skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting. But I don't necessarily agree that all merchants are pissed off.

One merchant I bought from had a direct store and an Amazon store. The Amazon store price was higher (by about $1.50 on a $20-ish item), but I still ordered from Amazon because I expected the merchant to take care of Amazon customers better wrt shipping time etc. :)

As a buyer, given a choice I would rather order from the Amazon store than directly from a no-name merchant.

I think your e-commerce customers just need to raise their Amazon store prices.
If that's all hipmunk has going for it (shiny?) than I wouldn't bet on them. Nasty interfaces often win (i.e. craigslist). The guys who started kayak are ex-orbitz people, so they've been around awhile and have data on what works.

Don't get me wrong, I'm rooting for hipmunk. I would love to see them succeed. But they need more than shiny.
The title of a job posting does not encourage or influence the way I act... They're just trying to differentiate themselves from the mundane 'Java Developer w/ 2 years exp' jobs, that's all. It's really, really not a big deal. I'm really having a hard time understanding why everyone is so hung up on what is essentially marketing fluff. Can we please yell at people posting jobs with 'requirements' like "6 years of RoR" rather than some cute buzzword in the title?
If I had to nail it down to one advice, it would be: Get high-quality, designer, jeans and classy shoes. You can throw almost everything on top of that and still look pretty good. Learned with past gfs and current (wife).

On the other end, if you have a bad posture, no matter what you wear, man, you'll still look crappy. Only it'll be "designer crappy".
It all turns on whether Groupon sells at commodity level or at a service level.

If Groupon is selling group-discounts as commodity, then that it. It's your job to figure out how to use them. Google sells click-throughs and Home Depot sells cement. They might each be perfectly good but if you don't use them right, they won't do you any good.

If Groupon is like personal trainer and provides ongoing value, then does need to assure that its buyers achieve success.

Both business model-types can make money. Neither is going away. I don't know enough about Groupon to say which type they are.
The article quote is simply a refutation of the meme that the iPad is a toy or consumption-only machine. Whether it can do everything someone might want a desk machine for is irrelevant. You're arguing against a claim no-one made.
I don't think it's fair to say it costs you more than $1500 to host one blog when in fact it's a series of sites. It gives people the wrong impression of how much the database costs relative to hosting.

(As an aside, I run a site that gets over two million hits A DAY, I pay nothing for my database, and about $100/mo for hosting.)
I don't believe that would be true except for local businesses that are selling a commodity. Those who hope to convert me into a repeat customer based on the quality of their donuts or haircuts will do it after one visit.
Man jailed over computer password refusal
Founders can cash out at various funding rounds, so it might be that Sam took some money out during Loopt's funding rounds.

I'm assuming the same for Kevin Rose who's a pretty active angel.

Likely the sums invested are fairly small as well.

The Foursquare guys took $4M home out of a current funding round

http://www.theequitykicker.com/2010/07/15/foursquare-founder...
The Myth of the Visionary Founder
Not all forms of prayer can be construed as meditation (as it is generally considered.) Some can, but these are not the dominant form in most Christian traditions.
> It’s only the iPad now but I’m sure there will be many similar devices in the future.

There will be, but that doesn't mean they'll have the quality and drive to show up. They've mostly been non-show so far.
Very nice, one feature I had to dig to find out if you supported was if the iphone app synced with the online version. I might feature that a little more.
The Case For Product Development in Interactive Agencies
So maybe 15% isn't much when you consider how difficult it is to build your own e-store?

15% isn't much when you consider how difficult it is to acquire a customer.

Everyone I've loaded onto Amazon already has their own e-store. But here's what happens...Sales increases 10 to 20% almost instantly. But profits don't because of the 15% commission.

If you have a premium product with a large margin and no e-store, Amazon can be a great way to get orders. Otherwise, Amazon should be used to acquire customers for future direct sales. 15% is just too high for a commodity product.
It's inhuman and unwise to target civilians when they are mere puppets of agents higher up in the hierarchy. It's simple, really: the US is killing Pakistanis, and when they find that their people are being culled, the likes of Faisal Shahzad will snap and go to any length to get back at the US.

IMO, what we really need is a MASSIVE propaganda effort to isolate Islamist ideologues within Pakistan. Not sure how this will happen, but the parallel I have in mind is the downfall of Nazism in Germany. If NATO along sympathetic states like India pool their resources together, I think it should be possible to buy out/instigate/support any number of revolutionaries within Pakistan who will effectively portray the Islamists as the cancer of not just Pakistan, but of mankind itself.
Check out ElasticHosts...I started using them a few months back to run some servers, and I've got nothing but good things to say about them (so far).
Cloudy with a Chance of Pain
I was actually hired in my current role by a competent technical recruiter. He's not a technical person but he sure knows how to find good technical people. His trick is to get good people to come to him by setting up events, conferences and pub meetups around interesting topics (e.g. the latest JVM language or Agile development practices). Of course, 90% of the people who go there aren't looking for jobs but I expect he does pretty well out of the 10% that are.

I think this is actually the right way to go about recruitment. Don't spam 100s of people on the off chance they're currently unhappy and looking to move. Just set up an environment which attracts the best people in the industry but also allows them to consider new opportunities. Not only that but as a recruiter you are immersed in the world you are recruiting for and cannot help learn and understand more about it (e.g. this morning I got an email on the list mentioning a possible talk about Jaskell - a language I hadn't even heard of but apparently, my recruiter has :)).
I'm disappointed to see someone as smart as David casually leaning on a stereotype like "shady Russians".

I'm confident that he wouldn't have said "sneaky Jews" or "naive Canadians" or "cheap Mexicans".
I'll be the contrary voice. At this point, I don't really care what the cause of the downtime is and I'd prefer that their engineers are working full time on fixing it, rather than writing extended blog posts about it. If they have a solid ETA on a fix, that might be nice to know, but from my experience it's unusual to be able to give such a number with confidence. After the fact, maybe there is an interesting story to tell about what went wrong and how they hope to avoid it in the future, but that's for tomorrow not today.
Clearly you can't read all at once (people can only read one thing at a time), but in my tabs I have one tab for HN, several on some MSDN class refs, one on Grooveshark, one on a tutorial I'm reading during thinking breaks (when I'm not on HN), one for gmail, and for Yahoo mail, one for TechMeme, one for Memeorandum, and one on Sharepoint. I've dropped to 13 tabs from the previous 18 (I had opened up a bunch on BluRay ripping for a weekend project).

In Word, I have my spec. In VS I'm coding a prototype to build my spec out.

And yes, I'm extremely productive.
I just came into a position where I inherited a site running on 1and1. Yesterday their DNS went down for a half an hour, that was a fun half hour.

I've never really had problems with HostGator or asmallorange. HostGator can be slow, but it's good value for the price, and pretty clean cpanel interface on the whole. ASO has good support and seems pretty snappy. (Of course I'm using an absurd amount of disk space on HostGator, mostly for backups.)

The biggest thing with 1and1 is what a huge mess their administrative interface is. Almost half of the space is ads trying to upsell you to their other services. You would think as a paying customer they could leave me alone.
Skype can just remain one of the choices, why die?
Germany Threatens Europe With `Deflationary Spiral'
No thanks. I'll give you money, but I'm not going to waste my friends' time for your business gain.
Do you have a github? I know that if a recruiter included a github link in their email, I would take a much more serious look.
I have by coincidence been involved with recruitment lately primarily of highly skilled UX, Design and technical people.

Although I am not a developer I do know my Perl from my Ruby, from my Haskel and that there are two types of javabeans. One drinkable one non-drinkable.

The primary challenge is that the people that are good aren't looking for work, in fact they probably never will have to as they transition naturally in a personal growth curve within their own social network.

So if you need to find good people you have to have your ears open and know where to look for them. This is the challenge but also interesting in more than one way.

If you know how to find the right people for the right job, you will gain insight into how to find the right customers for your product.

And that is a very interesting skill to get IMHO.
Here are the rules for being an accredited investor:
http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm

"income exceeding $200,000 in each of the two most recent years or joint income with a spouse exceeding $300,000 for those years and a reasonable expectation of the same income level in the current year"

And it is not like you have to submit to an audit to the company before sending them a check -- all you have to do is sign something that says you are accredited. That way you will have a harder time suing the company claiming you were mis-led or whatever.
This was the post I was arguing against:

"there's not much that most PC users actually do with their PC that they couldn't do with an iPad"."

I pointed out a couple of things where the software isn't available. And another being a use scenario that is much less comfortable. I'm directly arguing an exact quote made by a poster.
Ironically, I envy you because Verizon users are the only Android/Skype users in the US that can make Skype calls over 3G. I would love to be able to use Skype anywhere I go, rather than being limited to using it by a WiFi hotspot...
Me too. iTunes is just horrible. I'd love a non-iTunes way of getting my music onto an iPod.
I have owned many different mobile devices over the years, but the iPad is the first to become a requisite device for resting on the couch and watching TV. In fact, when I want to sit down and watch some TV and I can't find the iPad I go berserk and tear the house apart looking for it.
More because US carriers are deathly afraid of anything competing with them for voice calls, ie, to prevent people from buying just a data connection and still getting voice calls over Skype.
The No. 1 reason for unfriending on Facebook? "frequent, unimportant posts."
Interesting. Everyone I've bought from on the Amazon Marketplace has totally failed to "recruit" me as a customer. I typically get a box with what I ordered in it, and maybe an invoice. Nothing asking me to visit their website or anything like that, ever.
Ask HN: ListAndPlay.com - What should I change? 
This app allows you to create & share Youtube playlists in an easy way, tries to simplify the whole process and give you a new Youtube experience.

What would you change about the concept/layout/functions?
Then allow me to make your day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_iPod_managers
I think the question is: "What else do I get for that $25?"

I hate dealing with my library of songs. If I could stream it to any device, any time, as well as have -any- other value-added service attached, I'd pay the $25 per year.

By 'any device' I mean TV, PC, Android Phone, PS3 and more. Basically, any device that I can hook to the internet.
I agree with your points (iPad user here) but I don't think decreasing the battery size would amount to a huge savings in mass. According to Marco Arment (no link alas, on mobile), the glass display is the most massive component of the device.

But I agree, it's a tad hefty.
A friend wants to jump into the startup world, where should she start?
FYI, I did a follow-up post with stats.

http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/10/the-great-hac...

Looks like it could be a hobby. Not sure if anything more than that, though. But enough to play around with the idea some more
What I meant was that I don't think PandaBoard itself is meant to ship for your customers, but to allow you to prototype your ideas, and evaluate the hardware needs of your product, so that you can then build your own hardware which you ship to your customers.

And that's why I said that dev kit price is not that much of an issue, as it does not directly affect the price of the hardware you are going to ship.

edit: from their FAQ:

Is PandaBoard a end product or can I utilize it in my end product?

PandaBoard is a development platform! It is not an end product nor do we recommend directly using it in an end product. We encourage you to leverage open & low cost PandaBoard to explore, prototype your software & hardware design and venture into creating your own OMAP4430 based product.
How would one go about contacting you? Do you do mostly SalesForce implementations?
Top 50 Twitter Clients By Number Of Tweets
> After the Sims, WoW is the best selling PC game of all time. It's pretty popular.

Not by a long shot. WoW sold 12 million copies. Myst sold 14. Starcraft sold 17 millions if you combine SC1 and SC2 sales (SC1 sold 11 million). And The Sims sold about 30 millions, excluding expansions (16 millions for The Sims, 13 for The Sims 2 and 4.6 millions for The Sims 3).

At best WoW ranks fourth, whether by franchises (Sims, StarCraft, Myst) or by individual game (Sims 1, Myst, Sims 2)
Me too. I felt like I was listening to half a discussion.
I think your e-commerce customers just need to raise their Amazon store prices.

Those who sell commodities don't have that option. Every time any of them has tried, sales went into the toilet. You have to stay competitive when Amazon's web page shows your item right next to your competitor's.
The best way to tell a good recruiter from a clueless (normal) one is whether they have an exclusive arrangement with the employer. This is as rare as good recruiters are. It is more common in hiring for senior jobs in big companies.
The Fires of Innovation in Silicon Valley
Bragging about being one of the best Lotus Notes devs
I just heard a guy bragging in his cubicle: "I'm one of the top four Lotus Notes developers in Ontario." He's wearing suspenders. What should I do?
I'd look at their open source work, contact references, etc. I think I'd generally be able to recognize good people, especially if I accumulated them gradually over my "recruiting career".
Quick link: http://ListAndPlay.com
I see bubbles - pure CSS3 animated buttons
Perhaps, but Bernie Madoff managed to steal an enormous sum despite having a tiny firm. Various hedge fund disasters also started small.
Thanks. This looks exactly like an "application" of my putative theorem. The trapezoidal theorem assumes that straight line and curved line are the same thing with different curvature (I think); the way a circle and ellipse are the same figure but have different eccentricity.
Leiningen leverages the maven repository underneath, but has a much simpler, less scary API so it was adopted pretty quickly by clojure programmers.
Around a given operating point, you can approximate any function with a polynomial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_series). This includes approximating a polynomial with a lower-order polynomial. A line is first-order polynomial. Therefore, around a given operating point, a line can approximate a function.

The key phrase there is "around a given operating point". If you zoom in close enough, a line and an exponential will appear to be the same. Outside of this area, they will clearly diverge.

So you can't really say that a curved line is equivalent to a straight line, but you can say that sin(x) = x, for small values of x (and tolerable levels of error in sin(x)). In fact, that comes up quite often in engineering.
Interactive Agency Tries Variable Pricing
I've been working on a project for the last year or so (on and off) refactoring code and shifting it from Classic ASP to C#/.NET.

I'll say the one thing that would really help would be unit tests on the old code. It's rough transitioning some dirty logic that seems to work from one end to the other and not having a simple test to know I didn't break everything upon refactoring.
Calacanis to Challenge TechCrunch
Disappointed, because it's the protocol that counts, and they should be refining and promoting that over any particular implementation. Especially a toy Ruby implementation. Ruby is ok for server-centric deployment, but not so great for desktop/mobile deployments.

I wanted to see a p2p, NAT traversing, auto-discovering, auto-federating mesh of a social network.
I want to up-vote your comment more than once. Just this week, my boss told me to aggregate and then analyze 90 spreadsheets worth of data along with associated metadata scattered around in various (structured) files. The task is one I'm going to have to do once every two weeks. It took my predecessor three days every time she had to do it, three days during which she had no time for any other experiments.

My solution? I wrote a Ruby script in 2 hours, then an R script in 1 hour (to run the stats). They're both flexible, reusable, and efficient. They get my boss her report the same day as my raw data come to me. And since my source data comes from another computer program, the process is flawless and does not suffer from copy errors or improperly paired metadata.

People should not have to do repetitive tasks like aggregation or mapping data to metadata by hand. We should be teaching every high schooler basic scripting and (more generally) that we can outsource the mundane to a computer.
What's inauthentic about paying for a product with social karma? It's not like this system is duping people into tweeting out ads. Everyone on Twitter knows what it means to tweet, and they will understand that paying with a tweet means that it goes on their feed, and that their followers will therefore have a {positive/negative/neutral} reaction to it.

And, even if some rooks do not have that understanding, it will not ruin things for those of us that do, because we will unfollow them.
Again, the kernel will use a simple LRU algorithm, where the granularity is the page.

I don't think it's accurate to describe any performance critical part of the Linux kernel as "simple." For an overview of the page replacement policy, see http://kerneltrap.org/node/7608. I wondered if CLOCK-Pro [1, 2] had made it into the kernel yet, but it looks like it has not.

This author makes compelling arguments for implementing application level paging. But the nice thing about doing systems work is we never have to rely on arguments alone to evaluate something - show me numbers.

[1] http://linux-mm.org/ClockProApproximation

[2] http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~fchen/paper/papers/usenix05.p...
If customers haven't educated themselves about the danger of space-time accidents when they try to take a Toyota Maxwell 2033 out on the interstate, well that's just their fault. This ain't no internal combustion engine.
Saddly MySQL has become the Paris Hilton of open source databases. It is famous for no other reason then the fact that it is famous.
Here are two recent job postings from the News Apps team at the Chicago Tribune:

http://blog.apps.chicagotribune.com/2009/09/09/hacker-wanted...

http://blog.apps.chicagotribune.com/2009/12/24/were-hiring-a...
I downvoted both of you, so there. :P
The site I work for has been running at under 40% IE for over a year and a half. We're at about 15% Safari, 40% Firefox, 38% IE, and 7% Chrome. IE6 is under 4%, thanks goodness!
Agreed, when I saw this status page I let out a slight sigh of relief seeing a straight forward "currently down" "working normally" site, instead of a series of blog entries ala twitter and tumblr.

It's nice that you want to write, but for the love of God get back to work.
There are lots of things that Skype "could" fix. The point that I am hearing from the GP is that they do not CHOOSE to fix them. You should see the Skype 5 beta for Windows. What a UI cluster that thing is, and has been for quite some time now.

And I just tried Skype for my HTC Desire on 2.1 and yikes, he's right: it's a usability nightmare.
You can use events + mmap, you just need to factor the paging latency into your design. Normally, this might mean mmapping a chunk of data at startup, touching it all so that it's resident in RAM, and then beginning to serve queries, keeping an eye on your total resident set so that it never pages out.
You mean you don't consciously game personality tests. Psychology wouldn't be very useful if it only accounted for what people consciously did.

Besides that, even if you don't do anything wrong, it doesn't mean that the tests you took were good. Did you take a test developed by a psychologist (like paying $60 and taking the MBTI through CAPT) or did you take a free online test? That alone could account for inaccurate results.

Saying your type changed is almost like saying your code is broken because of a compiler bug. Is it theoretically possible? Sure. Is it likely? Let me just put it this way: it takes decades (if not your entire life) to develop the type you already have much less change types, yet there are a million and one reasons why a personality test might give inaccurate results. The brain is very plastic, but it has its limits. Even if you developed the cognitive functions to be an INTJ, you wouldn't just dismiss all of the functions you develop as an INTP. Those have been hardwired into your brain for a long, long time.

TL;DR - I suppose it is possible you're an anomaly and was able to change types. But it's a million times more likely that one of the tests was just inaccurate.
Just thought of a feature idea for TrueCrypt and other similar packages: encrypted files or partitions can have multiple passwords, which reveal different things. So you could have a password that reveals something embarrassing but not incriminating. If the police or border nazis threaten you with prosecution unless you reveal your password, you give them this one. Meanwhile, you hide anything really confidential behind a password that you never give out.

Or maybe they already have this?
Adobe's a big employer, but Cisco is the largest private-sector employer in San Jose, at least according to the city's numbers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose,_California#Top_Employ...
Own Mark Zuckerburg's 1st Website (FaceMash.com)