bought are games. Palm hasn't shown how they are going to compete in this arena...
It seems like there is a lot of interest in the "idea hub" concept. I actually first envisioned Almost Startup this way, but never found time to execute it. It began as a wiki, then a Wordpress MU installation, and then I finally decided to just ship it as a Posterous blog. The "idea hub" could start out as simply as a group blog and then transition over to something more substantial if there is interest.
I spent a couple years in South Korea a number of years ago and challenged myself to squat as the natives did. It didn't take long to achieve full heel contact with the ground but I never felt entirely balanced.

FWIW I found regular sitting toilets in most homes and establishments that I visited. The "squatter" was actually not common in the parts I traveled (25 years ago and mostly in Seoul). I think I used one twice in 2 years.
Housing bubble was caused by mortgages, not houses.

Higher Ed bubble is caused by student loans, not degrees.

So this whole argument about "you can't sell your degree" is BS.

These educational loans are pooled together and sold as asset backed securities.

So, yes, if you have student loans, your degree can be sold, but probably not by you.
Nearby Friends: First Google Map with Facebook Places
I agree and should have been much less implicit in my argument. Perhaps state universities once (< 80's) charged very little because they (1) got lots of money from the government with the mandate of providing affordable education and (2) students didn't have access to grants/loans to pay more anyway.

Now, the "price" is higher (which is used to create the graphs in the linked article), but the effective cost for the student hasn't increased quite as proportionally because he has a government voucher to use.

Greatly oversimplified, I know. We understand what someone means when he talks about the average price of a gallon of gas at a gas station, but we don't have a common definition for the "price" of education. Out of pocket not counting grants/scholarships? Do we discount the cost if the loans are at a below-market rate because of government guarantees?

Heck, even the gallon of gas "price" is hard to define. Marathon gives me back 5% on gas purchased with my Marathon card. What's my average price per gallon?
Software Estimation mentions some interesting research on team size versus calendar months to implement a project of fixed size. The upshot is that a team of 2 does work faster than a single person. A team of 3-4 works a bit faster still. A team of 5-7 works slightly faster. And then teams go slower!

You get back to the same territory at around 20 developers, and after that productivity scales smoothly. (Albeit with horrible productivity per person.)

This real-world data confirms and quantifies the observation made decades ago in The Mythical Man-Month that as a flat team grows, the overhead for communication grows as the square of the team size, while the effort available grows only linearly. There are techniques to organize teams in a more structured way to avoid this pitfall. But the drawback is that the necessary procedures, documentation, etc significantly reduce individual productivity.

Oh, and to this add the fact that any time you hire more people you have to accept a temporary drop in productivity as that new person comes up to speed. I don't have a figure for programmers, but for general office work a month is standard. And I'm sure from anecdotal evidence that programming is worse. Much worse.

On top of this, as I'm sure you know, the more code debt you have, the slower it becomes to implement new features, and the more risk you have when you do so. Plus you're setting the foundation for an environment that the best programmers simply will not wish to work in. What is the cost of that?

There needs to be a balance. You can't try to create pristine code. But don't discount the costs of a poor foundation, and don't plan on being able to hire past its limitations. That way lies disaster.
I just tried it out. It seems slow, clunky, and often unresponsive.
I think it's something that not only has legs in terms of scratching our (collective, it seems :)!) itches, but has the potential to be pretty big. I've started hacking on it in Django a few times, only to be waylaid by other stuff and having to set it aside.

I might write up a big blog post when I get the time detailing how it'd work in my head, and see if it can be expanded from there.

I'll keep an eye on Almost Startup too; I really like the concept and it looks like an interesting hub :).
Large parts of the tech press probably aren’t happy that they can now pay much more attention and do critical and profound write ups afterwards.

They're journalists. Their job is to gather information. I'd be surprised if the only way a site like Ars Technica or TUAW could get information is by waiting for a stream from Apple. The point of videos is for everyone else who isn't a journalist and didn't get invited to a special event. Not to help journalists do their work.
Doesn't YC target people like us, as opposed to the mainstream?
Recursive search in Google Maps
Google Maps is not just for looking up directions and "coffee". It gets more interesting when you can use it for some sort of business intelligence experiments with Google's location data. Let me know what you think.
"Booz Allen Hamilton, another outside contractor, handled the negotiations with Hewlett-Packard for the military."

They can't even do their own negotiating. How impotent.
I haven't seen it yet...interesting.
Video Converter for Mac can convert all types of video files
Video Converter for Mac can convert all types of video files (avi, mov, mp4, flv, mpeg, etc.) to the proper video formats (MPEG-4, MOV, MP4, MPG, FLV, H.264) on Mac OS X
If they were resumes, Apple would get the job.
Thanks for caring about the privacy of user data so much from day one!
I found Apple's self-description to be a little over the top.

But hey, it's PR.
Might want to substitute "corn" or "soy beans" for "wheat" when talking about Iowa :-) (Not that this undermines your point really.)
Not shocked : )
I got burned so badly from Google Buzz, I don't rush to try any new product they roll out, and that has stood me in good stead lately. Shame, because they made so much great stuff at first. Frankly, if I could find the person responsible for the Buzz privacy choices, I'd happily beat him senseless.
...and if they were bio's on an online dating site, I would think Apple is a self-obsessed douchebag

(disclaimer: typing this on a macbook)
Oh fascinating, you openly admit to wanting to do physical violence to someone who made a change to a service you undertook to use freely and without coercion. Seems immoral to me but your mileage obviously varies.
I programmed pretty heavily in Common Lisp from about 2000-2003 and I got over the parentheses too after a few months. I can't say I ever really came to love the syntax though. I always thought of it as the price I had to pay for macros. I did get pretty tired of the religious zeal of a lot of lispers though. Too many insist that lisp is the "right" way to design a language and refuse to see it as the collection of design compromises it is, like every other language.
Yeah, I think I've seen that one on the porn store rack.
Its been raining all day! If your looking to get in to the startup scene a lunch is probably going to happen soon (http://www.meetup.com/Vancouver-Web-Based-Entrepreneurs/).

Although you can always just email anyone and meet up for coffee/lunch with just them.
I worked at a place that had a huge Oracle RAC license. We ran non-mission-critical data collection apps on it, but the app which dispensed drugs in real-time, all over the world, not only ran Postgres, but 90% of the business logic was in DB functions.
The kernel module is under optimizing, we may provide it in a few weeks. Thanks!
Wow, this is more annoying than when a blocked popup in chrome still fully loads and starts playing a video.
There are many many many blog posts, short essays, long essays, old usenet posts, mailing list rants, you name it that are about 'the benefits of Lisp'. Now, you may not have found one that was very clear to you and that's fair enough. But to say they 'end in futility' is really pretty presumptuous.
Speakers for MIT Startup Bootcamp 2010 Announced
I have the priority inbox in my Gmail and in my Apps right now. As far as my accounts go, they were rolled out simultaneously today.
AskHN: Should us youngins be taking a Java class as a first programming class?
I'll be starting with a computer engineering program this fall (curriculum: http://resources.msoe.edu/cdb/programs.php?progCode=SE2.4 ). My advisor has chosen classes for me -- and I see that one of the classes I'm taking, 'Software Development I', introduces the concepts of programming with Java.

After witnessing so many rants everywhere at just about all social bookmarking websites about the atrocities of Java (and especially nowadays, with what Oracle is doing), I find this a little bit unsettling. Should I just take it as my first programming language, or should I protest and try to find a way around it?

(Sorry, I know this isn't the forum to ask for personal advice in the manner that I am doing -- but I think the discussion that might ensue might interest the community, so that's why I'm asking).
Are convertible notes new? Seemed common 10 years ago even.
Awesome answer, and very reassuring. Thanks! I'll target <= 6 for now, assuming I'm allowed by the team I hire to keep coding ;).

I guess I'm less concerned with technical debt and more concerned with the product debt, which is a closely related concept I haven't heard discussed much. By product debt I mean partially-thought-through features rushed out the door that have been forgotten about. Even if the code is perfectly-factored, the product can come across to the end user as buggy because of product debt. I'm concerned that hiring hackers (even the very best hackers) will in fact exacerbate this problem, because we'll be able to push even more partial features out the door. At what point to you loop around in a startup and revisit/remove old features?

Of course there are no hard and fast answers, and I appreciate the comment about balance. I'm trying to gather more perspectives and experience on this to better inform my position on this.
Emacs, since 14 years.

I was looking for something better each 2 years or so -- yeah emacs isn't perfect -- but didn't find.
It's just a draft yet so it's not an open standard yet http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos-http-live-streaming-...
Node Knockout wrap up with organizers on The Changelog
typically they convert to common or preferred after one or two years.
I totally agree and wrote a similar piece a few months ago, calling it "Wallowing in Education", http://www.melonakos.com/2010/07/25/wallowing_in_education/
And it'll probably make use of an 'open' codec patented to hell, in other words, it's open if you buy apple.
it really depends.

in my experience, convertible notes are either for lamer startups (nobody wants to lead) or very hot ones (startup gets to demand terms) with equity in between.

as an investor, i would MUCH prefer a capped note or equity to a merely discounted note (i want the earliest pricing.)

as an entrepreneur, i would prefer the convertible, of course.
Just on that advice: 1. try to find less ambitious tasks that still have some excitement for you - that is, the right level of challenge for you; and 2. try to learn how to break down tasks.

1. I always find it exciting to see something happen because of my code. It's very basic, like a child playing with blocks. Graphics code is especially good for this; and there's also javascript that creates a webpage; or simply printing something on the screen (terminal/console). Combine a few steps together, and you can have something cool, even though it's simple.

2. breaking tasks down is how you "get to the point of being able to attack something". This "divide-and-conquer" is crucial - absolutely crucial - throughout all computer science (and every other complex activity). This is not a skill you should expect to automatically have perfectly mastered, but it's one you already have the beginnings of and that you can practice to improve it. For a start, you could look at any task (of any kind), and ask yourself how it could be broken down into simpler steps - often, it will be obvious to you. Now, break down one of those subtasks again, and keep going until you have a task that you are 100% sure you can do. Then focus on that one task to the exclusion of the rest of it. This is difficult. Try to pretend that the original task and all the other subtasks and sub-subtasks etc don't exist; and when you have solved this one task, observe that you've made progress and congratulate yourself. Only after this little celebration of real progress should you go on to the next step.

If you want to hit a bird on the wing, you must have all your will in
focus, you must not be thinking about yourself, and equally, you
must not be thinking about your neighbor: you must be living in your
eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.

This might not suit your temperament, but it's the way to accomplish things that are too complex/overwhelming for you. Once you're encountered one kind of problem a few times (or maybe even once), it can become intuitively obvious to you, and so you won't have to break it down so far next time. You have grown!

But be warned: there always be things that are too complex for you, and that you'll have to break them down. The skill of breaking things down is essential.
Hiring is not easy. Hiring the wrong person is hugely worse than not hiring anyone at all.

The easiest hire is someone with whom you've already worked and who is known to be reliable. But once you've exhausted that pool, you're with the rest of us, dealing with the 1000s of resumes from people who don't bother to read the job requirements, the dozens whose experience has at least some vague partial overlap with what you're looking for, and the handful worth interviewing. So, "we'll just hire a large team" can be a solution, but before it's a solution, it will be a problem.

Ironically, if the tasks to be done are _truly_ independent of each other, then it is easier to scale up development by hiring and working with multiple software developers: they don't have to work with each other, the code one writes has minimal interaction with the code someone else writes, and if someone isn't working out, (s)he can be fired and a replacement found without affecting the rest of the work. Or you can hire contractors for the independent tasks, that might be even easier.

(I personally like systems that are more integrated - I think they have a better feel and higher value than a system that's just a collection of tools - but maybe what you're building fits well with a collection of separable tasks...)
When you're learning your first programming language, the specific language you learn isn't worth stressing over. You can be sure that the professors at your school put some thought into the decision, and even if you disagree, it would take a lot to convince them otherwise. There are so many things to learn, that you should really just start somewhere, anyway. Even if they teach you Java, what you should be learning are programming concepts. You can then apply those any programming problem.

Personally, I think C would make a better choice, simply because it forces you to understand the underlying architecture, and appreciate the thinking behind the constructs of slightly higher-level languages. I'm sure I'm in the minority on that, though. Java is a decent choice, however, as it's very generic and allows you to focus on things like data structures and algorithms without necessarily having to go through that steep of a learning curve.
This is the stereotypical Asian squat. Interestingly, young children do it by default. I think we lose flexibility as we age. I can't squat back on my heels without straining my shin muscles to keep from falling backwards, but the more I do it, the easier it becomes.

It is certainly a lot healthier for your knees than squatting on the balls of your feet, if only because your knees stay roughly on the same vertical as your toes. This is old powerlifter wisdom, and anyone with a knee injury can tell you first-hand. I can't squat on the balls of my feet without my right knee squealing in pain. Squatting on my heels is, at least, tolerable.
If you're learning about software development then I don't think it matter which language you're taught in. I was taught in Java, but now use Python professionally. The concepts of unit tests, modular code, etc. etc. apply to all languages, not just language X. I wouldn't stress about this.
> Their advertisement. It's an implicit promise.

Interesting you say that. Around here, the for-profit colleges and cook schools and whatnot all have fine print in their TV ads that say "XYZ School does not guarantee a job or job placement."
You mention that the net value of a bachelor degree is positive. I'm writing this on my phone so I don't have access to any numbers but I wonder what the spread (statistical dispersion) is. More specifically, it would be interesting to know whether a large proportion of graduates enjoy some net positive gains due to their degree or only a small minority enjoys out of proportion gains while the rest is losing somewhat.
Don't worry about it. The first programming class you take isn't about the language. When I did my degree, we learned in Pascal, then were required to learn C, C++, etc. on our own for more advanced classes. Your first class is about concepts, algorithms, abstract data types, etc. You'll learn the basics then be able to apply them to a lot of other languages that you can easily pick up quickly on your own.
Or maybe historio.us?
Most surprising is how nice the Android Gmail app is compared to Mail.app

I don't see why that's surprising. I would argue that Google has a vested interest in making sure the Gmail app (as well as Maps, Voice, YouTube, etc.) all look and work great on Android. Apple doesn't have this same motivation.
It's funny that people try to show that ideas have no value by giving theirs away, when the value of an idea could probably be quantified by how inclined someone is to not give it away.
"Allow"?

In a public company the CEO typically can only recommend to the Board that an acquisition go through. The board can then put it to a shareholder vote.

The real question is "why did he recommend it?" and the answer is because the company had no other options if it wanted to survive.
How is this a bad thing? It's all about building the best applications for your customers.

In the enterprise space the customer is other businesses. Apple does essentially the same thing in the consumer space. The user is more important than the developer.

This is a good thing.

Imagine if airlines treated their relationship with the flier as the most important. Imagine if politicians treated their relationship with constituents as most important.
I'm increasingly suspicious of DSLs. Mostly I work in languages like Scala or Ruby with a syntax that's expressive enough for almost anything as it is and avoid building DSLs on top of them. You can cover a lot of ground in any language that allows higher order functions and function, sequence and hash literals.

Syntax matters but it seems to have become a bit of an obsession lately.
Ironically I think Haskell is actually much better for this.
Reddit has nearly 10,000 paying "reddit gold" members so far
Maybe. Maybe not. I've had nothing but bad experiences with Oracle in several jobs now and will emphatically advise against it at every opportunity. Postgres may not be a drop-in replacement for every Oracle use case but for those that are I'll recommend it first any day of the week. Oracle in a job description is a big red flag for me.
You should not avoid learning Java; I think most of the complaints are about people who only know Java. As long as you don't let it limit you, Java is a good skill to have.
Google Shows Off Chrome, HTML5 With Interactive Music 'Experience'
Learn as many languages as you can including Java. Ignore all web-tabloid tech-drama distractions.

A large proportion of Software Development (as oppossed to Game dev or Web dev) jobs are in Java anyways, so it's pretty sensible.
It's true. Especially in the northwest China.

But things seem to change a little bit. The white collars think it looks strange. They would rather stand than squat.

Thanks for the post. I don't feel ashamed when waiting for a bus with squat now.
The study is about a population aged between 55 and 65 and what happens to them in the following 20 years according to their drinking patterns. So it's not fair to say that the results are skewed. It only excludes 40-year-old drunks in a trivial way: the study is not about them.

Analogy: suppose we have a study about the effect of using
or not using sunscreen on a Caucasian population. It wouldn't be fair to say that the results are skewed just because they didn't include non-Caucasians.

>The title should read something more akin to "Late life heavy drinkers outlive late life nondrinkers"

Indeed, the title of the paper is "Late-life alcohol consumption and 20-Year mortality".

I understand it's normal to be skeptical of whether the results apply to younger people but, as someone else mentioned, I doubt that so many alcoholics die before 55. There's probably also some practical difficulty of doing an analog study for a younger range.
don't forget that pure aloe vera is great for actual burns(mild not severe, if sever get yourself to the ER) not just the sun variety.
I've had no problems watching on-demand video content from my local TV station on my Nexus One: http://www.tvnz.co.nz/video

I would say the devil is in the implementations not the flash player....