skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry, but this is playing with fire.

What scientists, technocrats and economists forget is that public policy is rarely driven by rationality. It is driven mostly by private interests, demagoguery, blind ideology, prejudice and the public misconceptions.

The idea of taking a little bit of a very dangerous medicine is something that no one should take lightheartedly.
Just a note:

I pre-ordered a WakeMate on November 25th, 2009 with a ship date in January. After the ship date passed, I got a "we're sorry" email which said that they tentatively planned to ship them in February. No word until March when they said they'd go out in March. In April, they told me the following:

"Based on your pre-order date (11/25/2009), you should expect your WakeMate no later than 07/30/2010."

I've heard literally nothing since. Their website now says that if I order a WakeMate today I'll get it in September 2010.

I can't speak to whether or not these sleep analysis tools work, but I absolutely can't in good conscience recommend buying this particular device (YC or not).
You can read the actual contract rider for yourself at:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/van-halens-lege...
In my opinion, the document is full of a whole lot of weird stuff and the safety excuse may just be a post-facto rationalization.
Argumentative Essay Topics Writing Guidelines
Writing essays is a common academic assignment. There are many types of essays which students will have to write during their academic career. One of these is the writing of argumentative essays. With the right argumentative essay topic you will be able to do a good job.
I've thought a good product would be a real, decent quality digital camera - kid proof and kid simple. LCD viewfinder & review, 1 button capture, 1 button review, USB charging (no stupid AAs - nonremovable LiIon), smart on/off. Something a kid can get used to as a tool, not just a cheap toy, and no way to get "lost in the weeds" in menus or other discouraging traps or manufacturing shortcuts. (Anyone wanna fund a startup?)
My personal opinion is that badges won't matter to people consuming newswire content. I suspect that within a year, badges have little-to-no value in apps as a whole (with the exception of gaming apps -- and I consider Four Square to be a game).
I think my postulating from a few months ago is becoming closer to reality. http://parveenkaler.com/2010/06/30/could-ruby-be-apples-lang...

The release notes mention that there has been work on static Ruby compilation as well as well as fixes for clang/llvm.

The one weakness on Apple's platform is that they don't have the rich, language-agnostic runtime and a modern language to match Microsoft like .NET/C#. And Google is building on top of the JVM.

I think the future Apple stack looks like:

Objective-C & Ruby
----
Language-agnostic runtime (Grand Central Dispatch, Blocks, etc)
----
CLANG
----
LLVM
----
Unix (iOS or OS X)
The Chinese can't stop buying bonds if they want to keep their currency depressed relative to the dollar. Moreover, they have no intention of stopping the gravy train - tanking the US economy (further) would only hurt their own largest market, and no other large market is as willing to accept one-sided trade and currency policies as the US.
I'd include:
1) Hacker Dojo (conveniently near YC!) -- a slightly-more-corporate hackerspace

2) Computer History Museum

3) Weird Stuff and the other used hardware vendors

4) Drive by the "HP Garage" in Palo Alto

5) Facebook's new offices

6) In-N-Out

7) The Old Pro in Palo Alto

8) Drive by Moffett Field (and go inside if you can; there are events there a couple times per year)
My trick for spotting sockpuppets is to check for duplicate passwords. They usually clue in to using proxies and using non-trivial variations on the usernames but somehow they totally overlook that having the same password for each account (created closely spaced) is enough to detect them with a high reliability, as well as matching them up by user agent, screen resolution and language preferences.

See https://panopticlick.eff.org/ for a few more tricks like this.

A check on proxies won't hurt either, if you can afford it, as well as spotting the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Forwarded-For header in HTTP requests.
I've had the Zeo for about 5 days, so I can only provide feedback relative to that amount of time. It certainly SEEMS accurate with it's recording of my deep/rem/light sleep cycles. There's no way for me to really know though since I'm asleep.

I'm a data fiend, so having the data is worth more to me than the smart-wake feature. I cant speak for the WakeMate, but the Zeo will wake you up to 30 minutes before your target time if it is more optimal than your target time. I've not experienced any benefit from this so far, but like I said, only 5 days use.
This should have been resolved for you now.
Still, having a separate markup/scripting language for the UI layout has become an established paradigm for anyone writing apps that need to run in a browser.

side note: this action I guess has prompted the creation of "visage" http://steveonjava.com/accouncing-visage/ as a JavaFX scripting alternative.
Skype To Appoint A New CEO, Cisco SVP Tony Bates
Nate Silver: Odds Against Third-Party Bid Not as Long as They Seem
This was a very depressing thing to do after the bust. So many buildings were for lease during those times.
Reminds me of http://jsfiddle.net/ - JS lib, JS, HTML, CSS, AJAX and your Result all on one screen.
Plane Air Not Riskier Than in Rooms, Study Says
moreso, it's the way they present it so matter of factly (when in fact, it's not):

When you write, "We're looking for a rock star developer."
A developer sees, "We want to treat a developer like the RIAA treats rock stars."
This book is great. Branson was the first big-named businessman to convince me that "business types" weren't all backstabbing fat cats.
Facebook Holding Special Event This Wednesday
Wait, did he seriously just use goatse as an example of internet humor?

"By far the largest majority of humor on the web comprises of memes, catchphrases, remixes and repetition. All your base are belong to us, lolcatz, goatse and the rest."
The difference between 50mil and 31k is 1622x, not 1622%.
Comparison of Comet server implementations
How can you claim that the Framers were unaware of the possible consequences of industrialization when "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" was published in 1776?

Issues surrounding capitalism, the division of labor etc. were being actively discussed back then, and industrialization as we know it got started properly in 1789 thanks to the efforts of Sam Slater.

Besides which, the correct way to expand the powers of the Federal Government is by an amendment to the Constitution, not the liberal interpretation of existing clauses. The former is transparent & leaves room for public debate; the latter is the practice of political appointees who do not care for their expansion to be the subject of public scrutiny in advance.
same issue here, I emailed them earlier today and asked if it would be to me within a year of me pre-ordering :(

WakeMate so far for me is a sad story of a good product with a poor planning/release cycle..

Also their front page still shows the wrist band that will look nothing like the one you will get

final wrist bands here
http://blog.wakemate.com/2010/08/10/final-wristbands-3/

compare that to front page
http://wakemate.com/

Perhaps they are shipping to their new customers; cause they think there is no way to please the old ones?
Speaking of which, my colleague had her birthday today and I sent her a Cakesy image. She liked it. Thanks!

:)
I'm not sure about this stock photo...it doesn't really make me think of developers.

http://scalasolutions.com/images/consultant.png
Didn't even think twice about this - I am _always" clicking on "Read Later" - and then making sure I sync up with my iPad and/or iPhone before walking home. Then, throughout the day, whenever I have downtime, I get caught up on all the articles.

In fact, there are a few times when I'm just buried in the screen Spam, that I just give up and hit "Read Later", knowing that the article will be cleaned up for me (Kind of like Safari's reading screen)

Love the $1/month charge. I have zero reason not to continue this indefinitely. I would have gone as $3/month without hitting my "Hmm, let's think about this point" - though I suspect I would have paid as much as $4/month before I considered not subscribing. $5/month is over my pain point.

As a side note - the WSJ has basically established my "levelling" indicator for what I consider fair value for a subscription. They charge me $155/12 months or about $13/month - with content syncing to my iPad or viewable through the Web Browser.

So, when I purchase monthly content or service subscriptions, I mentally ask my myself - what percentage of a WSJ subscription this is. I'd say that Instapaper is worth about 1/3 of the WSJ.
Paying Yourself is Not a Reason to Raise Early Stage Funding
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UGG Classic Short : Ugg Boots Sale
I can only comment on my Virgin Blue (low but not cutthroat budget Australian airline) experience but I have to say that the company has completely embodied the Branson attitude as described in his books. For instance we've been an hour late to a flight (that was fortunately delayed) and not only did they let us on the plane, but they managed to let us check in an unexpected baggage item (they security cleared it of course) - I have no idea what the usual domestic American carrier is like but this rule-bending on favour of the customer and common-sense (humans at all levels to paraphrase Branson) is unheard of on other (particularly traditional) carriers where, for example, you can lose your flight without refund if you are only 25 minutes early to your flight instead of 30 minutes.

Some other comparison points:

- "Web check-in" allowing you to arrive anytime up to the boarding of the plane (if flying with purely carry-on luggage) instead of having to arrive an arbitrary time before departure because of inefficient passenger processing.

- Friendly, bouncy and joking flight staff versus off-putting and critical drones who seem put out at the slightest request.

- Modern aircraft with simple amenities like screens for every seat versus tired old planes from the days where lack of competition and government monopolies dominated the industry.

- Reasonable fares without sacrificing quality versus either dated but comparable quality at a higher price or true "budget" where you sacrifice both quality and patience for a price that is often pretty close after hidden fees (e.g. A fee for booking, a fee for paying and a fee for paying via credit when this is the only accepted option).
I like the idea and my initial impression is that if you can truly deliver all these features, with excellent news content, $1.99 might be too low.

I would almost consider scaling some of the features back and focusing on simplicity and content.

Do you have anything you can show us yet?

Sounds promising.
I've been on the hiring side of the interview table for web developer positions a lot in the last few years. While only having professional experience in PHP isn't a big deal, I have to say that folks who've never shown an interest in another language or facet of software development don't tend to impress.

PHP is a very pragmatic, simple language with a complex and baroque set of libraries. It's great for hacking together websites, but working with PHP (even for many years) doesn't tend to teach you the kind of technical and aesthetic judgement that differentiates an assembly-line coder from a productive, engaged hacker.

Learning Ruby or Python might be the shortest path to another gig, but it probably won't push you outside your comfort zone far enough to really improve your programming if you stick to the usual Rails/Django garden path. If you want to really push yourself and grow as a developer, learn something completely unrelated to the standard LAMP stack.

Lisp (especially in a modern form like Clojure) is a good choice, as are Smalltalk and Erlang. C++, Java, or C# may let you jump up a pay grade or two, but tend to lead into dead-end "enterprise" coding, unless you're lucky enough to stumble into a top-notch shop that happens to be using them for their efficiency rather than their "manager-approved" status.

Most importantly, I'd suggest actually building something in whatever language(s) you decide to pick up. Reading blog articles and tutorials is all well and good, but it's far more impressive for you to be able to show code and talk from experience about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the languages you've worked with. Even a half-finished side project hosted on GitHub (or hauled into your interview on a personal laptop) will go a lot further than regurgitating buzzwords on demand.
Silicon Valley places that Paul Graham didn’t cover
They're apparently hiring:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1757816

It doesn't appear that customer service is a role they're looking to fill.
Other potential attack targets: admin UIs for routers, webhosting cpanels, web crawlers with DNS cache.
I owned and briefly used a very similar German-made device called the Axbo: http://www.axbo.com/axbo/CMS/CMS.aspx?Language=E

In my experience, it actually didn't work at all.

I suspect one main problem was that you could only set the alarm to wake you up within a 30-minute window, which meant there was a fairly high probability that the optimal point in your sleep cycle would occur before or after the alarm (given that the average sleep cycle is 60-120 minutes).

That said, it's one of those ideas that just sounds so compelling (Circadian rhythm!?! Sign me up!) It could work, the Axbo execution just didn't cut it for me.

I actually know the Wakemate guys, and I'm really anxious to try their product. I hope it works! For their sake, and for all those sleep-deprived hackers out there like myself!

One question I have for HN, though, is: given their supply chain troubles and the fact that, for all we know, their product may or may not actually work, what do you think about pre-selling a brand new product? Is it ethical? Is it advisable from a long-term strategic perspective (e.g. does it create the wrong expectations settings for your first users?)

I'd be particularly interested to hear from Wakemate!
The Girl Who Bit Precious Stone | Authspot
That was the problem in Brazil, money was created not to invest but to pay existing debt.
> No, you only get patent protection if you use Oracle's GPL code (OpenJDK). If you write your own (e.g. GCJ, Kaffe) there's less protection.

Which leads to the question, how much of the original fork must you maintain in order to be safe?
His autobiography is fantastic too.
At the last company I worked for (Internet Brands), there were about 100 developers. 90 PHP, 6 Java (for CarsDirect.com), and 4 .NET (for a handful of sites like Tjoos.com that haven't been migrated). Some of the PHP devs also know a little Perl or Ruby (helpful for migrations or legacy code). IB's business model is to migrate newly-acquired sites to PHP/MySQL whenever possible. This keeps development cheap because PHP devs are cheaper than Java or .NET devs.

The Java or .NET guys probably make 2x what PHP devs make there, but those positions are in very short supply. PHP is good to know if only for the sheer volume of jobs out there, even if the starting pay is lower. Keep in mind that highly able devs familiar with any language will make more money.
Though biased (I wrote all of WakeMate's web-based software), I think the product is solid and works as described; Beta users have agreed. Release estimation and product management in general are clearly a different matter, but we have sent out multiple emails since April and the blog (http://blog.wakemate.com) is routinely updated.
I haven't finished it yet, but I've liked Call me Ted in a lot of the same ways as Branson's book, so far.

http://www.amazon.com/Call-Me-Ted-Turner/dp/0446581895
Ask HN: Want to tour the Silicon Valley on the day before Startup School?
I'm organizing a trip to visit the sites that pg lists in his "Where to See Silicon Valley" essay (http://paulgraham.com/seesv.html) on the Friday before Startup School.

I did something similar earlier this year and we had a blast (http://hackspedition.org/sv).

Send me an email if you want to come.

If you are a local and can help drive people around, I want to hear from you too.
Try an iphone app like "Sleep Cycle". It's worked just as well for me as the $150 "SleepTracker Pro" I bought a few years ago. Arguably better since the iphone app provides nice graphs and soothing wakeup music.

Does it work? I do feel like both the app and the watch nudge me awake at the right time, but you need to be disciplined enough to actually get up and make use of an unexpected 15-30 minutes in the morning.
You'd hope so. Objective-C remaining the only option this decade seems nuts.
Correct! It is a joy driving down to Monterey to meet with some of the folks we collaborate with down there. "Oh no, a meeting? How terrible!"

I am constantly thankful the UC Regents generally chose such beautiful locations for their campuses. UCSB and UCSD were excellent choices as well. We'll give them a pass on a few of their other choices. ;)

The point though, is that middle ground does exist in California. As another example, I grew up in Sonoma County, which is both beautiful and not a wilderness.
Stuxnet / cyberwarfare / Internet control and privacy
What's the big deal? It's just a bit of fun. If one doesn't like the attitude that a 'rock star' job posting conveys then one should simply not apply.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22armchair+forking%22

Congratulations on coining a new term!
I also had some luck with Sleep Cycle (though it wasn't mindblowing). It doesn't really measure your sleep cycle, merely your movements, but having an alarm going off while you're naturally turning over or otherwise not totally comatose seems to help. As you say, you still need the discipline to actually get up, but the value is in not missing the alarm due to being in a truly "deep" sleep.
Probability and statistics cheat sheet
I have Clear and stream Netflix.
> Is it ethical?

WakeMate never actually collected any money from the pre-sales, so I don't think there's anything that could be considered unethical about it. If we had, that'd probably be a different story.

> Is it advisable from a long-term strategic perspective...

That remains to be seen, but investors wanted to see actual pre-orders; since the investment was necessary to hire folks like me to finish the product, it was the only short-term strategy available.
you're right about the badges. that's just to get the engagement going in the beginning, but you will eventually see them evolve into something much more useful and perhaps you would be able to unlock real-life prizes like gift cards, sponsor supported gadgets etc.
It would be extremely difficult to sue someone who for patent infringement when they were following the letter of a GPL you issued. The law still involves a modicum of common sense. Stepping up to a judge and saying "yeah, I did say he could do that but I had an extra secret thing written on my shirtsleeve saying he couldn't" just doesn't wouldn't fly well however you try to reword it...

IANAL YMMV of course...

The weird system of Microsoft-Novel is closer to the way a sinister patent take-over could work, though; a third party who never GPL'd any code walks in and claims everyone owes them royalties, maybe. They then play divide and conquer, with the aid of some shills in the audience.
I'll subscribe gladly if they fix the cron that emails articles to my Kindle. That thing never works. Sometimes I go tell it to send the articles manually, sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn't and I have to download a .mobi.

It's worth some amount of money to not even know what a .mobi file is.
Root defects
unfortunately, i dont have anything to show you yet. we're in week 4 of development. one more week and we'll submit the app to the app store. trust me, all these features will be laid out extremely simply with a great user interface and design (in my biased opinion).

for subscription, we plan on charging $1.99/month, $4.99/quarterly and $19.99/annually.
great idea, I've often thought someone should make a URL shortener (or should I say changer) for saying things out loud. I've heard a few podcasts were they will say go to 'tinyurl.com/skf74d' (or spoken out loud 'go to tiny url dot com slash s k f seven four d') and thought surely there is a better way. It doesn't have to be short it just has to be easy to remember 'tinyurl.com/DogCatBear' is better than the above, even if its not related to the subject matter, even better would be 'tinyurl.com/SiteThatHasSuchAndSuch' or something like that.

Hadn't thought of the expiring part though thats key to make sure there isn't wasted words I guess, nice, though for podcasts/conferences you would want it to be measured in months rather than hours.
Agree. I live in MountainView and still drive there for the coffee and ambiance.
Which in my experience is horribly broken.
email me (you don't have contact info in your profile)
What technologies are geeks pioneering today?
4chan, nuthin'. I remember having a blast on Usenet back in the day, and the very same styles of humour were prevalent.
Using canvas to create alpha-channel JPEGs - 33% the size of PNGs
I would add Rainbow Mansion http://www.rainbowmansion.com/

The ultimate Hacker Villa and the location of many SuperHappyDevHouses
so the kind of news that we're hoping to deliver is breaking news. because we'll be push notifying you of breaking news, the goal would be to ONLY deliver good, quality news (in our opinion) and not everything that we can possibly find. we don't want to kill your device with 100 tweets a day. that's just way too much.

what will be missing would be blogger opinions etc. that generally go everywhere - unless that opinion happens to become a story of its own.

we're drop dead focused on simplicity and keeping the interface clean. i'll be sure to let you know when.
How about Faye? It's an implementation of the Bayeux protocol in JavaScript and Ruby, with both server and client code available in both languages. There's a JS client for browsers too:

http://svn.cometd.com/trunk/bayeux/bayeux.html

http://faye.jcoglan.com/

http://github.com/jcoglan/faye
I've presented at TechCocktail before. It's a great experience. Here are a few tips:

1) It's in a bar environment, so you have to stand out. I had a big retractable banner (8 ft high) which stood out, so when you walked into the room people saw it
2) 20" monitor hooked up to a computer playing a slideshow is also great
3) They have to walk away with something. Stickers? Something fun?
4) Talk to anyone and everyone who walks up, regardless of their background + interest. It may not be for them, but they may know someone who is.
excellent point, pushing yourself outside the comfort zone is critical, at least that I what I have found.

Though, I have also found that companies are willing to hire and teach you, if you can exhibit excellent projects (and code), even if they are in PHP