skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love the W40K universe (it resonated with me as a teenager), I'm thankful at least that Relic has treated it so well.
Not to add to a bevy of positive reviews for Lenovo, but the quality of these laptops is just so far above the rest. And I found driver support for them to be excellent with Ubuntu. Pretty much everything worked out of the box.

My T30 recently died after six years of excellent service and I switched to an Asus to save $200. I have regretted that decision more than I can tell you. Ubuntu has taken endless tweaking to get working, keyboard buttons started falling off after only a year, plastic moldings are pealing off, touchpad is of poor quality, and I could go on. Do yourself a favor and buy a Lenovo, the quality is outstanding.

If you choose to go the MBP route, it does come with its own problems. Take a hard drive failure, for example. 20+ screws to remove the thing and replace it. You basically have to take the entire bottom apart. On a lenovo, unscrew a single screw, run whatever processes you can on it to save your data, and pop a new one in.
Why the West’s present dominance is both recent and temporary
When I got mine, I had an option for "Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 AGN". That's what I selected and it works flawlessly. I don't know about the others.
also: http://www.strchr.com/strcmp_and_strlen_using_sse_4.2

SSE 4.2 introduces four instructions (PcmpEstrI, PcmpEstrM, PcmpIstrI, and PcmpIstrM) that can be used to speed up text processing code (including strcmp, memcmp, strstr, and strspn functions).
I'm not sure logic exclusively helps in stopping pseudoscientific and magical thinking. Really a more holistic approach is required:

Logic: to see how to reason deductively.

Epistemology and/or philosophy of science: to see why common meta-beliefs about knowledge and discovery are wrong.

Direct exposure to either a scientific or logic-driven discipline of study or practice: doesn't matter too much if this is a history book or the demands of a compiler. You have to put the reasoning in practice.

Developing a high-quality bullshit detector relies on much more than just an introduction to logic textbook. It is a bit like immunization: you have to encounter bad reasoning in a safe environment and build up your own defenses. (That's all IMHO of course.)
I'm in if I can learn enough Obj-C to toss an iOS app together.
Usability Resources to Win Arguments
That was probably the main thing that killed the game. Personally I loved the RvR aspect of WHO (the few times you actually had enough players from both sides on the same server and in the same zone to actually make a decent fight out of it). Easily the most fun I've had with any MMO game. Had they focused on that and really made that the core of their game, it could have been something great.
I just bought a ThinkPad T510. What caused me to convert was the advertised EIGHT HOUR battery life. Yes, it's true. Under moderate load you can expect to get maybe six or seven; under heavy load maybe four. But that's not bad. Better than many netbooks and this is a full-sized laptop.
I agree, that's good advice -- it's what Sun should have done with Java instead of pushing the least common denominator UI libraries, which lead to a host of lousy UI's that worked equally poorly on every supported platform. :)
I agree with this and think it also offers a way to reset. Work in a new field or industry and bring "newcomer's eyes" to the established problems, re-purposing what worked in your original field where appropriate.
Agreed, I don't think they 'owe' the free customers any support, in fact, charging for support would be a great way out of the problem it seems.

On top of that your service should not need that much support to begin with.
At the beginning I was upset, because this price increased arrived the day after I decided to integrate Chargify in an service we are building.

But I was wrong. If you really think that in 6 months your application for which you need a billing system, can't at least cover the cost of a latte per day... maybe you should stop right now and don't waste your time with it. Do you need more than 6 months because of any reason? Fine, that means you will have to give up your Startbucks habits for a while. If you don't trust your product to ever reach those 50 customers that would make you into a paying customer, why would Chargify?
Microsoft, Google security teams patching their differences?
The curse of the leader is that you cannot lead a group of people out of somewhere if they don't really want to leave. If you try, you end up becoming one of them.

I agree that corporate culture is dynamic and that you can make a difference, but you need to find if there is a group of people that is willing to change. Then you need to understand and put in concrete terms the vision that the group already have but does not quite understands. If there is not vision, the only option is to move on.
Other examples:

Cisco networks networks.

Google organizes the world's information.
Because native or web apps aren't "shitty"? The quality of the app isn't a direct correlation to the technology.

> Flash devs also know Html+Javascript.

This is not true. I am incredibly inefficient with html/css/js. I can rapidly create quality applications with Flash. My guess is that I am not unique in that regard.

> So again, what does AIR offer?

It offers clear wins for some people. You aren't in that group, which is fine. The Flash development community is excited about it and making use of it as we type. Arguments for or against preferred technologies doesn't change that.

> HTML + Javascript ... has a lower barrier to entry (lower cost)

Both are zero in terms of cost.
Nice ... thanks everyone for the info!
Key word being "startups" I'd hardly call Twitter a startup when Buzz came out. And hardly call... the email industry? a startup when wave was launched.
I second the "free for ___ months" then pay strategy. If a customer can't see the value in your offering after a few months of using it, they probably never will.

On the other hand, if you just charge customers off the bat, there are many people who can't overcome the activation energy of pulling out a credit card and will leave your site. I've come across quite a few services where even if they charged a penny, I'd probably pass just b/c I don't want to give you my credit card without knowing how useful your service really is.
Comparing Facebook applications to iphone applications
Accessibility checklist wallpaper
8 Tips to Protect Smartphones
Ask HN: Review my concept for an online court substitute
I'm in the very early stages of development right now, but with such a complex industry I thought it'd be good to get some feedback from HN.

Circuit192 is simply an online arbitration platform. Its a form of alternative dispute resolution that is usually legally binding.

To use the service, first two parties would agree to the terms of the arbitration. They then both submit a testimony and supporting documents to the service. We'll then select a professional from the appropriate industry (through LinkedIn) to fairly arbitrate the dispute. The point is to make the whole process as painless as possible, while still giving just and valid resolutions.

So what do you think? Potential business or legal nightmare? (I'm leaning towards both myself). Thanks in advance as always.

Link: http://circuit192.austinbrandt.net/hn/

More details: http://austinbrandt.wordpress.com/2010/09/22/business-idea-voluntary-arbitration-network/
A Million Dollars Isn't Cool
Bank Foreclosure Fiasco: Freeze Will Have Rippling Effects
Ah dammit. I noticed a couple of days ago the number of questions was at 997k. I meant to keep an eye out and see if I could ping in number 1 million - but then promptly forgot.
I'm extremely happy with my 11.6" Acer Aspire 1410. There must be newer variants by now. With its one-core Intel CULV it doesn't have much horse power, but then it's dirt cheap. You can get four for the price of a Macbook, which makes you not worry about taking it everywhere. It feels pretty fast doing regular work and programming. Linux works great on it. It still feels like a laptop to me, not like a netbook. There's both VGA (for projectors) and digital video out.
http://savedelete.com/9-best-free-accounting-software-for-yo...
One lesson-not-learned seems to be 'when taking responsibility for a big cock-up, try to minimize or omit blaming others'.

It's perfectly believable that free customers were an unsustainable burden or that the press (and its consumers) love disaster stories. These things are also perfectly fine things to write about. But the timing is awful - do you really want to be calling your customers a bunch of loud whiners with too much time on their hands just days after everyone on the net was calling you ham-handed and tone-deaf in customer-relations matters?
Clickable:

Link: http://circuit192.austinbrandt.net/hn/

More details: http://austinbrandt.wordpress.com/2010/09/22/business-idea-v...
I've been using a Dell XPS 1530 with an SSD, and couldn't be happier.

All the stuff I've tried worked out of the box (built-in wireless, webcam, sound, graphics card w/ NVidia driver, etc).

It's a great laptop and the SSD and 4 Ggis of RAM make coding much more enjoyable.

As a side note, it takes 5-10 seconds to boot into Kubuntu from a complete shutdown (i.e. not suspend-to-disk), whereas it takes over 45 seconds to get into Vista (on the same laptop)... And Windows isn't starting up database and web servers.

So if you want to get a PC, definitely look into the XPS 1530.
Building Scalable Support – Lessons Learned From the Chargify Price Increase
This reminds me of the anecdote about the math student who showed up late to a lecture and saw three equations on the board; he assumed they were homework, so he copied them down and worked on them. When he came to the next class, he said, "The homework was really hard; I could only solve one of the equations," to which his professor replied, "Those weren't homework--those were three of the most renowned unsolved equations in the field of mathematics." I forget where I read this, but I have always chosen to believe that it is true, because, damn... that's awesome.
Good essay but I don't think he adequately addressed the problem of transaction costs for changing software, either in process or later updating, of course that wasn't his primary point (it has been a while since I read it and I could be misremembering).
Apple "Back to the Mac" Event Oct. 20: New OS X
Just to toss this question in, because I've seen lots of people make a similar comment, but never have really seen an explanation as to why: what is the problem with iTunes?

For me, I don't do much in the way of using iTunes; I set up a play list, press play, minimize it, and enjoy listening to music while I do other things. Maybe I'm not a music player power user?
Non-linearity.
I was surprised a few years ago to find that a similar thing was already happening for big company email servers. My small company was working a joint proposal with a division of a big company. Every time the teammate at BigCo sent me his copy of the Word document containing the proposal, it would mysteriously disappear en route through his Exchange server.

Once he removed the "Confidential Property of BigCo" footer from the document it went through just fine. He was hitherto unaware that such a restriction existed.

It was a violation of his company's policy that he send a document with that footer outside of his network. It was also a violation of policy for him to remove that footer from a proposal for which his company would be the prime contractor. There's a lesson in there somewhere about centralized automatic enforcement of policy.
Apple to announce OS 10.7 (probably) on October 20
And to save you asking the obvious first question: the announcement has a picture of a lion on it.
I got a sneak preview of this yesterday. Having worked on a couple of large-ish JavaScript UI projects this is the kind of thing that people invent over and over again without ever distilling a minimal, extensible, and reusable set of functionality, it's either too application specific or heavily embedded in a larger framework (Cappuccino/SproutCore). MooTools+Backbone.js and/or jQuery+Backbone.js sounds like a killer combo to me!
The more accurate and less alarming title should be: Canon provides capability for administrators to block copy jobs by keyword.
Screw the super angels, we need a super user collusion table at Bin-38
Odd — I'm running Snow Leopard and haven't had any issues with many of the libraries or apps you mentioned (boost, ampqlib, postgresql), although it's probably worth noting that I installed them all through Homebrew (http://www.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/).
I think the "you" was directed hypothetically at the reader, not you specifically.

trevelyan makes some good points. I love my MBP, but consider it more of a host machine than a development machine. I do most of my development in VMs or while logged into various Linux machines. If you've never used OS X before, there are a few gotchas that can make it less suitable for cross platform development. Aside from Apple's unpredictable changes to upstream sources, my biggest complaint is the tendency of the Finder to leave turds everywhere it's been. I'm always disappointed when a vendor distributes source code with these intact (and by default, the Finder will try to write them to practically every network drive folder it visits). That's just one example of things you'll have to watch out for when you develop on the Mac.
Viral marketing. Even without the nickel. Don't underestimate the value.
How best to wake up a college student
yes -- working directly on our behalf -- designing a tradeshow booth, an ad, a giveaway. They expect us to send logo guidelines. Our guidelines are simple (just a couple of pages) -- Just showing how to make it monochrome, and some acceptable variations.
Wow! That is one huge button...
That's partially true, but I think also it's a sign that they're more interested in seducing investors than they are in making revenue.

If you could get a large enough population involved, you ought to be able to make this work in small towns in Ohio as well; however, you've got to produce a service that's got the wide appeal that Facebook does, not something that appeals primarily to 20-something technorati singles.
Just as perplexing, why do they need ~68 employees (http://about.digg.com/team).

My counting may be off by 1-2, but last I checked Reddit is coming up on them traffic-wise (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com+digg.com/), and only has 7 employees? And I'm pretty sure Reddit doesn't have 500 servers either, although I could be wrong.

Both sites offer very similar functionality.

While past its peak, Slashdot only has 18 servers. (http://slashdot.org/faq/tech.shtml#te050)
Key point of Backbone.js: This is for designing web apps, not just a web page. When you have multiples of the anything on a page, it's time to move to separating out your views from your models, and Backbone.js is perfect for this sort of transformation. Even better if you start with Backbone.js. And Backbone.js is a minimal set of functionality to get this done.

We use Backbone.js at DocumentCloud for our document workspace. It took a few weeks to pull out all the pieces, but we rely on the JavaScript MVC that Backbone gives us for the entire workspace. (That too will go open-source, someday soon enough.)

I am personally planning on integrating Backbone into NewsBlur, an RSS feed reader, which currently has an ad-hoc model system. Backbone would give it the ability to update stories and feeds without having to remember where all of the stories and feeds are on the page.

Anyway, Backbone takes a bit of getting used to, but it is fairly easy to read the annotated source to see exactly what's happening. And once you do learn the Backbone.js conventions, hard problems become much easier on the front-end.
"After authorization of our application Dropbox will grant us permission to add a folder within your Dropbox account called DROPitTOme."

And permission to put files in that folder. And... What else? I suspect it gives more than that.
Spreedly is PCI Level 2 compliant, which while not cheap, is significantly lower cost than Level 1 compliance. There's not additional liability involved by us being Level 2 vs Level 1 - while Level 1 is certainly a nice marketing strategy, the truth is that it's not required until transaction volume reaches a pretty significant level. Once Spreedly reaches that level we'll get it, but by that time we'll also be able to afford it.

In terms of support, what we're doing at Spreedly is focusing on providing excellent email support, and occasionally supplementing that with IM/phone support for critical issues. It's a trade-off that seems to be working well for us and our customers at this point.
Summary - Robert Scoble writes to the "super users", i.e. the users who use the most mobile apps. He says the super users should be helping to drive the market towards better applications. As opposed to the "super angels", who are driving the market towards only caring about getting funded.

I'm pretty sure HN users are a large part of the "super users" Scoble is talking about. I know I personally use a lot of applications and sign up to anything that looks even slightly interesting (but on the web only, sadly don't have a decent mobile.)
Microsoft, Google make amends over IE8 zero-day flaw
My last job served around 30-40 million pages a month on 4 servers that used ASP.Net and SQL Server 2000. The only server whose CPU utilization was over 20% was the database server. I'm not sure the CPU utilization on the web servers ever went above 10%.

A friend of mine's company has a tough time keeping up with 500,000 page views a month using more equipment. They're using PHP and MySQL.
So what kind of conversion rate are you seeing from visitors on that page?
I wish I could accept time-as-currency, but I can't. My bank won't cash the checks.
What if it is not the things that are changing so fast, but our ability to reflect and think long-term that has nearly vanished?
I switched away from Freemium for my company yesterday. Should have done it a while back.

Free users are harder to support, more vocal and less likely to upgrade. Even a token amount of money initially is probably enough to discourage the "pathological" customers and the sunk costs mindset might encourage spending more money with your service.
Depends on the servers to, I'm sure it would take more than 5 servers that Google run to run SO.
While I love Thinkpads and was going to buy a T410 I end up buying a HP Elitebook 8440p. It's sturdy as Lenovo laptops, all Intel hardware (not having to worry about crappy ATI/NVIDIA graphics drivers) and it comes with a kick-ass 14" 1600x900 LED backlit LCD.

Installed Ubuntu 10.10 yesterday. Everything worked, all hardware works correctly. Couldn't be happier. :)
It was only a single problem in statistics. The professor's name eludes me. He's still alive and teaching.
Part of this is also due to the fact that the analytics business is so multi-faceted and had many valuable niches. That fact, combined with the increasing volume and variety of data people need to understand, makes the industry even more viable as time goes by.
What makes founders want to found?
The largest problem is that the people telling you what they want are not good enough to through every possible path the user may want to go down. This leads to specs that are ambiguous at best, contradictory at worst. It takes a good developer to see the hidden things in the spec and raise the questions that need to be asked before the development goes too far down a bad path.
You don't think inferior products sometimes win in the marketplace? Ever hear of FUD?
Business appraisal jacksonville
Hetsler Mediation & Valuation, Inc. is a forensic and investigative CPA firm specializing in business valuation, Business appraisal and forensic accountant in various places such as jacksonville, Orlando, Miami and Tampa.
One thing is for sure, Spolsky sure knows how to scale his ego.
Here comes the new cat
Yenilmez 3 / Undisputed 3 / 2010 / DVDRip / Tr Altyazılı
Google Instant Coming to Chrome's Omnibox for Mac
Ask HN: for feedback on the product we just launched - a Firefox addon
This is the product I've been working on for a few months now. The company I work for have a small but knowledgeable dev team, and we really think this product is going to be a useful tool for our audience. We're also pretty convinced it's not been done before.

I'd like you to install it and let us know if you have any suggestions, bugs, ideas etc. We've "soft-launched" today to an invited audience, and I'd like to get feedback from fellow hackers before we do the full-on launch. Many thanks for your time.

Market: UK Horse Racing Gamblers

Scenario: You want to find the best price for a horse that you've just read about.

Problem: You have to open a new tab, find an odds comparison service, type the horse name in and compare odds from there. Or you have to open a bunch of bookmakers pages and compare odds from there - a lot of effort.

Solution: Odds Anywhere - a firefox add-on (IE coming soon) scans pages you're looking at and highlights horses that are running soon. When you hover, a bubble appears with the best odds for that horse.

Homepage: http://www.oddsanywhere.com/ - there's a live demo of the bubble on there.

Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/241026/ - if you want to see it working on other pages.

PS: I'm really sorry about the EULA, our boss insisted on filling it with ugly scary stuff :(
Film indir
So have I. In fact, most of the "can't do" folks in their 20's and 30's that I've had to deal with were failing to solve easy problems. My peers and I had encountered these in the past, we had solved them, and didn't care to waste time trying to come up with new solutions to them. The ones who failed were too arrogant to listen to the voice of experience, and as a result they failed miserably.

That said, I've also encountered peers who were too set in their ways to change, and continued to fail in almost exactly the same way over and over again, refusing to learn from their own experience.

It goes both ways, but age has had very little to do with it in either case. It's usually been arrogance instead.
I dislike iTunes because it's so bloated and memory hungry (unless it changed changed over the years). I use Foobar2k to do the same thing, load up and just play music.
Even then, 500 servers? That's an incredible amount.

EDIT: Then again Facebook is using 60000 servers at the moment.
This is exactly how the Helium-Neon laser came about. At the time there were published articles on how infeasible a gas based laser was to create. The researcher who came up with them didn't know about the papers and hadn't done a full literature search. He just plugged away. Now they're widely used and adopted for most everything.
Oh no! Hundreds of smileys (emoji) in the character set. Usually I block the smiley-gifs with an ad-blocker. Need to look for a character-based blocker now.
Whatever you do, don't wait until your inhibitions are down before sending the cover letter and resume. If you can't help but hem and haw over the cover letter, you're not going to submit anything until late in the day. Then it will be near bedtime, and you'll be more likely to put stupid obnoxious-sounding things in the cover letter. If you have this problem, it might help to make a game out of writing a simple, mediocre, polite cover letter, instead of trying to make a good cover letter. My response rate went from 0% to 100% when I did this. If you're not a naturally obnoxious person, maybe you won't have this problem.
Thinkpad X series (or T410). By far the best.
I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean.
I'm a keyboard junkie (using Vimperator right now), but OSX still has a few brick walls when it comes to keyboard shortcuts. For example, there are no built-in shortcuts to move/resize/maximize the current window. This is pretty basic stuff, but I have to reach for the mouse to do it.