skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember when the Hesco barriers started showing up in Iraq. They quickly replaced lots of the concrete pouring in many area for explosives barriers. Amazing things.

Plus, their booth at various tradeshows is basically an open free bar with unlimited beer.
When you announce a new product; have it ready to ship within in the month (sic)

In martial arts they have this thing they call "telegraphing" a blow, where you unwittingly give your opponent plenty of notice of what's coming so that they can be ready to counter it.

Obviously RIM is so confident of their manufacturing and marketing prowess that they don't mind giving Apple 3-6 months notice of what they plan to ship.

On another subject, why is RIM even in this business? Are Apple iPads taking market share away from Blackberrys? Is iPad some kind of a threat to RIM? I would have guessed that RIM would be pouring all of its efforts into defending its corporate phone turf, not thinning their forces by launching new devices.
Mostly we care about the people, regardless of how far along the company is. Which can be a problem, actually, because startups that have been running for a while generally overestimate the percentage of the work that's behind them.

For us the most important thing about the company having been running for a while is that it gives us more information about the founders. E.g. we can ask them "what have you learned from your users?"
Except when this finally comes it, it will be time for iPad 2nd gen. Seems like worthless jabs for a product still 6 months out.
we actually copy verified bugs from Bugzilla into an internal bug tracking system, and we then use that internal bug tracking system to drive bugs to resolution

What an utter waste of effort! For more time spent doing grunt work, you give slower and less complete feedback to your customers (platform developers in this case). There may be some information they don't want in a public tracker, but I'm betting it's:

- a lot less information than they think; and
- much easier to manage in a different way, as opposed to maintaining two bug databases!
Though it occurs to me now this may be just the thing PG and friends can't share with us. It's to their benefit to make expectations for a great application very clear.

On the other hand, I'm sure there are a handful of red flags and heuristics that they emphatically won't share, simply because they're effective filters. Their disclosure could let people better obscure true problems or falsely inflate perceived value. Reviewing applications after that would be a lot less fun.
Why would you bet on NoSQL?
What Google, Facebook and others look for in M&A deals
Interesting, how was Go used at Google? How do they deal with incompatible changes?
I was just about to ask the same question. If anything, this probably legitimizes the WordPress platform for thousands of small business owners - the very people who could be WPEngine customers.

If they were on the tipping point of this platform ("It's open source? Is it safe? I don't know if I can trust it."), they may be tipping now. ("Ah, Microsoft uses it. It must be safe.")
I guess I have two points:

1. Your observations about Atari and Newton highlight one of the problems with your initial argument- it's not generally a safe bet to assume an early category-creating product will continue to innovate and develop to stay at the front of the pack.

2. Whether RIM creates a broadly superior product is beside the point. A new market has opened up, and they expect it should be profitable if they can capture just a small share of that market.

Apple has shown a commitment to develop their successful product lines; but as the size of the market grows there will be plenty of room for profitable competitors even if Apple is wildly successful.
How an object falls and what it falls on to has a lot to do with whether or not it will break. It's probably better to drop your iPad onto bitumen (asphalt) than it is to drop it onto, say, linoleum.
Hurd was never fully functional. It never worked well enough to have an opportunity to be rejected for being weird.
"Obviously RIM is so confident of their manufacturing and marketing prowess that they don't mind giving Apple 3-6 months notice of what they plan to ship."

Really? To me it reeks of "don't forget about us". They are telegraphing not because they are so confident in their punch but because they don't want people to forget they are in the fight.
Are you looking strictly for mod_rewrite syntax support in IIS?

http://www.isapirewrite.com/

More here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/60857/mod-rewrite-equival...
That sounds logical enough, except for two things:

First: You are often working with someone-else's library which for various reasons you cannot change.

Second: It is not uncommon to use a standard method that may well be able to return multiple items, but in your use case it should only return one. Case in point: a database call that returns the result of a query.
I would guess the reason is that such applications are foreign to most potential applicants.
Indeed. Especially if it is aimed at business.
I agree. This, Opzi, and Namesake really stand out. I didn't really see much in the others, I could be wrong though...
Stays at YCombinator?
I really hope they actually do something with the platform that allows it to live up to its name, "PlayBook". I hope they didn't just name it that because they liked the sound or the metaphor at face value.

Think about it. Enterprise types are very competitive and sports fans; so the idea of carrying around your work "playbook" suddenly becomes very cool. I understand that the mix of calendar / email / and web make this the case for any device but I'm still waiting for someone to push the bar forward in this area specifically.

I'm a huge iPad fan but I'm still waiting on a developer to do something that takes all the different content buckets (GTD apps, email, Dropbox, Basecamp, Yammer, CRM, etc) and create an interface that allows them to work well together and with others (be it people on your team, company wide, or maybe just your family and friends). I'd really like to see someone do what FlipBoard did for RSS feeds and social feeds on the iPad but for being busy at work, in and out of meetings, on the go, etc.

The name "PlayBook" really hits home for me there but I have a hunch that it's just a name and nothing more.
Inequality and Moral Hazard Rents in the Financial Sector
I'd feel depressed. My whole life was in that question.

It's not on the same level as life insurance.
It's a bit misleading to call these events "dinners" though, because they last half a day.

People start to show up for dinners around 6 pm.

This seems wrong, unless the YC dinners conclude at 6 AM.
You think "rapidly changing apis" is "right from microsoft's playbook"? Microsoft has been known to abandon a platform (VB6 being the prime example), but they have also put tremendous effort into preserving compatibility in their APIs. So while they may have introduced new APIs over time, they've also shouldered the massive burden of keeping the old way working for many years. I would even say they realised this was a vital component in maintaining their dominance: the sheer number of applications that work on Windows.
Papert's ideas: mainly from mindstorms
You are probably napping for too long. 20 minutes is best because you are not hitting deep sleep and may catch some REM (20 mins is also not incidentally the polyphasic sleep prescription).
> This sounds cool, but how is this not a solution that's already been considered? … I have a CS degree

Well… did you think of it?
My point wasn't the 3D printing cost. Or about 3D printing in general. I know it can be really useful, and these would be good prices for those things.

My point was the objects available for sale. Like that robot. They don't make sense, especially for that price.
> A function that squares a number is simple, one that computes the standard deviation is definitely more complex.

I'm talking about the complexity difference between this:

def stddev(pop):
total = 0
count = 0
for x in pop:
total += x
count += 1
mean = total / float(count)
variance = 0
for x in pop:
variance += (x - mean)**2
return math.sqrt(variance)

and this:

def stddev(pop):
return math.sqrt(variance(pop))

def variance(pop):
m = mean(pop)
return sum(square(x - m) for x in pop)

def mean(pop):
return sum(pop) / float(len(pop))

def square(x):
return x**2

The first is a (mildly) complex function. The latter are all simple functions, and the complex result is constructed by composing simple operations.

Good programmers write functions in the latter style, not the former.
Also called "strategic incompetence".
I can't believe such a small library is getting so much attention.
That is accurate parse as written. I think the even more dramatic conclusion suggested by Lean Startup is it is probably max(y1..yN)*C^(90/x), where y1 is the utility of your first idea and x is average number of days it takes you to learn one important thing (a full cycle through the idea, implement, measure, conclude loop).

Scary stuff starts happening in any business when you take the limit as x approaches zero. (This came up in client work today.)
I don't think that's true. See, for example, Finding Maximum Flows in Undirected Graphs Seems Easier than Bipartite Matching (Karger-Levine, 1997):
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.52.3...
Qwiki
This is just spelling / grammar

Some syntactic errors are so egregious as to obscure, change, or remove the meaning of a sentence.
There are certainly a lot of important and so far mostly unstudied phenomena there. How much of it you could talk about in conventionally publishable economics papers is another question, though.
When I try to log on via Connect on Groupon, sometimes it doesn't work or is slow to log me in :P
Unity 3 released
Totally agree. This post by daniel tanner http://danieltenner.com/posts/0017-how-to-nap.html should be a practical complement to this.
When are you going to put the Wiki back online? That should be a matter of a few man-hours of work. Until then, it's not believable to claim "We're working on updating the site and docs as fast as we can."

In my experience developing a couple of FB apps in the past, the information in the Wiki was absolutely crucial. (I'm talking about the Wiki that was located at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/ in the past.)
I meant half a waking day, cperciva. When someone says "I spent half a day trying to find that bug," they don't mean 12 hours.
Here's my theory. Because the case flew off at 70 miles an hour, it is likely that it's vertical drop was buffered by the air current. In other words, the flat side facing into the wind gave it just enough lift so that it could come down slow enough to prevent breakage. Then once it was on the ground, it was home-free so long as it could stay flat as it skidded to a halt. The case, at this point, absorbed all the friction.

That was lucky. If it had come down on the corner or something, the case could easily have shattered (splintered?), and the thing would have been toast for sure, pinwheeling itself into oblivion on a hard asphalt road.
A lot of people here are referring to the iPad as a tablet computer, but I think that most consumers and Apple do not think of the iPad as a tablet, slate, or other terms that imply computer. It's an appliance. Apple doesn't highlight or easily make available the typical computer specs like RAM, chip speed, etc. You buy an iPad and you know the software will just work. You don't have to worry about if your iPad can run X program or Y program, etc. Any stress that most people associate with computers aren't even concerns with the iPad.

What surprises me about the PlayBook is that BB can't seem to make up it's mind about how it's marketing the product. They pretty clearly emulate the iPad in that the web, Flash, etc. just work, but at the same time they highlight specs that mark it clearly as a computer. These specs really don't matter when competing with Apple, because only a very smaller portion of the market would even consider the specs when choosing between the iPad and the BB. Even the name can't make up it's mind; Book really labels it as a computer, but Play makes it seem otherwise. I sort of assumed that BB would be targeting mainly enterprise customers at first with their tablet, but naming it Play really conflicts with even that strategy.

In short, the product seems like design by committee and I think it's identity crisis will be a problem for it.
i'm bearish on google... dominant market share = low growth. they used to be taking share from others, mostly yahoo. now they are loosing share to bing. new products? they have had a string of duds. wave, buzz, etc. furthermore they are loosing talent to facebook. i don't see it.
throw the sucker at a video card, and watch it finish thousands of times faster on cheaper hardware

This is nonsense even for dense operations. But this matrix is sparse, in which case GPUs are within a modest factor (2-5 or so depending on the matrix, whether you use multiple cores on the CPU, and whether you ask NVidia or Intel). And if the algorithm does not expose a lot of concurrency (as with most multiplicative algorithms), the GPU can be much slower than a CPU.
Sadly, "finite time" is not what we need - they are looking for approximations that will be much rougher than the imprecision of finite numerical precision, and they want the approximation algorithm to have a good provable run time.

In general, taking theoretical approximation algorithms and shrinking the approximation factor to below some threshold where you "tell the difference" is a dead end. For instance, this algorithm's running time has a poly^{1/\epsilon} factor, so you pay a huge cost for it. It is better to think \epsilon = 1/3 or so.
From the TC article : "Say you do a search for a person, Qwiki can look at their social connections and tell you about their LinkedIn profile, for example. It is very, very impressive."

Well.. hmm.. That's interesting !
What about D?
fags have that problem.
Sorting Algorithm Animations, Code, Analysis, and Discussion
I apologise for being a little sarcastic. However, "Don't forget about us" is only useful if their customers, especially their "enterprise" customers, are about to standardize on iPads and can be persuaded to hold off on the basis of PR stunt.

It's not obvious to me that consumers interested in buying an iPad for back-to-school or during the holiday season will hold up their purchases to see what RIM actually ships and how much it costs.
The great programmers certainly go through fewer interviews, since they tend to get hired quicker. And then they have a job, so they don't do interviews anymore. It's the incompetent programmers who are more likely to show up because they're more likely to (a) be unemployed and (b) go through more interviews before finding a job.
If you're hoping to hire people to use your chosen framework, Node.js might be a better choice than any of the ones you've listed.

Its not so much that there are more Node programmers than, say, Twisted programmers (although at this point there very well might be, especially in the Bay Area), but lots of people know Javascript, and both Javascript and Node itself are relatively easy to learn.

Edit: I don't mean to pick on Twisted here, I've been using it for about two years, and Node for only around two months, and I really like both.
RIM is also leveraging their QNX acquisition for the OS here, so it seems like its a primary part of their game plan, and not a spin-off product.
Or is Google Instant just too nerdy?

Isn't it really not nerdy enough? The auto-suggestions steer you towards common search terms and editing your query for instant results is really only practical on short imprecise searches. It seems to be a feature that exists for people who aren't very good at searching.
That's a bit too literal, I think. 12 hour work days are likely typical - ergo, folks stay past midnight.
The question is : are you dumber than a rat?
AOL Close to Buying TechCrunch
I'll admit it, I love cheevos. And I feel an odd compulsion to install this. But something makes me not want to add in a game into my work, even if it's work I do at home, for myself.
This is absolutely not true. The wikipedia page for the max flow problem lists several (slower) poly-time algorithms for solving exact max flow. Most theory-101 classes cover at least Ford-Fulkerson.
https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id
What will future generations condemn us for?
Jerkness Reminder
That's not an issue with OpenID. That's an issue with the decision to not use OpenID exclusively and applies to every authentication service on the list in that screenshot, by virtue of that list being a list.
Profit up 650% in a year. Remind anyone of this the next time they start talking about particular business types having patent on rapid growth.
I don't like this new thing. It is not similar to the old thing, which I do like!
There is a product called (I believe) ASAPII which interprets .htaccess files for IIS hosts. We have successfully used it to run Wordpress on Windows for certain clients.
"United States deployed force .... has done so in support of "worthy causes all over the planet," whether stopping genocide or promoting democracy in the Middle East.

Was this supposed to be ironic?
The US like every other country has deployed force to get what it wants, to stop an enemy or to please it's own voters.
Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada (in fact most of central america), Cuba, Iraq (1 and 2), Afghanistan (1 and 2) were not about promoting democracy.
Many of Ryan's complaints apply both to the graph API and to the older APIs, although one of them is that the graph API isn't maintained properly (which has been the case since the beginning).
I can't properly explain something I was wrong about.

But yes, "dental fricative" is the "th" sound made by pressing your tongue against your teeth. An example would be the sound in "teeth", written "ti:θ" with the international phonetic alphabet. I assumed someone had read about how, say, "the" was once written "þe" and gone off to restore the usage, as certain people are wont to do. Except that would be overly confusing, so I further assumed that what they found was instead a ligature, a combination of two letters for mostly shorthand and visual purposes, here for the digraph "th". Turns out that there is no such unicode code point - the visually closest thing I can find is ᵺ, and as seen above, it's not even a symbol for the fricative.
Design patterns are universal. You can't avoid using them. The more important question is whether there are core design patterns which can be used regularly to improve the quality of software design, and whether or not we have discovered such a set of core patterns. That question is still, for now, undecided. Some of the canonical patterns (from the GoF book, for example) are useful, some have limited utility, overall there's a good body of evidence that that particular selection of patterns is far from universally applicable in software development.
Great to read about success the "hard way" -- over the long term, and without using free as a "hook" to bring in the initial users. And despite taking a slow and patient route overall, they would have failed faster (if the idea crashed) than if they had have gone freemium from the beginning.
Sure - but that wasn't what he said. He said that requiring facebook makes him think that the website owner shouldn't be trusted with data.

Which has nothing to do w/ lock-in on 3rd party websites. It has to do w/ the relative security competence of those who choose to use FB Connect vs. those who choose email.
Cool, but there are similar projects out there. E.g. http://cdn-cloud.appspot.com/

Not sure that response times from app engine are that nippy compared to a 'proper' CDN.

What would be cool would automatically distributing images via google's image serving CDN. You can use the get_serving_url method in app engine to return a CDN enabled url for any image in the blobstore. Its super fast and allows dynamic image resizing.
I use MailChimp for free right now but I can't wait until my list is big enough for me to start having to pay them. It'll mean that I have enough subscribers to actually monetize the list. At that point, I'll be more than happy to give them my credit card.

This is in contrast with Evernote and Dropbox, both of which I use for free but neither of which I plan of paying for in the future. They work well enough for my needs, and if I grow out of them, I'll probably just either cut back on my use or try to find another solution. Maybe that makes me a freeloader or cheapskate, but I imagine I'm not alone.

So, at least in my case, Freemium works best for products that either directly or indirectly contribute to making money.
With a good college degree

Differentiating between good and bad ones may be a large part of the issue.

you can easily make $100,000 in less than two years

This where I have to disagree, especially if you're talking about $100k net, that is, in addition to paying off the extra college costs for those (less than) two years.

Moreover, I think the context of the OP is that the grant being offered is to disrupt by building something of value. Ideally, at the end of the 3-4 years (what it would take to finish college and earn the afformentioned $100k), one is left with much more value in what one built and possibly even much more money in the form of further investment. In the worst case, one is left with extremely valuable, arguably more so than a degree and a couple years of employment, experience.
Quite so, it should be intuitively obvious that this is the case.
with cache coherency fully guaranteed in all respects

It's not at all clear that this is desirable. I'd much rather have thin (one or two socket) systems with a reliable network and write for distributed memory. Even four-socket systems have quite unpredictable performance characteristics.
Build stories out of social media with Storify
Two reasons for this, that I can see. To take mind share away from Apple, so they do not get too big before anyone else has a chance, and to signal that they are actually doing something.

Tablets take a while, to design, get software going, and source parts for those big screens. Everyone is running behind, and running scared. They are not taking as long as they did to respond to the iPhone.

One thing it is going to come down to is the software, which all of these new entrants seem ignorant of. You can come up with any hardware stats you want, nobody cares about that. Sure, a camera can be useful, but the rest, who cares.
Qwiki was created by Doug Imbruce and Louis Monier. [...] He’s also worked at [...] the search startup Cuil as the VP of Product.

The cynic in me suggests this will probably not be "The Future Of Information Consumption". Perhaps a little less hyperbole would be in order after the spectacular failure that was cuil?
pretty cool. might be worth making the uri a key_name to make the lookup faster:

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastore/model...

discussion on efficiency difference of get vs fetch:

http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_threa...
I don't understand why anyone complains about Google Instant.

It requires one less mouseclick. If you want to pretend you're using the old Google, you can just close your eyes while you type, randomly click your mouse, then open your eyes. You will have before you the same results that original Google would have returned.

Unless you get confused by the "Instant" feedback along the way (like you somehow get distracted by shiny other searches that Google recommends, forget what you were originally searching for and get "tricked" into some new query), it shouldn't be an issue.
Cargo cult programmers are dangerous no matter whether they've been reading horrendous code or excellent code. If you try to build an airplane by copying a beautiful mansion you will still fail.
This looks just like one of the other sites that recently came up. Pivot? Copycat? or just another product from the same folks?
Oracle’s REAL Buyout Targets