skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe your information is out of date. In addition to the two major data customers in Google and Microsoft (rumoured to be in the region of $25m/year) it also has advertisers who pay for promoted tweets and promoted hashtags. As for the "at the drop of a hat", of course they could, but why would they?
Germany did introduce the Rentenmark to replace the Paper-Reichsmark in the mid-twenties to stop hyperinflation. (Later on they--essentially--reverted the name of the currency back to Reichsmark.)

There was no hyperinflation in the 30s. The early thirties saw depression and deflation. This Weltwirtschaftskrise lasted longer in the US than in Germany and is known as the Great Depression, there. The crisis contributed to the rise of Nazism in Germany, though.
It is probably just a concatenated string of his credit card number or social security number and random words. I wonder if they are currently trying to crack it using some kind of dictionary brute force mechanism, or if there is some kind of lock out enabled after five tries.
Solidarität mit den Frauen im Kongo
>you intend to commercialize it

The problem then is that cell phone makers would have a monopoly, since no small company could come up with a better antennae, or better screen etc without also having all the other parts of a cell phone.

The original idea of the patent was to grant the inventor a limited monopoly in return for the invention being published and adding to the set of human knowledge - rather than a maker keeping it a secret part of their product.
You could breathe your homegrown oxygen too that way!

On a more serious note, the sun puts out about 1KW per square meter of receiver that is exactly perpendicular to the incident rays, in full sunlight. So theoretically there is enough power there, but in practice photo-synthesis is not efficient enough to make this happen, typically somewhere around 5% of the energy gets captured, and that's for a very dark plant. So if your cross section towards the sun is .2 m^2 and you convert at 5% efficiency then you can expect about 10W from that in usable energy. There is a reason leaves are relatively flat and can change orientation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency

It's not easy, being green.
One thing that I think is ridiculously misleading, is that when watching the video for "how groupon works for busineses"... they have the "we only make money when you make money" premise, and show bags of money piling up on both the business owners side and the groupon rep's side, at what looks to be a 5-1 ratio in the business owner's favor

Now it's pretty clear that in this instance they are talking about when the money is collected from the sold groupons - not the overall economic benefit that the business will see in the future (although it's questionable that even that will be favorable). From the Posies story and finding out that groupon takes at the bare minimum a 50% cut, this video is incredibly deceiving, borderline flat out lying to the business owner from the start... No wonder business owners are disenchanted with the whole process.

Click on "How it works" http://www.grouponworks.com/
That is, in fact, what the alpha nerds I know are doing that other people are not doing.
Unless I'm mistaken you can currently still operate an unsecured access point in the UK. The legislation was originally part of the Digital Economy Act however I can't spot anything expressly forbidding operating one.
If I only I could get a patent on irony - unfortunately it would mean getting Americans to understand it.
2. Observe the working conditions. They reveal a lot about the company's philosophies towards its employees.

You're looking for top notch monitors, chairs, desks, and computers. Look at how much space each programmer has and if the environment is quiet or not.

A top notch work environment is a good investment for maximizing the productivity of programmers and keeping them happy and healthy. Anything less than a top notch work environment is an indication that the company is overly focused on keeping costs low and is cheap with its employees.

I would disagree with this point. While it is important to have quality monitors and computers, I don't think it is necessary for an early stage startup to go splurging money on nice desks and chairs. In fact, some might take it as a sign the startup is not spendthrift enough and thus more likely to not have enough runway.
BigData LAMP
If they are unable to crack the pass code, does he go free on lack of evidence?
The ad used the work `grok'. So there was a pretty high chance that the tone of your cover letter would be well received. Good perception!
Testifying is providing information to the court. Decrypting your hard drive is providing information to the court. What's the difference?

I would argue that all evidence is really just information. Once again, the old lines dividing one category from another become blurred.
Protip: Use syslog-ng.

Besides longer log message (arbitrarily long, with a recompile) and reliable delivery, it obviates my main use for logrotate, since it can be configured to write to a filename (including directory) based on time, date, or other variables.
How do they know it's a 50 character password?
I'm not an expert, but the application's memory usage being opaque to the kernel sounds vaguely like the problems Azul had scaling its Java runtime to large (>2GB) heaps.

Azul recently open sourced some of their kernel patches:

http://www.managedruntime.org/faq

But that is about all I know.
The iTunes UI is horrid, but I have yet to find anything that does everything iTunes can without being crashy, slow or non-intuitive.
It would be a lot easier if you hadn't been conceived, yet.
Yes, trying out other music managers is a very good way to come to appreciate iTunes and how it works. I encourage everyone who thinks they're unhappy with iTunes to check out these other applications.
Any way you could break down the specific IE versions?
Calacanis knows a race to the bottom when he sees it. Hell, he practically invented the race to the bottom with Mahalo.com.
The Secret Reason Why Your Life Is Boring
I would absolutely pay google $25 to store my music in the cloud. I have 150GB of the stuff and keeping it on my laptop has become impossible.
It is not completely impossible but there are 3 big reasons they stay with IE that I heard of.

Transparent Identification/Authentication, its is possible to support the protocols with Firefox but it is not as transparent.

ActiveX like stuff... sadly several enterprise applications use that.

Justifying the tests and rework of switching to a different browser.
Apple made elderly couple rich to get North Carolina data center built
One of the things that popped out at me in this announcement is that he's going to be launching this on email, rather than a blog. I know email seems like it's so antiquated and passé, but after listening to Mixergy's interviews with IdealBite and VitalJuice, I'm not so sure. The CPMs for email newsletters seem to be 20-100x what you can get for a blog in the same space, because the customers are so much more engaged. This might not work as well in a tech market, where the audience presumably uses RSS (or maybe not, as Jason already has a sizable list). That said, the reality seems to be that normal people do not use RSS, so you're probably better off starting an email newsletter than a blog.

Some links:

http://jasonlbaptiste.com/commentary/email-newsletters-busin...

http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/email-newsletters-are-sti...

http://mixergy.com/jen-boulden-ideal-bite-interview/

http://mixergy.com/amanda-freeman-vital-juice-interview/
Protip: look at rsyslog, syslog-ng, and splunk and decide what is right for your environment.
Android apps safer than Apple's but security concerns remain
For what it's worth, I'm a service provider in the Sacramento area and my tech manager and I are working hard at coming up with an offer that we can provide through Groupon near the end of this year.

I think they're a great, valuable service, despite the large amount of negative press I've read about them recently.

I'm not very interested in trying to convince anyone on HN, though.
Reading also this one now:
"My experience as the first employee of a Y Combinator startup"

http://nathanmarz.com/blog/my-experience-as-the-first-employ...
Do you have a PayPal (or similar) account setup for collecting funds?
This comment from spencerfry might be useful:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=779448
Wait, seriously? Down votes for this? I don't get you sometimes, HN.
MicroRNA Testing For Early Bladder Cancer Diagnosis
The clock has already been ticking... [1]

[1] Universal Music Group Now "Declaring Legal Jihad" Against Grooveshark... http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/090310groovesharkumg
I think the fallacy of this article is that there really isn't a mutually exclusive choice, or "crossroads" as TechCrunch calls it. SV/Palo Alto tends to be centered on the hardcore science, such as hacking file systems and search algorithms, while SF tends to be centered around social media and tools, with a couple in between like Github, which makes Git incredibly more powerful and social. It's ridiculous to think scientific innovation will end in SV.

EDIT: I think that it would have helped for the article to talk about how SF has changed from SV.
But you'd get fat by being outside. That seems suboptimal.
What seems like a lifetime ago, I was taking graduate CS classes at my local University. I had been writing software professionally for more than 20 years, so I was atypical in my class.

We were given some assignment to write a mail server in Java. At the time, I had never used Java, but had decades of experience with other dialects of C, so I taught myself Java over the weekend.

I put together the server, as well as several classes that could be shared by the client and presented it to the team on the following tuesday. When I showed them java code in emacs, with a Makefile to compile it all and jar it up, they were astonished. They didn't believe that:

1) I had learned the fundamentals of a language in a couple of days and was producing professional quality code in that language (actually professional quality design).

2) That I could do it outside of some java-specific IDE, using 20 year old tools.

I learned Java over a weekend; I wasn't about to tackle ANT at the same time.

After years of using ANT, I still think it is a pain in the ass.
I've had to up the maximum simultaneous connections, but otherwise I've been able to log extremely large volumes of data from 1,000s of machines, with syslog-ng. I'd assume the same is true with rsyslog.

Looking at limits on open files, and considering tcp timeouts and cookies were all we needed. Total volume was in the order of high 10s of GB.

If you want to unpack offline, contact details are in my profile.
4braham@gmail.com is a working PayPal account.
But...

this wouldn't be double jeopardy. It would be a second instance of him refusing to turn over the passwords. Just as you can be tried twice for murder twice if there are two separate murders, you could be tried twice in this situation.
I think you're overstating the time it takes to come up with benchmarks to evaluate performance optimizations. Even micro-benchmarks tailored to showcase your performance under ideal circumstances are a start. The longer you go without doing any performance comparisons, the longer you go without knowing if your work was worth it.

I'm not trying to deride his work - it's a neat project, and I will probably read through his earlier entries more. I'm down with all of the reasons provided, but I recognize that as humans, we tend to believe in things we understand. Hence, we need to evaluate.
Does anyone know what the browser market share of HN is?
Amazon Prime gets some competition: ShopRunner
So when will we see mass produced graphene? Also same question for carbon nano-tubes.

What are the obstacles waiting to be overcome?
bbc.co.UK
I'm based in Pakistan and all I have to say is that this is hurting America more than anything (these guys have no idea how much hatred this is causing among Pakistanis).
I mean there is this American guy who's helping people teach their kids and this American guy is a hero (and he teaches in the same dangerous zone). So I think if we need help we need it in education and etc.

I've been working with Americans for last 6 years and I've found them very honest, friendly, smart & hard-working. But when I look at American foreign policy towards the region I live in I find it most disturbing. Something is seriously wrong with the current drones-policy and American's(people in charge) have no idea how wrong it is ;( But our own leaders are probably responsible for it too. Stories of current government's corruption are very common now. I mean we have a 90+ member cabinet & most of them don't know an iota about running a country. I mean I can go on and on ;(

I'm currently pursuing graduate studies and most of people I meet everyday they want peace as much as you all want. We just don't know when will this terror end ;(
Couldn't care less. Never was excited about it. Always figured it was flawed from the start. The average human being does not care about "open source" and while they like the theory of being open, they can't do anything with it (code wise) and the mass majority who aren't in tech or more specifically programming, don't have their own web host to even host the damn thing. The incentive is low and really, even if everyone hates Facebook, fact is, they're too lazy to do anything about it.
I am pretty surprised that he resigned. I mean, isn't this exactly what hired PR companies do, only with a little bit more denyability?

I mean, it's certainly unethical... but I thought this sort of "push the line" thing was the intent behind hiring bizdev and sales types.
Rediscovering the First Miracle Drug
Wikipedia has this to say:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Boucher

On February 19, 2009, Judge Sessions reversed the
magistrate's ruling and directed Boucher "to provide an
unencrypted version of the Z drive viewed by the ICE agent.
I think some people have hundreds of friends they tangentially know or don't really care about. If at all inconvenienced they realize they're not interested in having them as a facebook friend anyway. Why anyone would bother with a study on a topic as trivial as facebook defriending still confuses me though.
Ask HN: How do you manage working with multiple languages?
Everyone has a language that they love working in, but sometimes the problems at hand require different tools. This may mean writing code in 2 or 3 languages a day. How do you write great code in any language while staying true to the language's ideals and not trying to transform it to work as other languages?

EDIT: When working with C/Cuda, python, and perl throughout the day, I find myself being pythonic in perl, and whatnot, or not being pythonic in python after working in C/cuda. Then I have to go back in refactor. I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually, I was just wondering what HN does to keep their head straight.
If you invent something that by itself has no commercial value whatsoever, but could make someone else's idea either viable or more profitable (maybe it makes their widget easier to build?), then you're basically saying that your invention isn't patentable, even though by licensing it you could enable another company to benefit from your work while being compensated for it.

Wow, that was a long sentence.

Anyway, that's the whole point behind patents in the first place. It's to allow the inventor to be able to stand up to a big company and negotiate on at least somewhat equal footing, and finding an agreeable set of licensing terms.

Then you could be an inventor instead of a builder, and come up with ideas that others can use to build stuff.

You're suggesting that there should not be any such thing as an inventor who doesn't build stuff, because you're proposing that such individuals are invariably shot in the back.

"If your sole source of revenue is licensing the patents that you've created, you're a patent troll."

False. An inventor's sole source of income might well be licensing patents -- such a person is making a living by inventing things. Hence the term "inventor" ;))

A patent troll is someone who abuses that aspect of the system, like IBM. They try to make their patents as broad as possible, and then use them to prevent other companies from making progress, rather than making the licensing process into a collaboration between entities -- allowing the inventor to create the shoulders atop which the builders stand.
But some people are ASKING about the US, and everything I've said above is as it pertains to US law. Which is a worthwhile discussion anyway, as US readers are the largest single group of HN readers.
in the first part, he says, "don't bother doing manual memory management, you'll be fighting with virtual memory, that's programming like its 1975". in the second part he says, "do a different sort of manual memory management to avoid contention across processors". how long until the latter advice is "programming like its 2006" :)
Do you have experience with QuickCheck? It allows you to specify rules and the computer will generate the tests for you. That's very pleasant to work with in languages susceptible to this kind of reasoning (e.g. Haskell).

(Edit: quicktest -> QuickCheck. Thanks!)
You just have to use your common sense. If the company hasn't raised much cash yet, then it makes sense that they might be tight with the purse strings. You'd expect this to be a temporary situation.

In general though, the salary of the employee dwarfs the cost of providing a top notch working environment, so it's in the startup's best interest to maximize their already large investment in the employee.
Q&A with ScanScout's CTO & Co-Founder Steven Lee
Passat BlueMotion goes 1,527 miles without refueling; 74.8 mpg
Apologies... If you had replied to a question, I wouldn't have felt compelled to post that. But in the UK, it's illegal to refuse to give up your password.
I think it would be great for everyone to learn a little bit of scripting in a straightforward language. Do they need to remember it? Absolutely not.

I think it's important for everyone to at least get exposed to what programming can and can't do. The crux of the problem is all of the people who don't even realize that they are spending hours or days at a time, time-and-again, performing a repetitive task that could be done automatically with a program. We sometimes encounter the same problem from the other side: someone expects a program to magically do way more than is reasonable.

Is it important for everyone to know how to program? Absolutely not. I think exposing everyone to programming, however, would be very valuable. While many are likely to forget the details or not care, I contend that the majority would at least retain some of the notions of what is and isn't programmable.
Google Goggles available on iPhone in Google Mobile App
Biggest Problem for Big Media is Size
I don't know much about this stuff, but the 'sacrifice business relationship with Calacanis', is that the only loss Arrington had? Seems like a tiny thing to lose. Leaving Arrington's persona out, Calacanis is a major douche from what I've seen so really it doesn't seem like Arrington lost anything from switching to Disrupt.
"Half plant, half animal" seems incorrect: it's an animal that has borrowed some DNA and cell parts from algae.
Depending on what you mean by analysis, plenty of startups have them, including two I've worked for. No names here because apparently every word I say represents all employers, past, present, and future : rolleyes :

Nonetheless, in slightly larger -- 30-40+ people -- startups, there is often a need for someone who is good with sql or whatever datastore you have, who can make reports. That sounds a little bland, but it can range from asking and answering questions like how effective is our SEO or SEM, what advertising is giving us the best response, predicting churn rates for customers, etc. Good luck.

If you want to talk to the analyst at my current employer, hit me up over email. She's not a personal friend, though, so I can't promise anything but an intro.
I work on C# on the pc side and objective C on the iPhone side. I don't have a problem going back and forth. Try it out for yourself. I don't think its that much of an issue.
Unbelievable. Even if the product in question was completely fraudulent, how does it make any sense at all for the FTC to settle with the company who made it for $0 and then go after the ad network who promoted it for the entire amount that consumers paid? Are they supposed to test and verify the products and services of every advertiser on their platform?

This is nothing more than extortion, likely for the purposes of boosting some career politician's clout by increasing a number in a spreadsheet in Washington.

I wish they'd sue Google for some of the crappy ads that appears on their site, both so Google would clean things up, and also so someone with deep pockets would fight the FTC on this ridiculous policy. But I'm guessing these shakedown artists won't go after anyone big enough to put up a fight.
You can do this already. Write a music player client that can stuff your music into an encrypted blob and push it out on Amazon S3 or something. $22.50/month for storage.

The problem is that that monthly price is a bit high for most people.
Thanks for your feedback, here a quick reply:

- Yes it is possible on YT, but you need to login and it is not fast enough for me. I want to find videos while I type and build a list.

- Auto-suggest is already active, you can force exact search by hitting enter.

- 90% Controls have influence on your search results, that's why I put them top left. They need to get attention but shouldn't distract the user, so that's why I chose top left (also the fullscreen looks nice with it)

- The dotted outline is a DIV hack needed to catch mouse clicks for pause/play (since I can't capture clicks from the flash video itself)

- Not having a login/register is one of the main advantages of this site, you build a list, share it and save it that way.

- Add icon was not meant as rip-off from Netvibes (didn't knew they even used it), what do you suggest as a positive 'add this video' icon?

- Supporting other video sites is in the pipeline!
I've worked with both proprietary DBs, particularly MSSQL and Oracle, and free DBs, particularly MySQL and PostgreSQL.

I would trust Postgres for any production application -- however, Oracle has a few nice solutions when it comes to business intelligence that I haven't found for the free databases. Further, so many solutions (such as the major ERPs) come on big hardware databases that mid-sized companies already have the necessary database. Why use Postgres when you already have a license (or three, including development and staging/training) for a commercial database?

Certainly, at the Fortune 500 level, Oracle and DB2 have advantages that are YAGNI for us. (For example, Oracle RAC is a pretty elegant solution that isn't right for serving Facebook, but certainly adds more convenience than it costs in complexity for a large company.) You can have a big cluster of databases and use a single point of control across the cluster. I just haven't seen the same tools for Postgres.

I would never suggest that Facebook should be served up by Oracle. It just wouldn't make sense considering the cost. However, for a large company with a dozen (or many more) large interrelated applications, both consultingware and internal, used on three continents? I wouldn't want to manage a Postgres cluster....

(I am, of course, oversimplifying things.)
Slicehost is good; I've used them for about a year now and had no problems. Very similar to Linode, but slightly more expensive.