skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And, I really like the tag line: "Open Source Personal Development". I gots to get me some of that :-)
This dude does a pretty good job: http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p2.html
It's a direct quote from the article, "America’s brightest minds have been abandoning industry and technical enterprise in favor of more prestigious but less productive fields like law, finance, consulting and nonprofit activism."

Btw, he should have added "pundit" to the list of non-productive fields. ;)
If a transaction can be reversed, it hasn't cleared.
People that have worked in start-ups are very well suited to being trouble-shooters in a large organization, and people that have worked for a big company stand a chance of running a start-up that interfaces / sells to big companies because they can relate to the party on the other side.

I'd think that it's a net win to have experience about the other side of the table, and that your skills are actually worth more by having been 'on the other side of the line' for a while.
On the one hand I think he should respect the CC BY-SA license and attribute the source of the passages, but at the same time I wouldn't want to contribute to copyright over-protectionism by arguing that he's violating copyright law in not doing so.

In the end I think people should do the moral thing and attribute their sources when they copy them wholesale (or more, when appropriate).
close it if the click is _not_ a drag?
It probably is, feel free to flag it. They created an account just to post that, twice.
This might be the answer to our "depleted ocean fish stock" problem. Feed the bottom of the food chain and we'll have plenty of fish in 5 years.
Why would you fear that? It is just an often used methodology that works okay but is inferior to the new view first idea (currently only implemented in the Lift framework and as a library for Clojure).
Certain problems have to be solved by large teams, and the team dynamic is different when you get into the thousands of people. Contrast that dynamic with a small shop of only a few devs. Disregarding of the technical skillset, they are practically different jobs.

If you were interviewing a candidate that had never worked for a startup wouldn't you take that into consideration?
I'm afraid that condition already obtains: the microbes were up to the task since the a lot of oil naturally seeps into the Gulf every year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_seep) and in this case they just had a whole lot more to chow down on.

Similarly, there are entities many would rank at the moral level of microbes that are highly evolved to feast on endless quantities of Federal money, borrowed or not. Their answer to the deficit is like the Gulf's microbes: "more, yum!" which is not quite what I think you're looking for.
It's probably not really 20GB. Most of what's in WinSxS is links to files in other directories, often multiple links to the same file, and the Windows shell "Properties" dialog will include every "copy" when calculating total size.
Yep. As long as they're old enough and that's all you get to ask for.
If a merchant (paypal) has a high triggering rate on that insurance, the credit card company might raise their rates on that merchant.
Disappointment might be mitigated if you use small, unexpected bonuses, e.g. "$100 for whoever fixes the most bugs in the next 2 days!", "Free dinner at Bennigans for whoever can fix this bug that's been nagging us for weeks!"
Ask HN: How to setup a merchant account for a new startup?
I'm working on a startup to sell physical goods. We'd like to setup a pre-order page to accept payment information but not bill the individual until the shipment has been made (we're shipping in about 4-6 weeks). Of course after we're shipping I think that we'll have higher conversion rate if we have a true credit card processing system rather than relying on a third-party.

I've only done payment processing through PayPal and Plimus.com. I've read about the complexities of setting up a true merchant account for credit card processing, but it still seems a bit complicated to me.

Can anyone recommend a payment gateway and processor for someone new to the process?
I don't think the original business plan included credit card payments. You only ever put "real" money into your account, and in order to use the service you basically had to keep enough in there for them to float it. Adding credit card payments changed that. Notice that paypal still doesn't charge fees for payments that come straight from a bank account.
I think this is linked to the wrong blog post.
http://30sleeps.com/blog/2007/09/27/set-your-hourly-rate/
goes better with the title.

As someone who was just asked to bid on a fixed price contract, I agree with his comments. It is really unnerving to estimate exactly how much time it will take, especially if it is something you have never done before.

Tripling your estimate is a great strategy, but you also don't want to price yourself out of the contract (at least I don't). Work hasn't exactly been pouring in lately.
Unfortunately, a lot of this type of wealth generation isn't tracked by most economic measurements. Improvements in the quality of automobiles, entertainment systems, communication systems, etc. have been tremendous over the past decades, but almost none of that surfaces in statistics, mostly because to some degree such improvements are subjective and hard to measure quantitatively.
I like the tone of the article, it is not judgemental and very factual keeping in sync with the subject matter (Houellebecq). Him copying wikipedia does not surprise me at the least, as the article explains it's just the way he does things - I especially like the part where he describes that he altered the original entry just a little bit to suit his own style, somewhat echoing his book The Possibility of an Island.
These are "speed arithmetic" techniques which have existed for decades in Western society (check out any of the half dozen $7 Dover books about the topic). It's also based on abacus arithmetic techniques which have existed for centuries in Japan and other countries. It's good that this is being taught to young kids, most adults have 12 years of bad habits to unlearn.
I reluctantly switched from Bloglines to Google Reader a year or so ago when it became clear they weren't improving their product any further. Unfortunately, I've been just as frustrated with Google's lack of innovation. And it seems like the new services I've seen (Pinyadda, feedingo) are focused on dumbing down RSS for casual users rather than serving the needs of information professionals.

I keep track of a lot through RSS. I'm subscribed to almost 500 feeds, most of which are blogs and websites, with several that are search results or other monitoring feeds. Managing my feeds and seeing which feeds are providing me with value are my biggest pain points.

If there were a service that provided easy import from Google Reader (or an OPML file), that provided analytics on the feeds I'm subscribed to (update frequency, how often I read, how often I click through / save), good organization of my feeds (labels, not folders, ability to mark as high priority), and delicious-like saving / organizing of feed items, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
I've seen this sentiment expressed here, as well as a few other places.

[1]Nothing matters more to employers than seeing that you actually have a passion for building things. There are a lot of people who have got certifications up to their eyes, but don't really care too much about tech.

There is a huge difference between the person that goes home and spends their nights working on a building cookie-baking-robot, or the next big social-networking website, and somebody that goes home and watches the TV.

I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with watching TV, just that having somebody who likes doing the type of work you're hiring them to do so much that they actually do it even when they don't have to is going to go a long way towards motivating them. It also means that they, typically, are good independent learners. I imagine that this is a hugely important trait in an industry where doing things that might seem kindof insane (like running a data-store that hasn't even reached a 1.0 release yet) is considered normal.

[1]Obviously, within reason. If you've got a passion for building things, but you think that a server is somebody that brings you food at a restaurant, you might not be well suited to a system administrator position.

(Or maybe this is all just wishful thinking. I love building things, but haven't yet gotten my dream job.)
The question is, if you can build something cool (and importantly get press), why just settle for just a job?
Alice got $95 in her pocket and $100 credit in the bank.
Can you say that overall she's richer from state when she had $5 in her pocket and $0 credit?
IIUC, your implementation does not solve the same problem.

The OP's implementation automatically determines the correct format string from the type of the variable. So you can simply do:

LOG_EXPR(some_int);
LOG_EXPR(some_float);
LOG_EXPR(some_complex_cocoa_type);
Because 99% of people make more money collecting a salary than they do being bought by Google.
You drastically underestimate the number of people who think the Google is an Internet, browser, program, web page, etc. (I have at least one customer who thinks her school Internet and home Internet are different places because the start pages are different and The Google finds different sites on each. She uses Bing at school, but does not know Bing is not a Google.)
With the possible exception of damaged ocean bottoms, I'm not aware of any "depleted ocean fish stock" problem that's a loss of total biomass. What we've seen with e.g. the cod off of New England is the suppression of an apex predictor to the point where many suspect it has been replaced by new apex predators that have prevented its revival to commercially significant numbers.

Bad news if you love the taste of cod (as I do, I showed up in the Boston area in its waning days) but not quite the same thing.

That said, iron is said to be the limiting micro-nutrient in the oceans (mostly in the context of CO2 geo-engineering) so adding that to an area would be a first step to achieving greater biomass. But it still wouldn't bring back the cod :-(.
HP Laptop Battery Explosion
Pictures posted, another battery recall in the making?
SSL Intermediate Certificate Hell
I don't know what I'm supposed to see or what it's supposed to do. I use Opera (just got the update this AM). I don't get Google Instant, either.
How much does he charge? (Feel free to e-mail me; e-mail in profile.)
It would be great if there was a stumble button that proceeded to next random video. I always thought there should be a stumble upon for video.
Seems a very valid article, and some of the non-science it debunks is absurd!

That said, the line "we could eat meat ... (albeit much less) with a clean conscience" is a little glib, surely most people know that the ethics of killing things just to eat them is at least an open question for reasons beyond environmentalism?
Ask HN: I Built A Business Funding Visualizer For SEC Filings. Any Feedback?
I got hit by a car two separate times (I know...I know...). Both times, the car that hit me fled the scene and the very next car that came along gave me a ride home.In the second grade, I was walking home from school through the crosswalk at a green light and the car turned right didn't look and hit me, the other time I was crossing the a road on my bike and don't really remember the specifics. Also, when I was two my parents "lost" me at Knott's Berry Farms...and a stranger took me to the lost and found.
HN,

Form Ds are filed with the SEC by startups, hedge funds, and growing companies to announce the completion of fundings (equity and debt) but there's no way to search for companies near you. I built a Google maps visualizer that takes the daily SEC filings and overlays them on Google maps.

For example of a Form D, here's SeatGeek's (current top story on HN) Form D filings:

http://www.formds.com/issuers/seatgeek-inc

I'd love feedback on my Google Maps visualization.

Things I know I need to add:

Ability to zoom in on an area and see filings from the last week or month.

Ability to save the areas you're interested in (instead of the whole US loading every time)

Tech thing to change:

I'm writing out the javascript using Rails' erb instead of a javascript function pulling from a JSON object. I just saw the SeatGeek guys use a JSON object + function for their raphael visualization and realized that that's what I should be doing...

Thanks for any feedback!
SeatGeek is already an affiliate to the larger ticket selling sites (StubHub et al). This replaces/upgrades their flash version.
Really? Where's that number coming from?

Seems to me that if you build a startup that's acquired by Google (say for the relatively small sum of $5m after a couple of years) that's still a whole lot more than you would have earned as a salary - even if you're a cofounder with just 50%. And on top of that you end up getting another good salary from Google as well once they acquire you.
"In January, I was invited to speak to Google’s search quality team about issues I had with Google’s search results. My topic? For queries where I know a subject really well, I often found Google provided some pretty poor results in the top listings along with the good ones. I wanted more perfection!"

Oddly enough, I like it that Google isn't going to return only things that a given field's experts like. It's good that it's possible that if you hit enough criteria, you can be one of the top search result even if you aren't what the authorities like. It keeps things interesting.

What’s happening is that Google rewards longevity. AltaVista was around ages ago, gained a lot of links over time, and in particular links from other aged sites.

Again, I think it's good that Google is using the Internet's memory. Searching is seeking information. Altavista might just be the term for information on search engines with the most discussion around it. Maybe it's the "best search engine" but perhaps my searches for "search engines" isn't about that but rather about how a search engine is built, how people interact with a search engine or what-not. There, the memory of the Internet is crucial.

If every search for X becomes "what is the best X in the world", the Internet will be rather diminished.
Given the iPhone's exclusivity with AT&T in the US, Android's US growth isn't surprising.

However, it is interesting to see Gartner worldwide projections. Does anyone have links to Android vs iPhone market-share-data for countries where they are both available on all/most carriers ?
http://twitter.com/Chad_Hurley/status/24134092111
So I'm going through my bloglines feeds and re-entering them into feedingo.com. Apparently bloglines has been ignoring updates to over half my feeds for many months. The other reader finds very recent updates just fine. I had just assumed the feeds dead.

Thanks a lot bloglines. ಠ_ಠ
> If you were interviewing a candidate that had never worked for a startup wouldn't you take that into consideration?

People that apply to a start-up usually do so because it offers them something they can't get elsewhere. Freedom, responsibility and a smaller world. They've self-selected long before they applied because they're usually willing to take a fair sized pay-cut in order to be able to join. That speaks volumes about their motivation and willingness to adapt.

If a candidate had never worked for a start-up and didn't throw up any overt red flags if they're the most suitable guy or girl for the job I'd definitely give them a shot at it.
That's one of the founding principles of stoicism[0], as I understand it. The general idea is to change your emotions about external events, since you can't change the events themselves.

I'm told it's rather helpful for POWs.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism
What would you pay for that though and how many people out there are in your position?
They aren't the only ones studying this; are you aware of anything that contradicts their results? From studies to simple observations that things stopped getting worse when the well was capped?

(I for one an extremely tired of this sort of attack, which among other things implies that government funded researchers are a pure as the driven snow. OK, I exaggerate, but it's been well demonstrated in many fields that deviating from the scientific establishment's orthodoxy results in your no longer being able to get government funding for your research.)
Firefox 4, chrome 6 and 7 still vulnerable to CSS history hack
I would plan to learn it, while at the same time have someone else develop this project. So I'm not delaying my work, I'm just learning while the work is going on.
Mobile app developers already do fill out a survey on the specifics on what their apps do: they're called app store/market descriptions. I believe the author meant that these descriptions should be indexed as well.
I was looking for the zooming too. At least allow me to scroll up and down the map until that is implemented.
Good quote. It made a great scene in the HBO miniseries:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9f1miIDcDI
Toronto community mourns passing of angel investor
Google search index splits with MapReduce
Own Your Identity
I've been through this a few times. Three times the startup went under before exit, and the options wound up being pure fiction.

Once I left the company with some vested options, bought them for about 500 bucks, and then got washed out in their next round of investing.

Once (like you I was employee 65 in a 70 person company) we got bought for a nice sum, and the employees all got retention packages worth, as tptacek noted, 5 figures per year served, give or take. Most of the early-in employees, who put in very long hours at the beginning, felt a bit screwed. They worked out their hourly rate for overtime spent on the company, and it came out... okay. Not great. Late arrivals like me felt just fine.

The main point I've taken from these experiences is this: when grunts like us own shares in a private company (or options to buy shares), we don't own anything real. What we own is a small piece of a partnership contract, in which we are a very underprivileged partner. If you look carefully in the partnership agreement, you will see that not all shares are created equal. There are A class, B class, C class, and so on. Each class of shares enjoys different privileges w/r to the money that comes into the company. Grunts like us get C class shares that place us at the mercy of the other two classes.

Investors and founders are senior partners in the company, and they can pretty much do what they want with your part of the contract. Your only remedy is to quit the company.

Some things companies commonly do with shares of this class:

- Take a new round of investment, and rip them up. Often this happens after a down round of fund raising. With layoffs in advance. The laid off employees lose all interest in the company (even if they bought their shares!), and the remaining employees get issued new options in the new agreement.

- See them replaced with some other incentive plan. This usually happens after a medium sized exit. Basically the buyer puts a certain amount of money on the table. The board of the company splits up the pie in some way that sort of relates to the current share agreement. Then they wash out all of the existing shares and hand out retention packages to employees and founders. The size of the packages typically relates to the size of your grant, but few people get cheques cut on the day of the sale. Most have to work for a year or two to see the payout.

Let me sum up with this: I'm not bitter! I've got way less risk in the game than investors and founders, especially as a late arrival. This is the reality of the game, and my eyes are wide open. So equity participation in a small company for me is icing on the cake. Far more important is base salary, benefits, HR policies, company culture, technology, co-workers, all that stuff. I've never chosen one company over another based on the options package. For grunts like us it rarely matters anyway.
http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com
The Unheralded Benefits of the F# Programming Language
Hopfully enough folks have swung around to the Batteries Included approach (bundling dependencies inside the app's disk footprint) that DLL Hell will eventually die out. Plus both disk and memory space has gotten much less dear over the last 30 years, so conserving and treating every byte as sacred is no longer as important as not having one's software break in mysterious and painful ways.
Times Said to Take a Stake in Bit.ly
It is something to think about. Service jobs were appealing because they seemed impossible/impractical to outsource, but its not necessarily the case with many anymore. Doctors/lawyers/realtors and the like will always be protected by their professional associations creating a barrier to entry through licensing and legislation. Maybe we'll see a rise in these sorts of regulatory boards for other professions.

Maybe we'll see a rise in business creation when people can't get a job working for someone else. It happens during every recession. I wonder what the impact would be of corporate jobs becoming increasingly rare.
And voters who don't want businesses in their area. Why do you think that since the early 1970s, first manufacturing, then new shopping malls, migrated out of the towns and cities? They were forced out, partially by economic costs, like land prices, but even more by galloping tax and regulation growth concentrated on any non-residential activity. They were forced out of the cities and eventually most manufacturing enterprises were forced out of the country by regulations.

"Pretentiousness" is a good term, especially given David Brooks's "did not want their children regressing back to the working class, so you saw an explosion of communications majors and a shortage of high-skill technical workers." But high-skill technical work is also much harder than teaching and the newer "high touch" "professions", so I think "wussiness" may be as good a term, depending on what influences predominated.
He probably wanted to say is that on average people make more money from salaries. For each company that is acquired by Google many others don't go anywhere.
here's the data about manufacturing from the federal reserve:

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/default.h...

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/ipg1.gif

And other pretty charts in section G.17 Release Tables
99% of people who make up statistics post them without a reference.
Hmm? OPML is XML. To export your subscriptions, log in and then visit http://www.bloglines.com/export. That URL is linked to at the bottom of your feed tree, under the name Export Subscriptions.
"Innovations in design and manufacturing tend to dovetail and drive each other."

That's Andy Grove's current argument too. I would have thought it to be obvious, self-evident even, but apparently not.
The 99% figure is obviously a generalization, but it's well known that most startups fail. Amongst the ones that don't, only a few are bought out by someone like Google, or go on to succeed in bigger ways. Additionally, only those with substantial stock positions in the company make out well on these pay days - the rest of the people who worked for the startup are making a salary.

In short, most people are making a salary, and of those that try to found their own company, most will end up failing and making less than they would have if they took a salaried gig. That is the risk of founding a company.
I had a similar problem, but with a QVGA-sized matrix and not just a small array like this guy.

I used some Numerical Recipes formulas to do a linear interpolation on the data and upscale it into a larger grid, then used OpenCV to threshold and then find contours.

It works pretty well, but I wish I could process the data faster. I fear using this Python example with mapping and overlaps would just run way way longer.