skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's there that Bing really wins out for me... Bing's "bird's eye" view is perfect for checking out locations before you go for visual cues.
People keep mentioning this, and I really don't understand why.

Do you have a username/password or username+certificate that a script kiddy is likely to hit in their first 10,000 attempts?

If yes, you have a much larger problem that can't be solved by port knocking or moving ssh to a different port.

If not, then you're trying to solve a problem which doesn't exist anyway.
I wonder how they're going to handle sound effects and background music without any plugins?
Not a Chrome bug so much as an artifact of Windows blur APIs as far as I can tell. Shadows and blurs look less Gaussian and more bidirectional motion blurred on Windows in Chome and other modern browsers.
I love using posterous, though I mainly use it for pictures.
It's not that surprising. Maps that refreshed the page when you needed to move X miles south got tons of ad revenue, and JavaScript was still considered a "simple scripting language" by most.
Disk Recovery Software
Disk Recovery Wizard offers a full set of tools to successfully repair corrupted partitions and return inaccessible drives back to use.
Should Google Create its Own Currency?
Jesus.

Can't you make hn links non-follow? At least of the newbies?
I actually own this on DVD and watch it every now and again, pretty cool documentary on the history of GNU/Linux
Auckland... close.... ish?
Alternative Title: Capitalism at work, trade instead of war, each got what they want.
> If the state needs someone who is unemployed to work for it, it should give her a contract and pay her a wage. You can’t make someone who receives welfare benefits work more than those benefits are worth anyway. That would obviously be unjust.

Unjust?

Why should taxpayers pay to have someone do nothing?

That person is consuming resources produced by other people.

> I’m not exactly sure why the state shouldn’t hire that person instead of forcing it to work for it.

There's no force. If said person can get a better deal than a dole check in return for picking up trash, said person is free to take it.
It's pretty interesting to see how intertwined China is with Australia.

If you ever want to short China, your best bet is to target Australia which already has a bit of a property bubble, mining companies that are dependent on Chinese demand, and a currency that is buoyed by commodity prices.

If China is indeed a bubble (at least in the medium-term) Australia is going to experience a world of hurt.
It would seem then, that the solution would be to ban new postings by users who don't have at least 10 karma.
I've got a fairly good collection of the older mixes, and there's some amazing stuff in there, no doubt. Any pointers on what's been really great in the last couple of years?
Google did maps right, and eventually yahoo and map quest followed, but by the time they did it was too late everyone was using google maps and had no reason to switch.

Actually as soon as February 2009, MapQuest was still #1 in maps: http://gislounge.com/mapquest-still-number-one/

(Google Maps was released in early 2005.)
Links under a certain karma threshold are marked nofollow. I think the criteria is 4 or 5 karma.
It is, but my primary strategy has been to commit a huge list of words to memory, especially the two-letter words to join new words together for point efficiency.
I am using Posterous and can recommend it.

Whatever you choose, make sure to use your own custom domain. Doing so, you can later change your blogging platform wherever you want.
On the other hand, not having business cards can come across as amateur and lose you points. I'd keep the cards handy but give them out to those who ask for them or those who give you theirs. If they ask for your card, ask for theirs too.
My advice is to really work out the value proposition. How much value is the first employee going to bring when it comes to revenues and how fast will those revenues materialize? $5k just isn't that much money but if it feels like it will over-stress your business then maybe you are not ready for an employee and need to keep progressing the way you have been even if it means you move slower than you would like.

The other option I would consider is contracting out some projects to the experienced engineer if he is open to it and discover more about what he can do, how he can help, and get a real feeling for what he will bring to the business.
The Back Side of Your Gullet Is Decadent and Depraved, Part 4
Could Tiny Somaliland Become the First Cashless Society?
The Four Levels of Social Entrapment
Operations and logistics are things that a company can control. The big about successful retail chains being real estate operations with store sidelines also applies.
I don't think Techlens would do well with preprints.
Don't most professors pay students to do this?
User interface is far more important. The majority of use cases were people looking for directions to places in non-satellite view.

Google maps was the first one where you could simply drag a fullscreen map around with your mouse and zoom with mouse wheel.

I suspect it wasn't until after this user interface enhancement that people even bothered exploring satellite views much.
I recently launched a small project (http://statusdashboard.com) with the goal of learning RoR and was blown away by the community and infrastructure (particularly Heroku). 3 weeks from watching the first blog railscast to a fucntioning site (with SSL, recurring billing, monitoring, etc.). I've also setup a VPS and started learning how to host myself (I think it is always better to understand how the magic happens).

Heroku definitely hides the complexity of their "magic". It just seems to work so effortlessly.

However, my biggest question so far is this: what is the best practice for managing and maintaining the DB? I'm used to jumping into the db for routine tasks, ad-hoc reporting, and troubleshooting. Amazon RDS would make it easier, but a bit pricy for my needs right now. I also understand you can db pull, but I've heard a few examples of data loss when attempting a pull/push roundtrip with a local PostgreSQL instance. So, I find myself spending time in the Heroku console, manipulating the data in code, manually.

What do you do to manage/report on data in the DB? I'm preparing to launch a number of larger projects, but need to get a better system in place first.
Motorola F3: The anti-iPhone? (2007)
Matt Cutts gives you a free startup idea
I don't think it's that simple. Consider, for example, that the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, lost his leadership largely because mining companies were upset by his plan to tax them further. From the article:

Economic and diplomatic advances, however, have not
fueled a warm national glow. Australia's proposal to
increase taxes on mining became a national issue,
precipitating a three-month barrage of anti-government
campaigns paid for by the mining industry, which in part
led to the removal in June of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd,
a Chinese-speaking former diplomat. In the August federal
election, the ruling center-left Australian Labor Party
lost its majority due in large part to massive swings
against it in the resource-rich states of Western
Australia and Queensland. Supporters of the tax argue
that the resources are not coming back and that Australia
should participate more fully in the outsize profits.
Those against include the mine operators and the many who
work in the mines; mining salaries are, on average,
Australia's highest, according to the Australian Bureau
of Statistics.
Memory pricing for all shared/VPS hosting is simply bizarre. RAM is dirt cheap. I don't get it. It's almost like they all got together and decided to gouge on the one thing people need. It's this one factor alone that seems to make dedicated/colocation services a better option at about the point you mention.
> I think the original point of college was to pass on information we as a society felt people needed for life

Actually, high school was supposed to do that, and before that, grade school. Instead, they're largely child care, and college may be going the same way.
Option 4.

While it may seem daunting, with technologies like Skype, and interactive whiteboards it is as good as being right there. Once you force yourself out of your comfort zone you will also find that these technologies can make you more productive.

I currently work with a team that is distributed around the globe and we do well, some developers had to adapt there work times so some guys work 2am-12am'ish. Anyway we do just fine, we are as productive if not more so than a structured office development team.

It completely changed my perception of a fully distributed team. The collaboration is there just like an office, the comradeship is there just like the office but many times the distractions are not.

Anyways, long story short I would recommend it even for a first employee. I used to have the perception that developers would be isolated and that that innovative environment would not be fostered over the distance of communication technology. It is one of the many cases in my life where I could not have been more wrong. Not only should you not exclude it, you should strongly consider it.

The saving implications from not having to provide infrastructure and space for developers alone is enough to give it consideration from a start-ups perspective.

As a side note: these are really interesting times to be in the start-up development world. With cloud based application and the possibility of distributed teams. One can achieve their idea on almost pure effort alone. The capital required is becoming more and more marginalized.
I wouldn't put together "minimalism" and "simplicity" as there is a fundamental difference between the two.

When something is minimal it's not very useful. It's basically saying "I don't want to look too complex".

On the other hand when something is simple it's because there's and underlying understanding of complexity.

You can read what Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, thinks about this (http://designthinking.ideo.com/?p=404).

The work of a designer should be therefore to understand complexity and make it simple.In order to make it simple, the designer should ultimately be the one who decides what to add and what to leave out.

I really suggest this video by Joel Spolsky during BoS 2009
http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/08/19.html
The only 2 options, really. We can trade with our fellows and produce total results that exceed our wildest dreams. Or we can take what we want and eventually be reduced to fighting over scraps.
Just for the love of god don't write another dynamo clone. The world has enough.
I'll volunteer 10-15 hours a week to build a recommendation engine like this!

I too have wanted a search-engine/feed-reader, no-holds-barred web-experiment that does exactly what you describe. I'm not an academic, but I have fairly deep & broad reading interests across mathematics, physics, economics, history, etc. Ok, make that broad interests in basically every subject that is truly interesting. I'm the guy who pretty much reads journal articles for fun because newspapers, magazines, blogs, and most books suck and just aren't smart enough.

But it's more work for me to find reading material I like and want to learn from than it is for me to read it.

I could certainly hack around on something like this, as I too have been wanting to scratch this itch for a many years. I've got the time, since I'm currently un(der)-employed(ahh, gotta love contracting) and bored, but my first two roadblocks would be:

1) instant non-starter: I no longer have any university library proxy account to use to login and scrape the journals, abstracts, authors, citations, etc. I personally could care less about copyrights on academic papers. I justify my position via jury nullification using a jury of one—me. And I don't give a second thought to doing whatever dirty work it takes for building a system of scraping scripts to pull all info about every paper from every journal out there.

2) If the beta site gets even the smallest amount of traffic, I will be crushed by EC2 server and bandwidth bills.

I realize a bajillion other folks probably want to build the exact same thing, and I realize it's stupid to build your own when someone else might already be well along the way and just needs some help.

Anyone need a Linux/Ruby/SQL/Sysadmin/Wear-All-Hats-Get-Shit-Done developer? I'm in LA and on #freenode. Just say the word!
I find citing research helps a lot. Keep on top of the latest reports and case studies and use them to draw analogies as to why your suggestion is the best given the situation.

Also, know your limits. Many times I make a recommendation and suggest that we split test it properly quickly. The "to test" list will grow and it will serve two purposes:

1. A reminder of important tests you really should do

2. A place where bad/low priority tests go to die. You do this by regularly pruning the list with the help of the client.
Referencing: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2349378/new-programming-j...
redis-objects does a pretty good job of this for Ruby: http://github.com/nateware/redis-objects
Use <video> with an <embed> / <object> fallback inside.
Doesn't seem to deter a large proportion of spammers, either--- I guess spamming is cheap enough that you might as well shotgun it, instead of bothering to research each site's nofollow policies. If you ever look at Slashdot's submission queue, there's a ton of spam in there too, despite the fact that it gets pretty quickly buried, is nofollowed on a robots.txt-prohibited page that not even many humans visit, and has no chance of being posted by the manual story-posting process.
Mutual respect and patience. I'm afraid that you're going to have to keep explaining things to your clients; if you don't they will feel that you didn't act in their best interests and will feel bitter about the whole issue.
Ask HN: Who do you consider to be a creative leader/company?
Looking for ideas for potential case study for an assignment.

Need ideas for creative leaders/companies. So far thought of all the cliche companies - Google, Apple, Facebook, IDEO, and Lady Gaga, of course.

Any other ideas for companies known to foster innovation and creativity? Or individuals?

Thanks in advance.
Paul Rand is an inspiration for me. He listens to ALL the requirements and provides the "one" solution, and never shows the alternative options.

You definitely need a strong personality/portfolio, and probably a prior agreement with the client.
New Meryl Homepage is Out
Seriously, after all these years aren't we past this repetitive question?
I don't really agree with the author's proposal, although it is well explained. As many others pointed out, Google's usability was (and maybe still is) much better than the others.

Another big point in Google's favour is how their maps look. Back when Google Maps came out, the other maps were bitmapped and horrible to look at on the screen and in print. The quality of Google's maps is much more like what you see in a proper street directory. And they've made it look that good at every zoom level. Quite amazing.

I've never used Bing Maps, so it was interesting to learn in this article that they've improved the design of their default map view recently. It looks good. If the appearance of Google's maps was some part of their success, we should see Bing's market share rise in the future if they can convincingly beat Google in this area.
I'm at CU Boulder, and they've done a pretty good job with the CS course. Freshmen are required to take a "CS As A Field Of Work And Study", which introduces both workplace concepts and some of the underlying theory of computers.

I'm currently taking a "Discrete Structures" class. It's a 2000 level course, and it's all theory. And it's fun.
little people will get hurt. Apollo Global and co will haemorrage hard, and both it and its backers (like the Carlyle Group) will just continue to turn to other countries they can lobby to set up the same system they have in the US: privatised education where their clients are (as far as they're concerned) paid for by loans (in the US, we're talking federal Title 4 loans, but it could be bank loans as well - clearly hugely subprime) at zero risk to themselves.
Actually it looks like it's just wearing a halter. I think what looks like another piece of tack is just coloration.

In any case this is not abuse (is he a troll or just ignorant?). I've rarely had trouble getting a halter on a horse except for one who doesn't like his ears being touched. My take is that if an animal that's basically 1,100 lbs of muscle (OK,not that one :-) lets you do something, it's not too bothered by it! Horses have absolutely no problem letting you know when they're pissed.
The use of the term "the Cloud" is basically for anything that's not the traditional way of requesting and utilizing IT resources (aka rigid, pre-allocated, persistent and more than likely tied to physical systems). And that's probably why you're seeing so many different definitions.

What I think "cloud" should mean is the combining of individual resources (computing, storage, etc.) into a large virtual pool that can be accessed and allocated dynamically. This can be done within a corporation's own set of servers and devices (private cloud) or by tapping into someone else's collection of resources (public cloud providers like Amazon, Azure, etc.).
tumblr seems to promote itself as 'microblogging done right' but I guess it's fine for a normal content type blog as well?
Yes. You can post just text if you want to, but if there's a link, video, quote, or picture that you want to post, it's obviously going to be pretty easy to do that as well because of the nature of Tumblr.
heh, just realized, in my case, I should have probably taken courses called 'emailing managing directors', 'scheduling meetings in obsolete Lotus Notes versions', 'using that one goofed-up sharepoint where you have to click through six unintuitive links to find the files that anyone actually uses'. (Yeah, I know, my current assignment is pretty lame, sorry-- my snark is directed at it, not you).

Of course, I actually did learn this kind of stuff in college. You do similar stuff in the courses and it applies to the job in unpredictable ways. The point is that you learn to learn, and if you (with the college's help) do it right, you pick up the specific job skills much sooner.

I know (from experience) this can be a painfully hard sell with HR at a lot of places, but saving a few months of learning-curve time for your employer or your clients adds value to the economy, especially in an economy where technology, tasks and jobs change so often.
Scalp Acne
Which begs the question:

Why does the blog post exist? To expose oddities? In which case, where are the insights that the title implies it contains? "Insights" imply that they have some insight into the questions, not that they have questions.

If we were meant to dig into the PDF for information, why not link to the information directly instead of through an apparently-contentless blog post? What, if any, is the value of the linked blog post, except as a 3rd-party link to the PDF?
A cloud is a visible mass of droplets of water or frozen crystals suspended in the atmosphere above the surface of the Earth or another planetary body. (c) wikipedia.
One great starting point is ActiveSupport, specifically the core extensions:

http://github.com/rails/rails/tree/master/activesupport/lib/...

Though this library isn't really Rails-specific, it has a bunch of self-contained ruby files, good to learn about the style of doing things elsewhere in rails.

Examples: Array#uniq_by, String#pluralize, Numeric#hours, etc.

The Rails router, while considerably more complex than ActiveSupport, is also a self-contained chunk of code you can read:
http://github.com/rails/rails/tree/master/actionpack/lib/act...

Also: When reading Rails code (or any ruby library's code, for that matter), I've found that reading the specs first is very effective.
Those aren't the same thing at all. You can't write C in visual basic. The guy you were responding to was comparing what it would take to get your application working with Heroku vs. what it would take to set up your own server providing some of the same services that Heroku does.

If you were trying to set up a similar question, it'd have to be more like: "Should I use gcc or should I write my own C compiler?" Clearly the correct answer here is "Use gcc" if you're trying to get work done, but that doesn't mean nobody should ever write their own compiler, either. It's just not the right choice for most people, even though I'm sure there is a huge reward in learning how to do it.
to me it means: computing power behind an api.

so my scripts can manage the data center (by growing/shrinking resource usage)
I love Doppler. Thanks for it! :)
#1: No, increasing the latency of the time it takes to post spam has nothing to do with the throughput.

#2: Probably not a good idea. It's very hard to get lots of karma from comments alone, and you start to cut in on actually useful posts, like a new founder posting a link to his/her company at launch.
Motivating Specific Actions to Enhance Site Value, a Heuristic Approach
That's not a bit.ly domain, though. It redirects to amazon.
Nice overview. Off topic, but for complicated work flows I find it useful to use a diagramming Tool like Omnigraffle to maintain a one-page overview of data sources (with sample data), each map reduce job and output (with data examples), etc. A small amount of overhead, but worth it to help keep track of everything. As I add/remove jobs and change code, I keep the diagram up to date.
All great leaders are creative. Generals, just as much.

Alexander the Great conquered a soghdian fort by having his soldiers climb the mountain behind it, and declaring that he had flying men. Toyotomi Hideyoshi had his men divert rivers and build dams so he could flush the enemy out of their castle. Cortes sank his ships, so his men could not retreat, and their focus would be on one thing only, victory.

Find individuals that moved the world,
and you will find creativity.
I've not done it myself, but once when I thought I'd need such a queue I found this pseudo code and references:

http://www.cs.rochester.edu/research/synchronization/pseudoc...
This whole notion that beneficiaries should pay is garbage. The logical end of this is a totalitarian dictator that shoves stuff down your throat. The person who should pay is the person doing the buying, acting on their own free will.

As per college, totally agree this is over valued. There are far more efficient ways to learn. The whole system has turned into a tremendously expensive signaling device to future employers that you're willing to commit to something.

Of course there's also a long list of phenomenally successful engineers and businessmen who did fine without it: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell and Thomas Edison to name just a few.
Ideas vs. execution: A personal history
With this kind of positive feedback, maybe I'll post more in the future.
So you want to abolish welfare and instead establish a working program were people are paid substantially less than minimum wage? Well, nothing wrong with that, I just don’t think it would work very well.
The article plays off the insecurities of others in their belief that they are imposing on others by being social. That being said, it has very very funny ms paint illustrations.
Use Heroku is the simple answer. Unless you have specific needs for background processing or do some stuff that is not in Ruby, use Heroku. This is especially true if you have not set up a production system before.
I'm just gonna rephrase and repeat this bit, because it seems to be not completely understood:

Do not allow password logins. Do. Not.

Have a method to redact keys quickly. The advice of the article becomes irrelevant. If someone gets hold of an unencrypted/crackable private key, they'll likely also have access to the secret portnumber, knock sequence and username, so nothing much gained there.
Wish these were hosted on mixcloud.com