skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let me for one second pretend to be your co-founder:

Hey Colin, that website sucks (even if it is much better than it used to be), we have too little traffic to really make a go of it and all we get is some of the HN crowd, the world is a LOT bigger than that.

Let's either make a real go of this or kill it because for the money it brings it it isn't worth the time it is taking from someone as talented as you. Our tech is superb but our marketing sucks, picodollars may be setting a new standard for fairness and humor in pricing but nobody outside of a bunch of nerds are interested in that sort of thing.

There you go ;)

And I don't want any equity either. And Amazon would never tell you that.

The real value of 'co-founders' is not that they're wheels in a machine, the real value is that they will tell you when you are wrong about something. And that equity helps to keep your goals aligned, that way everybody wins at the same time. AWS will just send you a bill for services rendered, they couldn't care less if you swam or sank.
Do people read programming books to find reasons to become interested in programming? Seems to me, once they've picked up a book, they're already interested. "Preaching to the choir" seems like an apt phrase at this point.
Adobe AIR Available for Android
OK, forget my dumb last comment...
So imagine... cars are automated, and possibly pooled. Bus is the most energy efficient way of transport. So you want to go from A to B. Instead of looking up static train/bus schedules, you just type that into your phone. A server system looks at how many people wants to do a similar trip, and automatically starts an automated taxi that would have just the needed size and will come up 10/15 min later. That way you get the best of both worlds. And if that's not enough space privacy for some, you could just plug mini-cars together, eliminating air resistance but with everyone having its close module transport. Even better, you could switch module transports between road trains. The possibilities are unthinkable. I think this marks the beginning of a new ear in transport.
Two Nations In One State
Mono 2.8 Released with C# 4.0 Support
What it's Like to Teach Black Students?
ARM Assembly (with the exception of TDMI) is an absolute dream compared to 68k, Sparc, MIPS or x86. Instructions are fixed to 32 bits so everything (in theory) should line up nicely, the predication functions are way better than using flags and cmp-type instructions and the pipelining is much better.

Having said that, I wouldn't want to write a web app in ARM asm, I'd much rather use Python or Ruby.
Timely, I wrote about some German research project that has a car doing a trip in normal traffic in a big city:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/Autonomous+driving+cars+one+big+s...

The google car seems very much reliant on its gps data, in the article there is this passage: "He did [interrupt auto mode] so twice, once when a bicyclist ran a red light and again when a car in front stopped and began to back into a parking space. But the car seemed likely to have prevented an accident itself."

Seemed likely is not really good enough though, you have to be sure enough not to interrupt the auto-driving at all for this to be usable.

The biggest problem with auto-driving cars that have a human supervisor is that there is nothing more dangerous than having to be alert for a long time when nothing happens. Invariably you will be distracted when something does over the course of tens of thousands of miles.

Regular traffic is one thing on mapped streets is one thing, but that 100's of thousands of emergency situations that a normal career on the road throws at you over a lifetime contains quite a few where I really wonder how a 'robot' driver would deal with them.

I'm all for 'automated drivers', but I'd like the researchers to be sitting in the passenger seat and to have their kids playing around the car (or come out on their tri-cycle from between two parked cars) while they drive it to prove that it is safe. Overrode but the car would have probably done it is not good enough yet, even though the achievement is very impressive this is not as close as it seems.

Computer programs are great at dealing with everything that you can think of beforehand, it's the exceptions and the response to those exceptions that matters in an application like this.

I also wonder how they'd deal with liability issues if their driver was not actually paying attention to traffic and the software made a mistake and caused an accident.
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Firefox 4 for mobile goes beta on Android and Maemo
11 Common Mistakes That People Make With Their Personal Brands
One handy tool that I came across recently is "autojump." It lets you jump to directories by typing in a short pattern, which is matched against the names of the directories you use the most. I still use cd for short, direct changes, but autojump is nice for switching between top-level project folders and the like.

Source: http://github.com/joelthelion/autojump/wiki
also curl is pretty good for doing anything HTTP related.
My first gripe is the repository system. It might sound silly for a lot of people but it's not as silly as it sounds. Firstly you don't have to deal with the changes that debian do to some of the packages in the repo (for example the OpenSSL security holes). Secondly if you need two different versions it can be a pain in the ass to get it to work and thirdly you don't have to install a ton of dependencies if all you want is a small program.

The two last reasons are so much easier and faster to do by hand and it was such a breeze to do in Slackware compared to when I ran into it in Ubuntu.

The second thing that I like a lot more with Slackware is the config style; to go into a file and to edit it directly instead of doing it GUI-style. I guess you could configure it in the files directly in Ubuntu too, but Slackware is basically built around editing these files for configuration and so I've find that they're a lot easier to edit; great documentation and easy to find.

Ubunut is a great way to easily get a working linux up and running without much configuration needed, but if you have the time and energy to sit down and tinker with it a bit like I had then Slackware is pretty easy and straightforward too.

Lastly I think that if you run Ubuntu, you will learn exactly that: Ubuntu. But if you run Slackware you will learn more linux with only a few Slackware specific parts like the startup scripts and the package tools - I can't honestly think of anything else which is unique to Slackware (the startup scripts are actually BSD style but meh). Which is a good thing if you want to learn linux like me.
I would suggest autojump for quickly switching to frequently used folders.

http://github.com/joelthelion/autojump/wiki
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i want passwod help me to send password at this id ikhlas_9@hotmail.comfor apple id is there any one who
I have both a Mother and a Father.

Obviously nature has a bit left to learn.
forced by who? nature?

it is not the well off that created conditions of scarcity. They've only figured out ways of remedying scarcity by innovating and trading.

Sure, the are many instances where people have been dispossessed of their land or resources. But this is hardly the free market. It is the ultimate expression of the idea that might makes right and that who gets what should be determined politically.
Samsung Galaxy S sales surpass five million
I wanted get a broad overview of the article's size and structure before investing my time to read it. However, as soon as I reached the comment section, without having read anything in depth, I suddenly got a nasty CSS pop-up:

If you enjoyed this article Then you may also be interested in ...

... asking me to subscribe for a newsletter.

In that moment I didn't want to read anything from that site anymore.
This is interesting. Thanks for the info.
Let me just add here that I second jacquesm's assessment.

You really do need to stop worrying about the technology and start worrying about your marketing.

I love the point you make about the extended leverage open-source and outsourced code gives us. However, all of your competitors have the same advantages.

I should know, Gridspy's (http://gridspy.co.nz) marketing hasn't really even taken its first steps yet.
Ask HN: Accept a job or continue my nascent startup
Hi everybody,

I really like the HN community and I have a hard decision to make and cannot make my mind.

I'm graduating in CS this month and have been working on my startup for the past 5 months. The project is still in development and there is at least 4 months of development left.
To finance myself, I've been doing some freelancing and the company for which I work as proposed me a job as lead developer with a (well) above average salary for a fresh out of school developer and some nice incentives. The work is really nice and the team is great. The contract would have a non exclusive clause so I could continue to work on my own startup during evenings and weekends. Obviously, it would take me much more time to release something.
On a sidenote, I'm completely new at the startup game, not connected at all and only have experience as a freelancer. OTOH, the guys proposing me the contract have experience creating other startups and raising funds.

Should I take the reasonable choice (I think) which is to get the job or kind of "follow my dream"?

Thanks
I didn't _disagree_ with what you said. Yes there are certain people who have spent a good amount of their time working towards noble and challenging causes who have my utmost respect. I fully agree with your first point.

By saying things like "And who cares about law school or baseball teams", you are belittling a whole set of people. Saying "sailing solo is more admirable than working towards law school" might be accurate, but the way I read it - "law school? You haven't sailed solo around the world, hence your existence is invalidated".

As for the troll remark, you're a new user with no real identity making relatively controversial and somewhat personal statements with a relatively disrespectful tone. I'm not too sure what the textbook definition of a troll is, but this is the closest one I've seen over here.
Someone needs to point out that this isn't the TCP/IP level, it's just HTTP.

I know it is pedantic technical discussions need precision in their agreed terminology. HTTP and TCP/IP are at different stack levels, and everything discussed here is HTTP.
Mea culpa- I did not remember the document I read correctly. The carbonic acid references are usually a separate but related concern. As CO2 dissolves in water, it changes the pH balance, which is having a detrimental effect on sea life (esp. on the micro scale) in the area. This is more prevalent at the poles, due to CO2 more readily dissolving into cold water.

http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/Science.aspx
Nice, but don't compute the length of a list if you don't have to.

(not . null) instead of (\x -> length x > 1) is shorter, and works on infinite lists also.

Edit: well, in case you would test for x>0.
[Cherokee] Your logo is extremely culturally
My zero-equity co-founder is my Aeropress, for keeping me supplied with excellent coffee at all times.
Hm, I just thought of something. Colin should team up with Patrick, they'll rule the world within about 3 years.
Bringing Firefox To Android
Continue to perform contract work with the company that offered you the position. Explain to them why you are making the choice. If they have been successful in dealing with startups, they understand that it takes a person who is following a dream to make one happen. Don't take the salary job unless you really are strapped for cash, and/or have a family to take care of.
Given your inexperience and the fact that you can continue working on the project on the side (make sure that is in any employment contract you sign, explicitly called out) I personally think you should take the job. Use it as a learning opportunity and keep moving forward on your side project.

One other note: why is your own project taking so long to develop? Is it possible that you need to reduce the scope so you can launch sooner? Just some thoughts.
HTC has doubled profits in Q3 2010
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Designing as if Programmers are People
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Thinglink ( http://thinglink.com ) has tried several approaches in this space. Originally they offered this very abstract kind of "URL for things" service, then they pivoted to be more a social network around things, then they pivoted to be a social network for designers and people who like designer clothes and other designer objects.

Now, their final pivot was in my opinion marvelous, as it went to very basics and offered a super-simple service to tag things in photographs. It's still operating in a same space "to URLify real world objects", but it offers an immediately useful service, for example for fashion bloggers.
You're a Bad Manager. Embrace It.
My one colleague has an Ubuntu machine and every time he upgrades something breaks. Be it a 3g modem driver, or a graphics card driver or something else. This is exactly why I tell my non-geeky friends not to install Linux, because they just want something that works, not something they have to spend time on to get the basics sorted out (or worse: call me to fix it).
It's a really big project involving hardware, not a web-only startup ;)
Hahahaha - this is hilarious!
You should remove the date/year hops.
Five Signs You Need HTML5 WebSockets
Windows Mobile: Too Late To The Game
> Private ownership is not the cause of all of the political wars over water. It is their solution.

That bullshit gets trotted out with some regularity but it is clearly nonsense.

Have a read here and draw your own conclusions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Cochabamba_protests

If someone owns a resource they have an interest in extracting maximum value out of it, not in preserving it.

I've seen the case made for private ownership of air and water and I think it is utter rubbish. What we need instead is good stewardship of our natural resources, a way to extract tax on the depletion of natural resources instead of on production of value.
Maybe in the wet dreams of the DRM-lobbyists. I think this is closer to truth: http://funnythirdthing.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/GxzeV....
That http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_turn_on_red is the source of almost all dangerous situations I had on the roads as pedestrian. The one single time when cause was different that I can remember was when somebody drove in one way street in wrong direction and I was crossing the road assuming that this was impossible.
The question was raised when the made their proposal. The contract work was schedule to go until December and would continue if my decision was negative. However I do not have any other contracts lined up but I'm not really in need of cash right now.
lol...had no idea anyone would find that comment so offensive.
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Making touch screens that touch you back
An easy proof of the Chernoff-Hoeffding bound
Less ridiculous and more persuasive:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c
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Inside Windows Phone 7: ghost of Zune
If the CC provider gets a little commission for booking you into a hotel or restaurant, but saves you the time of doing the research and so on yourself, then everyone's a winner. I don't have a problem with people making a profit on providing a genuinely useful service.

It's what you might call "artificial artificial intelligence", they've discovered a business model that lets you have a conversation with a search engine in plain English.
You only need to be a part of it if you ever want anyone to extend any sort of credit to you, no?
As with all bookmarklets that include dynamic scripts, there's the security issue of XSS as well, including cookie hijacking and form posting. It completely a matter of trust that the bookmarklet you're running is safe, and hasn't been modified to do anything bad.
Node.js screencasts : Nodecasts.org
I can tell you that there are a lot of sites I use that ask for my email address and I'd rather not give it to them, and I can tell you that I give them crap. I.e. I give them an address I've set up specifically for the purpose of giving it to sites that require one. There's an awesome, self-explanatory site called 10minutemail.com that I love using; sites can ban their domain (I think some do) (but it's a new one every month), but there's no way a site can tell the difference between my real Gmail account and my crap other Gmail account. And I think a lot of people use similar tactics.

In other words, requiring an email address doesn't mean users will give you their email address. I only give my actual address when I want to. Meanwhile, it's a pain when a site requires one, and sends me an email with a confirmation link. I feel alternately clever (ha, I outsmart them) and sleazy (this probably isn't what they intended), and always annoyed, when I do this.

I recommend making emails optional (but if it has a definite use, like for resetting a password, then explain this to the users). I was happy, kind of exhilarated actually, when I signed up on Hacker News and all it asked for was a username and password; the email address is a text field that one can fill out when desired. I think I remember it explaining that this address wouldn't be visible in your profile; it would just be used for notifications about your account, or something. Take note.
I managed to talk my company into git as well - although our route is different: We literally had no (official, my projects always ended up using a private repository of some sorts) source control. At all.

So, after fighting the battle for far too long I'm now rolling out git/gitorious right now, with lots of early adopters using that already, on my (properly backed up..) test machine.

The biggest issue that I've seen so far are mostly general "I just don't get scm" things (no commit message or a useless one. Working around rules by just entering space if I try to prohibit this).

The only git specific issue that come up is that the people don't understand that each user's clone/working copy is a separate branch of the origin already. If 2 guys clone from the "server", you now have 2 branches of origin/master. pull by default merges remote and local branch, which leads to a huuuuuge number of completely useless merge commands in the histories of some projects. That makes the history far less useful in my book and all visualizers now show you a large numbers of branches that you don't care about.

You can work around that by educating users to, for example, using git pull --rebase - but that is a concept that needs quite some understanding first.

Apart from the thing above the introduction seems to work fine so far and people with different background (VSS.., cvs/svn mostly) are using it without (real, major) problems.

And I'm glad that we finally will have an official scm server sometime this month, after only ~5 years of nagging. Ah, it's the small things that make me happy these days...
It reminded me of one of the pitches in Brewster's Millions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svKq044qrYU
Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)
In a stable environment a large greedy specialist often does better then a lean thrifty generalist. In a more dynamic environment a lean thrifty generalist does better then a larger greedy specialist.

The problem is our methods of food production: Specialized, concentrated and resource hungry. We might have to become more generalized, distributed and efficient.

[Note: Currently "efficiency" is often mistake to mean "externalizing the cost", "doing less", etc. Here it means "more productive with less resources" and "working smarter not harder"]

Our food lacks any real bio-diversity, it all requires nearly the same conditions to grow. For every joule of food we are currently using more then 10 joule of energy, basically we are turning oil into food. And it's not very mobile.
Who controls the internet?
eh, a 32GiB ram 8 core G34 opteron with 4 disks is going to eat around 150 watts; that's a lot of 512MiB VPSs. The shevaplug/disk setup will definitely get you better I/O performance than the VPS (hard drives share... poorly.) but as far as power goes, the VPS, on modern hardware is going to win.
Honestly, I've never had any good customer service experiences outside of America. In Japan, everything is, "we're sorry, but it's been decided that...". In the UK, everything is, "for security purposes, you can't...".
a sheevaplug with it's own sata disk is probably going to have less CPU than the amazon 'micro' (at least if their setup is anything like mine, which it likely is.) but disk shares very poorly. If the sheevaplug comes with it's own sata disk, it will kill any shared disk solution as far as disk performance goes. (on the other hand, it's not RAID, which can be pretty bad.)
Ubuntu 10.10 is here
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Ubuntu 10.10 Out
Jailbreak for iOS 4.1 released
Irritating brand names: Silly name, silly company, silly product?
I'd expect a situation to arise where cars are allowed to go into automatic driving mode on motorways/freeways but not in cities. Gradually more and more roads would become available for automatic driving as more and more cars get the automatic driving capability. I don't think people will ever be ready for an instant complete switch over. I'd expect it to be a gradual switchover which takes years.
Thanks, sorry I mucked up the link; I should have checked it. I'll resubmit.
Gilt's business model: Inside out
> The free market is people peacefully trading with each other.

Then few if any free markets actually exist.

Some traders are indeed "peaceful." The brute fact, though, is that that many market participants actively seek out ways:

A) to inhibit competition, or even prevent it completely, for example by anticompetitive business practices; and/or ...

B) to make the public pick up the tab for costs while keeping revenues for themselves -- think pollution costs and bank bailouts, to name just two examples; and/or ...

[EDIT:] C) in some cases, to flat-out lie, cheat, and steal.

FOOTNOTE: As I understand it, economists refer to B as privatizing profits while socializing costs, a.k.a. "externalities."

These human tendencies to do A, B, and C above appear to be fundamental facts of life. Left unchecked, they can have a corrosive effect on markets.

There's ample room for evidence-based debates about how best to deal with these tendencies. But it doesn't seem to have done much good to insist that free markets are a cure-all -- it's reminiscent of the old economist joke whose punch line is "we'll just assume we have a can opener."

> Most government is coercion. I don't see how more of it is a solution.

It's certainly true that when government regulation is driven by untested ideology, or by private interests, it can make things worse by discouraging private initiative and effort. (Some of the ways market predators try to do A and B above is by encouraging government actors to enact legislation and regulations that favor them.) We've certainly seen that happen at various times in various places.

But governmental regulation, selectively applied, can also be at least a partial solution, to the extent it can help keep market predators from doing A, B, and C above.
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