skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Enumerating a list of successful people who didn't attend public school doesn't say anything about the utility of the public school system, especially without looking at the people who did.

It also ignores the armies of undergraduates and computers (the human kind, mostly public school educated women sitting at adding machines) that made most American discoveries and inventions possible. Individuals do make some leaps, but on the whole it's massive collaboration that advances science and technology.
"Secure" and "Facebook" in the same headline. Please allow me to regain my composure. To elaborate, I measure security by three metrics: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. Facebook has been fighting Confidentiality tooth and nail since its inception. Therefore, I say Facebook wholly fails the security test.

If you want confidentiality, you have to be certain to share only that which you are comfortable being made totally public. This goes for information written or spoken pretty much anywhere. Long gone are the days of ephemeral communication.

For what it's worth, Facebook's Availability (uptime) is pretty good, and these measures have the potential to improve Integrity, but only if implemented and used properly both by Facebook and the end users.
Mexico's population is over 100 million people. That is what gives it a seat among the big world economies in spite of having low per capita economic stats.

How many Albanias do feet inside Mexico City alone?
I just listen to the audio podcast while on the go or doing mindless tasks. Slower than reading, but you get the full flavor that comes from hearing people's voices.
I was trying to be slightly diplomatic, but I seem to have failed. Let me put it more blunt:

If you're looking for 40 people you'll be looking for team players, these guys are really good, on their, own doing something that will never need maintenance.
Such compensation need not be financial. I can see a market brokering between people in the same boat "if you look at my x-Ray, I'll look at yours."

First, however, you would have to find out whether lay people are any good at this task.
Microsoft-launches-windows-phone-7 from thinkbrief.com - StumbleUpon
thefind.com is also tackling this

For example, last Christmas, I learned that a local crafts store carried Thomas & Friends wooden railway. All of the local toy stores had been sold out, but A.C. Moore had a few in stock.
Your figures are unbelievable.Just check below.

Chennai, India (live in the centre of the city)

My typical expenses:

Rent (Room + Bath + Kitchen) - 66$. Single. From next month it's shared by a friend and going to be 33$ for me. In a safe and good residential area.

Electricity - 5$

Water - Included in Rent

Internet (BSNL 512kbps unlimited) + Cable TV - 17$ + 3$

Food - 70$ (eat at my parent's home in weekends)

Mobile - 9$ (600 mins local voice calls free + 5000 free text + 200MB EDGE usage)

Transport - Train ticket.7$ for 3 months. Travel up to 30 km within city and unlimited.

Entertainment & other expenses - 25$

-----------------------------------------

Avg income - 600$

My Expenses (Current) - 197$

My Expenses (from next month) - 164$

Savings (approx) - 400$ (a decent amount here)

BTW, I'm not the least spender around. I can easily save 10-20$ still.
Thanks. Will search.
Good question. The original iPhone was web-only for a year and developers clamored for access to native development. There is a long way to go until browsers plus the web development stack can provide the same experience as native code, and until then "apps" are here to stay.

Personally, I'm excited about it. People are making great applications for mobile devices that are not really possible in a web-only environment. Having to re-write them for different platform/device combinations is the price we pay for being able to build things that were not possible three years ago.

What makes this so different from the mess of incompatible platforms twenty years ago is that today we have the web as a common denominator. As long as you can convert your data into html, you can share it with anyone regardless of what type of device they have. The whole "well, we are not both running Word on windows 95 on pc's with floppy drives, so we can't possibly collaborate" problem is essentially gone.

Posterous has made a better mobile interface here than they could have on the web, but their web offering still exists. Anyone on any browser (or with an email account) can post to posterous, but if you have an iPhone, it is better.
Maybe commercial support is easier to get? That would be a biggie for a business. Possibly more up to date packages? I am just speculating though.
Shooting Lasers from Planes for Conservation
What do members of the rock ‘n’ roll band Radiohead have in common with Nature Conservancy scientists in Washington?

They’re both using a high-tech tool called LiDAR to communicate.
I've worked with them as an affiliate and they have a pretty good system. The travel industry as a whole is pretty fast moving.
You guys run your servers out of your offices?
As an existing Chargify customer, I'm actually very, very glad that Auth.net is the one storing all the data. It gives me the ability to say bye-bye to Chargify and jump to one of their competitors, which I'm seriously considering after this debacle.
It looks very promising. One thing that I think is often neglected is how to properly modify the admin interface to make it useful for all the little things you want to do. The admin interface is really useful and helps you get started fast, but it's a lot harder to grok and modify than models, forms and "vanilla" objects.
2011horrormovies.com
2011 Horror Movies
Localrockstarblueprints.com
local rockstar blueprints
Let me explain this slowly.

From the article: "Optimizing typography is optimizing readability, accessibility, usability(!), overall graphic balance."

If you lay out your text in a way that only works right when viewed in the typeface and font size that your own browser is using, then you'll fail in terms of readability, accessibility and usability.

The Vinh pages that the article holds up as a shining beacon of good typography are particularly bad in this regard.

On my display at work, they are mangled in various amateurish ways, presumably because my browser is using sufficiently different fonts from the designer's. Words overlap where they shouldn't, or run past the edges of the elements they are supposed to be contained in.

It's not a browser standards problem, this is an up-to-date Firefox, but with font overrides in place in order to make sure that I don't have to suffer because of fonts that render poor on my monitor and OS.

I contrast this with HN itself, which is a great example of typography that works pretty well no matter what fonts you're using.

Is that clearer?
AMEN! I never thought a website would be a competitive advantage for a bank, but I am actually switching all my accounts to Wells Fargo because their interface is mediocre (compared to Chase's which is horrendous). I have over a dozen bank accounts, and even more credit cards, between personal and businesses. It's an exponential increase in UI confusion with each account.
Chris speech was emotionally moving for me because he spoke out of his heart - this community is awesome and his thoughts are trendsetting for it!
By "constructively" do you mean in a constructivist logic like intuitionist logic? I'm too lazy to work it out right now, but I'd place my money on that statement not being valid in intuitionist logic.
Bloomberg to profile Steve Jobs in one-hour TV special this Thursday
This is a kind of obvious problem to approach, but as people here have mentioned, it would be extremely difficult (milo are trying, as have others). An idea I had once upon a time was that you could essentially solve it by building a kick ass point-of-sale and inventory management software system that customers are able to use for free, provided that they're happy to have their goods indexed on a location aware product search engine. Needless to say, that is still an extremely difficult challenge. I've got a feeling these guys might attempt it at some point: www.vendhq.com
Hotpotato 0.8 released
Would love to chat? Can you drop me a line? I'm Shafqat at NewsCred dot com. My startup is in this space so really intrigued!
This article further confirms the ridiculousness of asking friends and co-workers to recommend a dentist. I do trust friends and co-workers to recommend movies or restaurants because most people have seen hundreds of movies and eaten at hundreds of restaurants. Both most people have had only 1 or 2 dentists in their entire lives. They have no basis of comparison to say whether their dentist is any good.

You might as well choose randomly from a phone book. That's what I did when I moved to a new city. Actually I looked for dentists that were close to me, that spoke English natively (I live in a very cosmopolitan city), whose dental degrees were more than 5 years ago (gained experience) but less than 20 years (not outdated), and whose staff were pleasant and prompt on the phone (on the theory that the behavior of the staff will reflect the character of the boss).

Thus I picked my dentist without a recommendation and without meeting or speaking with him, but I think my method is less arbitrary than asking your friends and co-workers. (And yes, I do wish there was a better way.)
I would be short of two teeth, if my mom hadn't had the resolve to get me a new dentist, just as the newly hired one began getting all sorts of weird ideas.

I was only there one time, and no harm was done, and no teeth were removed, but you can recognize many kids my from my city by them missing one or two teeth. I don't really know what to think of that, but it sounds like something straight out of a wicked story. I guess it is a wicked story.

Teeth are the most difficult part of your body to maintain, which makes it all the more awful considering how proportionally dependant you are on dentists compared to other experts you need regularly.

I was never afraid of dentists, because I was there to keep my teeth healthy (and as they always were, I didn't try nor fear a cavity and subsequent drill), but if I didn't have a dentist I loved dearly, I would probably shudder at the thought of them doing a sloppy job.
I use LaTeX with TeXShop on my Mac.

http://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/texshop/

It goes with the MacTeX distribution, which includes other Mac-friendly goodies.
Nick Denton: Zuckerberg’s Original Idea for Facebook Was Dark Facebook.
As a hiring manager, I can vouch for this. Just having a cover letter at all (whether in the email or as a separate document) is surprisingly unusual. Having one tailored to the position? Vanishingly rare. If the candidate describes how their experience is a fit for the position, they're almost always going to get at least a phone screen from me.
Thanks a lot for the input. Maybe that was it. Would really enjoy knowing if it was a legitimate penalty or a flag or two.
Yes, I have been talking about the UK for this thread. Perhaps I should have been clearer.

Sockets do not exist in bathrooms in the UK.
Wait, you have to pay for these?
He stated they have $70,000 per day in revenue. Depending upon average ticket price that is more like 6,000 to 8,000 tickets during this period. Still an incredible success, but not 70,000 tickets.
I'm watching the sample screencast now, and I have bought Peepcode screencasts but not for rails, but here's my impression.

The railstutorial screencast reminds me of railscasts - almost 100% editor/terminal/browser. Very hands on, very code-intensive.

Peepcode has a lot of organized section transitions, slides, visual aids, etc. The summaries and concepts slides are exceptionally useful. Also, Jeffrey talks about half as fast as Michael in railstutorial.

Both are great and I'm talking myself into buying the railscast package right now. I wish I hadn't already spent ~$100 on educational stuff already this month :)
It completely depends on who you're sending it to whether Word is an acceptable format, but PDFs are pretty much universally okay. If your Word doc is forwarded to someone who uses OpenOffice, your formatting may get all messed up. They might not have the right fonts, etc. PDFs are the safest choice.
Doesn't this mean that if someone steals your phone, they can easily log into your facebook and take over the account (change your real password and e-mail)?
Generally you VPN in (using two-factor auth for PCI compliance) to a private network and can SSH in from there. Public facing SSH is generally a bad idea. Also it didn't seem like they had any firewall rules preventing brute forcing.
In the United States, maternity leave is rarely generous, and only kind of mandated. There are many, many loopholes and exceptions.
Online Ad Rev At All-Time High, Video Growing At Record Pace
If anything, I think there should be far more of these posts, and have been thinking of compiling my own list on my blog. There has been no indication from Google that they think anything is wrong with the market or that they're planning to fix it.
A quick traceroute would tell you that they don't. He probably meant the source ip range for restricting access changed due to the office move.
A partial solution would be to have something like Google street view for the insides of stores. At least then you could check to see if the store had what you wanted. Some objects could probably be automatically recognized.
I came here to post that I was happy there was a transcript, because I abhor video interviews — I'd rather scan for information that interests me.
It's a security issue because someone can compromise google's CDN, or cache poison, or DNS poison/hijack that, and can inject malicious JS code into a large number of websites with one attack. If you're running a payment related it pays to be paranoid.
> - hygiene (appropriate glove changing, mask, tool use and sterilization). The most obvious things I notice are whether tools are coming out of sterilization bags and being placed on a sanitized surface. Does the dentist return a tool that's been in your mouth back to the sanitized surface?

Just for clarification, that tool SHOULD be going back to the sanitized surface correct?
Ask HN: Addicted to HN
These days I see myself spending a lot of time on HN.

It's good spend an hour or so to learn something new and interesting but I sometimes spend too much time on it and then I don't have time left to work on my projects.

Has any of you faced this problem? How did you overcome it?
Ovid signed on as well. Do you know if they mentor well? I can program in Perl and have created a few websites and internal stuff but some things are best taught.
It would be an interesting experiment.
Facebook Groups API: Details and Potential
I was recently in The Netherlands, and was surprised to find that the taxi drivers spoke better English than they do in Sydney.

(In Sydney a lot of taxis are driven by recent immigrants who's English is sometimes less-than-ideal, despite some kind of mandatory-English requirement. If they have a mandatory English requirement in The Netherlands for taxi drivers then the bar must be a lot higher than in Australia!)
> In the end, though, I did nothing, my license was revoked, and I had to live without one until I was able to come up with the extra cash that it took get it back

Maybe that was the best solution? Having to live without a privilege such as your licence seems like one of the best ways to teach you not to let your registration expire next time. Stay on top of things, and don't let the first late fees happen in the first place. If you STILL don't have enough money, you're living beyond your means, plain and simple.
His expenses are in my opinion at the high/upper middle side. You can check my expenses here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1785105

I'm not living in the same city as he is so the rent may differ a bit but not so drastic. I too live in a metropolitan city (4th largest in India) and I can get you a posh 3 bedroom apartment/house for the rent he specified.
Twitter Co-Founders Offer Tips for Entrepreneurs
It's not really HN subject matter, but don't forget this pales into insignificance compared to the new tax law which says you have to fill out and issue a 1099 to anyone you buy more than $600 of stuff from:

I have a startup. Now I have to do this. It pisses me off.

I'm thinking that's about as much an "HN Matter" as anything else on the front page.

This is the "death by a thousand cuts" scenario: lots of little piddly nuisances which add up to a regulatory nightmare. None of them are really all that onerous, but taken together, well, things accumulate, and perception is 9/10ths of reality. There is an aggregation of PITAs from state, local, and federal governments. I'm not saying that in an anti-government way. Whatever your feelings about taxation and government, it's more of an issue of the bus heading down the road and nobody is driving than anything else.
Idea:  Code Snippet Storage
I always come across interesting code snippets that I can use in development, but never have a central place to store them.

I have decided that I am going to start using a text file that I store them in, and proceed like that. But there MUST be a better/more slick way of doing this.

The app doesn't have to be a web app (actually probably shouldn't be, or have the web integration as a bonus and not the main feature). I should be able to easily search it by a number of factors - language, keywords, type (e.g. method/function/etc.), etc.

That's just my $0.02 that I won't be doing, but would definitely appreciate and probably purchase, if someone did it properly. It also should be available for both windows + os x.
This is not a bubble, a bubble is when any idea no matter how stupid or how long the sunshine laden plan will take to break even, gets funded. I think there is an "we will make money off of ads" bubble, but that it localized to a segment of the web.
Are Google's Driverless Cars Legal?
The point is that if part of your business is in the same state as the customer, it's not interstate. This is hardly a new rule. Mail order catalogs have extracted sales tax in states where they had warehouses since before there was an internet.
"Let's assume for the moment that Mary has no safety net; there are no friends she can ask to float her a loan, no family members that she can reach out to, etc."

But this is almost always a false assumption. It would be better to borrow money to pay the fee in time. Can anyone think of a case where it actually would be better to gamble (at expected loss) than borrow money?
The way I see it, a lot of my books are on my shelf through mere inertia, not because of any great love for them. They just happened to be physical when I acquired them, and as such, disposing of them is extra work. So they sit there.

In the future, I think I'll be reading books on my kindle, and then I'll consider whether the book merits a meatspace presence in my life. If so, I'll pick up a copy.

In the end, I'll likely have fewer books on my shelves, but what I do have will be a more meaningful representation of my tastes and values.
Check out this post:
http://brandonkonkle.com/blog/2010/oct/4/django-admin-custom...
Wait, does this mean that my earnings are in Texas where the state income tax rate is 0%? Woohoo. That sure beats paying tax in my state. I'm half-serious here. This might be worth looking into.
That sure sounds like biting the hand that feeds you. When you are (essentially) a re-distributor of RHEL5, why on earth would you bash on RHEL5!?
Yes. That's what I meant. That was my feeling too, but I know myself too well than to place any bets on what is provable or not constructively unless I work it out. :)
Visit HN less by using utilities like http://hckrnews.com/ so you don't miss the stories you learn the most from.
Practicality trumps everything, after 10+ years of using ssh and trying port knocking and everything else none of it works when you're 4000km away in another country with only a handheld to access the servers.
I have an almost diametrically opposed experience. I have good Perl skills, and 8+ years experience, and can't get Perl work in Sydney Australia, primarily due to the fact that recruiters looking for Perl devs here don't know anything about Perl tech.

The few Perl dev jobs I've interviewed for and taken have relied on unbelievably basic programming tests.
Tanenbaum was right that linux was a giant step back in to the 70's.

Microkernels have swept the world before them in a way that you can't even imagine, in the embedded systems world where 'failure is not an option' microkernels rule supreme without any threat from larger stuff.

When you want deterministic hard real time with very tight upper boundaries on latency then a micro kernel will help tremendously.

Everything else is subordinate to the scheduler, even things that in 'monoliths' are part of the kernel, such as IO driver running as user processes.
oh cool. This seems interesting.

Thanks :)
Actually, I would argue that a varied culture is almost always better than a very homogeneous one if you are shooting for innovation and competitive advantage. New ideas come from the clash of various ways of thinking not from the confirmation of thought paradigms.

This said, if you are running a mining company, an automotive giant, or you are operating in any industry where the priority is on reliability and tradition, I can understand why diversity could make you nervous. But never forget that diversity can become a way of life.

That's very much what hapenned to American culture anyways with the great melting pot, isn't it?
Sorry about that, looks like the VPS can't stand about any pressure :<
If you have multiple servers in multiple states, you charge sales tax to customers in all of them (such as are relevant). Just as you would if you had brick and mortar stores in multiple states.
Enterprise linuxes avoid many of the Debian ideals like the plague. On Debian, you are required to make a gajillion choices and to some extent are responsible for piecing together a competent system yourself; on RHEL and Ubuntu, you make a few, and retain the power to drill down and make choices, but you always start with the same solid template (roughly)

Debian is great for one or two machines, but based on my experience with it I can't imagine using it for 10,000 boxes
That's a good point, unfortunately not mentioned in the post. One could assume/hope that this one-time password doesn't give you access to that kind of functions.

If anything though, it makes it easier for your friends to log into your account and prank you: "Do you mind if I borrow your phone for a minute?" And then log in on their laptop.
Lexus Shows Its State of the Art Driving Simulator in Action
Sounds like http://gist.github.com/
Web application built in 3 hours - fantasy basketball drag n drop tiersheets
@vaksel, nope. I still watch and listen. Often, the best interviews are the ones you initially dismiss because the guests aren't known for crushing it under 4 hours every week. :)
I think at a bare minimum any patent that feels like it's just been a race to file a patent shouldn't be granted.