skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
if you're looking for perl jobs in Sydney, drop me a line at mwotton@gmail.com. I have a few friends who are constantly looking for good perl devs.
Sprideshare
well, I think the real tech isn't the concentrator but the membrane that converts heat to electricity by forcing ions through a proton-exchange membrane.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean it that way. I meant the Sahara is the least habitable part of Africa, and also in the top couple least habitable places in the world.
Google funds 6,000MW mid-Atlantic wind farms, transmission grid
quickly and in parallel.
It wouldn't even have to be stolen. All someone would need is access to the phone for less than a minute, which is harder to detect than if it was stolen outright. Though smartphones already have other privacy risks and are therefore protected, people with regular mobile phones weren't previously at risk, and probably have no idea that letting someone borrow their phone for a minute (or leaving it unattended) now means giving full access to their Facebook account, continuing even after the phone is returned.
Across the U.S., Long Recovery Looks Like Recession
The original assertion (All the best chefs are men, best professors I know are men too) is unprovable, because none of us are xentronium and the professor part of his assertion was based on personal experience ("I know").

However, the first part of his statement (I firmly believe there are three areas women should not generally be part of: military, cooking and teaching) can be argued against quite effectively by showing a single counter example.

xentronium needs to either argue the counter example (ie, argue that Jeanne Bamberger is not a good teacher), or narrow down his argument (eg, argue that only women who's first name starts with "J" make good teachers). Both lines of response weaken his argument considerably.
Min-Kyu Choi impressed every passer by with
his neat, apparently market-ready plug that
folds down to the width of an Apple MacBook Air.

Considering that a MacBook Air is 32.5 cm (12.74 inches) wide, I'm not impressed.
Electronic Arts Keeps Its “Edge”, Wins Court Case vs Trademark Troll
I think rule 1 is good. The rest makes it sound like some combination of a a big bureaucratic corporation and survivor.
Maybe, but women's salaries are about the same as and often lower than men's, while older developers tend to get paid much more than junior developers.
Will Facebook And Microsoft Declare War On Google Tomorrow?
Why not make humans immortals?

Sounds good.

Oops! Now you have abolished children!

Several possible solutions come to mind. A ridiculous solution, which would still be a tremendous improvement over the status quo, would be to institute a Logan's Run policy where you get 100 years of good health and are then painlessly euthanized. But really, I think concerns like that are analogous to the doomsayers 120 years ago who predicted that given current trends New York would be waist-deep in horse manure by 1950. More likely, I would expect a temporary drop in the birth rate, while we get serious about colonizing space (which we should do regardless, on the egg/basket principle).

In summary: changing the nature of life expectancy will change the nature of our demographic weirdness, but is unlikely to produce anything less complicated.

Things would be different, yes. And given that right now aging is responsible for an impending fiscal train wreck, as well as incalculable suffering and destruction of human potential, we badly need something different.
The 10 Most Valuable Blogs in America
Entrepreneurial success is not random
First i/o Ventures Demo Day Ever: 6 Companies Launched
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/about/logo/
Powers of Ten
So, basically, don't raise money until you have traction, at which point you probably don't need to raise money.

Got it.
I would go with 3. Definitely flatter than 1 and comparable to two. Not the prettiest drive but some of it's nice. You are sticking to interstates so driving pressures should be minimal.

I-5 has a lot of elevation changes, it also takes you through the most traffic..
Collect and Curate Data with Wolfram Alpha's Volunteer Program
Yes, that was their workaround when the IRS disagreed with them on the legality of the previous dodge.
What I resent is being tricked into spending my time reading 1000 words that could have been edited down to "why is populism an effective political strategy?" just so that an author that I've never heard of can tell me that they went to Yale.
Look out for my presentation at the New York Tech Meetup in November.
Matt Havener wastes employer resources by pissing away his time in online forums, trying to be an Internet Vigalante

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/matthew-havener/3/837/20

He's up for review in a few months, so I doubt this will last long.
My wife is a dentist. I'll go ahead and call bullshit on this. The no-cavity-plan isn't some secret. It's no refined sugars in your diet and brushing & flossing religiously. (It's speculated that Neanderthal didn't get cavities. Ever. They had no refined sugar in their diet for the caries to feed on. They all did have horrible gingivitis and halitosis, though.)

It's the same way that the not-a-fatass plan isn't a secret, but most of this country (the US) is obese.
Swamp coolers use the same principle - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooler
Cool thanks for sharing. The one that sticks out for me and the one that's so easy to get wrong is the comment on benefits before features:

> Apple puts benefits before features and technical specs. They emphasize the benefit of a technology. Battery life in terms of work hours, storage in terms of music hours/total photos, etc. Talk to your customers in terms of benefits. Things like security, the ability to hold more stuff, work longer, and work faster are things they understand. GHZ, MPs, GBs, and 48X are just confusing.
Look, the bar is set pretty low. Just work on something (for fun!), and give a show-and-tell. That's the prospective minimum.
>Mono is open source, so anyone can continue developing it.

"Can" but who will? You already implicitly concede the point that mono has no community strong enough to survive without the Novell employees. Your hypothetical entrepreneur that fills this gap is charging money. Hasn't that just incurred an extra cost on the person who built their business on a free Mono? That's if this guy turns up on time for the crucial expansion to your business; if he turns up at all. There may well not be enough users of Mono to support such a model: I can't name a single big or medium sized group using Mono besides Novell itself.

Edit:

I think you have conceded my point against using Mono for a startup i.e. there is a real chance you are going to incur future costs of an unknown size. I don't live in a dark place either, please drop that language, I said I wish it wasn't this way. It's just that, given there are plenty of other options, why pick the horse lagging behind with vultures circling it for your business?

Edit2:

Also, to score a cheap point, I will highlight your use of language "fear and horror". Not only am I planting garden variety fear, but also horror. A new, and more terrifying, breed of FUD. FHUD - Fear, Horror, Uncertainty and Doubt. It's catchy.
My answer:

I'll stop everything, go somewhere that I can cry (checking in on my Dodgeball account when I get there), post about my defeat to my Jaiku followers, push a message to all my Buzz contacts, and start a Wave suicide doc with my co-founders-- because Google always does everything perfectly.
Africa's problem isn't it's size.
Thanks. Most of the writing is being done by http://github.com/tuxcanfly though. Please use the book and leave feedback.
Russia, another country whose size is often underestimated.

How come Russia is /so big/?
Starbucks, Chipotle, Nike, Apple, Victoria's Secret, Whole Foods, and Google all seem to me like examples of x done right for some x. But for each of example like those there are probably ten more xs that haven't been done right.
Its Agiliq. :)

(We were Uswaretech earlier.)
Folks should keep this in mind when they get agitated about the possibility of NASA getting rid of Hubble. Basically all of your pretty space pictures are false color, so it doesn't matter which space telescope produces them.
Yes, it is very well understood. Muscle mass has little relationship to endurance.

In endurance events (real endurance, not wimpy things like 2-3 hour marathons) women are highly competitive with men, and there is some evidence they have an advantage.

For example, in the 235km Badwater Ultramarathon, women consistently finish top 5, despite representing only 5-10% of the field.

Long distance swimming is even worse for men. Shelly Taylor-Smith has held the record for the 48km Manhattan Island swim since 1995. Women are within 28 minutes of the outright English Channel swim crossing record (6:57 vs 7:25), and based on this older swim time list, women have 9 out of the top 20 times: http://www.channelswimming.com/solo-time-HTML.htm

I'm going to resort to quoting papers to you:

"When performing certain isometric exercises, the endurance of women is almost twice that of men performing the same exercise, according to results presented at a meeting of international scientists. Both sexes performed the exercises at the same percentage of their maximum strength.
The study, conducted at the University of Colorado in the US, confirmed that women outlasted men by an average of 75 per cent and, importantly, showed that the reason women had longer endurance times was not due to differences in the motivation levels between men and women, or within the nervous system, but due to differences within muscle." http://www.mydr.com.au/sports-fitness/women-beat-men-on-musc...

"The negative slope and the X-axis intercept of this equation at 66 km supports the hypothesis that women ultramarathon runners have greater fatigue resistance than do equally trained men whose performances are superior up to the marathon distance." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9044230
I just skimmed through this. My overall sense was that this article is mostly well-meaning but written in a condescending tone. The continued reference to the contest participants as "the kids" and "those kids" was irritating. I personally don't give a shit how old someone is or what they look like. If you have a decent personality and are smart, that's all that matters.
Amazing. Also, I've never realized that land-mass wise Canada is larger than the US, and Russia is significantly larger than anything else.
Orkut, Google's old attempt at Social Networking had this feature.

I doubt anybody really cared. This was not really a game changer and was just another feature.

It's a nice feature for your ego to know who is secretly stalking your profile but beyond that (and after the initial novelty) its usage fades.
Just curious, what is the typical size/complexity/difficulty of projects presented? Are we talking weekend projects, e.g.:

$ sqlite_diff db1.sqlite db2.sqlite
Table(futures),4
> CREATE TABLE futures (date text, symbol text, qty real, price real)
> 0 rows
---
< CREATE TABLE futures (date text, trans text, symbol text, qty real, price real)
< 0 rows

Or are we talking bigger efforts, e.g.:

$ fajitalang --wall testprogram.mex; ./a.oud
Hello automatically parallelized world.
Perhaps because academia isn't motivated by profit and the 'time = money' mantra. At least not so directly.
Some of these do apply to me.

3- I did have the chance to write programs on punch cards. This was nearly at the end of the punch card era and I only did a couple assignments that way. But it was still another two years before we stopped having the "wait for your printout at central computing to see your results" hassle.

4- One of my first jobs involved loading a boot loader via toggles every morning while powering up the PDP-8. It had a washing machine sized hard drive with removable disks, but had to be set up with the boot loader. The lights blinked when programs ran... good times.

7- Remember the VAX well, and VAX/VMS was the first OS I hacked.

10- A surprising number of machines at the computer history museum were contemporary or objects of lust during my career.

I still want a Cray, though its gold value probably keeps it out of reach now.

The interesting thing about this article is, I think it was written by an old timer to my generation, and the current 20 somethings are 2 generations further on.
Ouch! Awesome.
This is also an opt-in feature of OKCupid.

I personally opted out, because people's whose profile I viewed but didn't contact are exactly the people I don't want contacting me- which they could do if they saw my profile name/info.

Namely, these are all the people whose profile I looked through and said "meh." If they knew who I was they might contact me when I already determined I wasn't interested.

I imagine it might be the same for LinkedIn; say you were looking to headhunt someone but found their resume lacking. Would you really like them to have the option to then contact you and ask for a job?
visuallization with double L's, really? ;-)
(why I can't edit my comment?)
Streetview wouldn't benefit from some self-driven cars?
Not that this wouldn't be a cool idea, but why would a large company expose their real-time inventory data via a public API? At the present I don't see how any ROI could be achieved from the expense of making this inventory information public.
First-Ever Patient Treated In Stem Cell Study in the US
You'd be amazed at how many obvious ideas get patented.
Hire me: Rails Frontend Developer
Howdy!

I am looking for a job that will harness my skills of Ruby and Frontend development to build great products and actuating great ideas.

Maybe you are an Entrepreneur or Tech lead that needs an extra hand to build your great product. Or maybe you are part of a Rails consulting company looking to subcontract some projects. I want to speak with you!

A little about me:
6 years Web Software Development
3 Years of Ruby on Rails Development
BA degree from UC Berkeley

Acronyms dear to my heart: Git, HTML5, CSS, SASS, JS, JSON, SEO, MYSQL, CS3-CS4, *nix, Ack
Acronyms I can tolerate: SVN, PHP, XML
Misc: Selenium IDE, Linux server hacking, Facebook Integration, Wordpress Hacking, Sphinx search

What I have done:
Been part of several startup tech teams
Helped scale a major Rails Ecommerce site from 0 to 1.5 Million uniques a month.
Built custom storefront applications using Sinatra for Fortune 500 Companies.
Built an email templating and tracking system and integrated it with
a major ESP API
Built interactive financial tools with Ajax, Flash, HTML and Ruby
Coded integrations with a bunch of different API's

Why Rails Frontend?
I have built Rails apps from end to end and been part of a number of teams building Rails or ruby apps. Whereas hardcore backend programmers seem to be in abundance, I think that there is a real lack of quality developers who can really build quality UI's on top of Rails while being able to dive into the Controllers and Models to make magic happen there also. I think I fill that niche really well.

I am seeking:
A remote web job. I live 2 hours outside of Chicago, so I could potentially travel to Chicago once a week or once every other week if you are located in Chicagoland somewhere.

If you want to fly me out to CA or NY occasionally, if that's where you are head-quartered than that could work also.

I could do a fulltime salaried position or a contract position with a minimum of 6 months, prefer a 1 year though.
My salary needs are pretty reasonable for a great Rails front-end dev with good communication skills and startup experience.

I am not interested in working for solely equity. Been there, done that. I need to eat.

Anybody have any thoughts, suggestions, or job offers regarding this?

Drop me a line to learn more and see examples of my work: rubyfrontendguy@gmail.com
Google’s Autonomous Car Takes To The Streets
The article seems to me to be a highly idealistic look at the Hackathon by someone who is not a hacker. For example, it likens Mr. Jablonowski to a DJ, and makes him seem like a pop star, with people taking pictures with him. It even refers to the "joys of startup life", and while startup life may have a measure of joy, it is mostly a lot of hard work.

Anyway, the article just seems overblown, even cloying to me. I almost expected the author to start gushing about the "rockstar programmers" and "code ninjas" there. If anyone here was actually there, was the atmosphere really as portrayed in this article?
> Most of the elderly will not need to be cared for, and will in fact be capable of working.

A very presumptuous statement, and not backed up by that study. While it is true that there is a large increase in life expectancy, there is a much larger increase in life expectancy beyond the point where the person can no longer work. Much of this could be solved in the future with greater attention to exercise later in life, proactive re-training for a career shift to accommodate reduced mobility, etc, this is not yet being done in a meaningful way.

> The issues are political, not demographic.

Bang on here. If you look at the actual math comparing what the boomers put into the system vs what they are taking out, and compare that to optimistic projections for the current working generation, it is pretty scary. This article touches on some of the issues:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/01/60minutes/main2528...

IMHO, a lot of programs and entitlements need massive, intelligent reform, and soon. And even then, I think a good deal of luck will be required as well.

One can come up with a variety of qualitative theories of how nothing bad will happen (you can't predict the future, new technologies, etc), but looking at it from a quantitative perspective, I just don't see an easy way out. I hope I'm wrong.
How are the hubble's images any more "false color" than my digital SLR?
Disclaimer: not a physicist.

My intuitive understanding is that, as you heat the absorber, it becomes hotter and hotter, until it reaches the same temperature as the sun's surface. At this point, the absorber (also a blackbody) radiates just as much energy as it receives from the sun; thus there is no more heat exchange. Otherwise, you would be taking two objects at the same temperature and making one hotter and the other one colder with no work from outside the system, violating thermodynamics.

There is a more formal study in solar energy books like (http://books.google.com/books?id=81WI2LwrpkcC&lpg=PA25&#...) or (http://www.physics.drexel.edu/~jenks/Solar%20Energy.pdf) (PDF, page 21 onwards is quite relevant).
Harvard vs. Stanford: Which builds a better entrepreneur?
Re: the "what if" Facebook scenario:

And so a thousand jilted exes had their egos soothed.

("OMG, he forgot to opt out, and he's been stalking me every day for two months even though I unfriended him. He's like, totally still into me.")
"There is no spoon" - The Matrix
It makes perfect intuitive sense if you're used to the way the word "if" is used in logic.
Regardless of any technical issues, that cultural issue would be enough to put me off. Sometimes it is the case that the language's maker's interests diverge from that of its users (e.g. OCaml is developed by language researchers without direct commercial interests) but it's rare to see them poisoning their own ecosystem.
How Color Saturation Affects User Efficiency
The Super Soaker profits are now "only" enough to pay for a third of his dozen-employee business. Presumably if he wasn't so committed to his research, he could shut down and live comfortably off of that money.

Putting something away for the rainy day might be good advice, but it isn't really relevant here.
Friendster (at least for a while, perhaps still) had a similar feature. If I recall correctly, to see who'd browsed your profile, you had to let others see when you browsed theirs.
I would say an expertise of mine is analyzing bubbles. Web 2.0 definitely has a ton of funding in companies that are moving further down the quality chain. Also, the supply of investment is absolutely a sign to watch.

With that said, bubbles can last years.
The Case Against Data Lock-in
I think most people, VCs included, cannot really see an opportunity until it's obvious. So, there is a lot of after the fact pattern matching. These days, it is social gaming, a year ago it was "real time". The few that are really visionary or lucky are the big winners
Mint.com Pre-Launch Pitch Deck
From back in the day when Wasabe was their biggest competitor. Includes financials.
This is a great example of how awesome teaching yourself using the Internet can be. If you read and understood that in 30 minutes then you learned it in about one quarter of the time we spent covering this stuff in my discrete math class--and I'm supposedly going to a really good college.
It makes perfect intuitive sense if you're used to the way the word "if" is used in classical logic. Remember that it's you who has bent your intuitive sense to fit how material implication works. Most people are not going to think it makes intuitive sense, and the fault doesn't lie with them -- it lies with the logic. Logic is like UI: it's Not the User's Fault he doesn't find implication intuitive.
I'm not sure I agree with you. But upvoted for not censoring yourself.
In the early days D seemed like a real good idea as a cleanup replacement for C++ with potential to innovate in some areas such as the multi core revolution.

The developers started off with something that was compatible with C in the same way C++ was but couldn't make up there mind whether they would like to depart or maintain that relationship. Then they kept adding increasingly more features/complexity and a lot of the decisions were pressured and rushed out the door by Andrei Alexandrescu so he could meet the deadlines for the book everyone had preordered. Eventually D was left as a language that had no idea what it was trying to be.
So if it takes a large number of programmers a very long time to produce a product, the valuation is higher than a small amount of programmers creating a viable product quickly?
I don't know/care about your four reasons, as they are all intrinsic to me but I do want to comment on when someone should meet with investors. To me the best time to meet with investors is when you are not raising money.

If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have had 9 term sheets / offers to pick from when raising my previous round. I would have had to race around and try to get meetings. Instead, we emailed people we knew and pitched for 3 straight weeks and closed quickly with plenty of market checks and opportunity to make the best choice for the company.
Having a Berkeley degree, I doubt either of those schools actually "build a better" entrepreneur. Rather they just attract really smart, competitive, driven people that typify the ilk required to run a successful startup. The networking factor doesn't hurt I guess.....
Yes, the legacies of colonialism (of which slavery was just one) have been huge. Coupled with the AIDS epidemic, which has had an impact that's nearly impossible to overstate, they've economically devastated sub-Saharan Africa.
You know, it would be great if the author used something other than being accepted by the current "elite" (apparently defined by attending one of a few universities) as her definition of "merit":

"Barack Obama...Columbia and Harvard Law School...Michelle Obama...Princeton and Harvard Law School...Clarence Thomas...Yale Law School, and Supreme Court justice.[...]

In America, the end of the meritocracy will probably come about slowly: If working hard, climbing the education ladder, and graduating from a good university wins you only opprobrium, then you might not bother."

Glad to know that merit == went to Harvard/Yale. I wonder where the author of this article went to college?
Meh, the design is fine to me. But then, I am also design-challenged.

So far... I love it! This might actually tempt me to try to write a book.