skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There is probably a path for every single person in this country to make a million dollars in the next year if they were just "savvy enough" to take advantage of it.

Yes, there is, in the literally uncountable possible paths that the decisions of every other person on the planet (not to mention the state of the planet itself) create, there probably does exist a path to success, if not all, at least most people. Some of those paths involve crime, deceit, coercion and such but that is irrelevant.

"Luck" is you making the right choices (naturally based on your genes, psychology and the decisions that have led you to your current self), others making choices that facilitate it and the planet not blowing up in this process.
Is there any developer that didn't developed and IRC bot or client in their youth ?

I know I did it. It's a great learning experience in network programming. And one you can brag to your friends in #whatever.
Using immigrants as a proxy for anything is very suspect since emigrants to the US are a self-selected subset of a country's population. Compare the average intelligence, ambition, and work ethic of an Indian-American immigrant, that immigrant's American-born child, and the average resident of India.
What if your ideals are correlated to making money? What if it's to become a CEO and destroy the rain forests for money?

Just being the devil's advocate here. But those are issues to consider.
Then why post at all? I mean, criticism with reasonable justifications is one thing, but "Not on My Machine!" doesn't move the conversation forward in any direction at all.
I think the point was that the article assumes that the only thing that can cause transcription errors is ionization. This assumption is known to be false, since viruses can also mess with DNA transcription.

Obviously no one is suggesting that cell phones create viruses, but the point is that ruling out one avenue does not rule out the destination.
Okay I may get bashed for this but: Java feels that it is intended to restrict the programmer, because apparently the programmer is stupid and we need to restrict him so that the programmer will not make mistakes(think mandatory exception handling as an example). Java forces it's class-y style on you.

Creative people don't enjoy being locked down, they wan't freedom and expressing power like what they can get with JavaScript and jQuery and they don't want to be saved by Java.
John Sculley On Steve Jobs, The Full Interview Transcript
Agreed, Balsamiq is really a inspiring role model -- and the open transparent way they've documented the process is really valuable for those of us who want to learn from them.

One of the things that really impressed me about this post was the thoughtful way Peldi stepped back and realized the vision needed to expand -- as opposed to trying to keep the old vision when it didn't fit, or drifting into something new without really thinking about it.

Here's hoping they take their success to the next level!
I am really digging the idea of charging $1 for the trial. Care to share how it's effected the quality and quantity of trial users?
It's really hard to invent plants for cosmetic uses, so patent them
Loser-Pays makes lawsuits fairer in Europe. It could work in US, too
Important fact 2:
No study has ever shown a correlation between the rise in cell phone usage and any rise in cancer rates.

If there were some unknown indirect method by which cell phone radiation causes cancer, where is all the cancer? Because no study has ever found it.
40 under 40 - Business' hottest rising stars
Get involved with programming-related user groups and meetups in your area. The first time you hear a dumb question from a guy earning six figures at a Fortune 500 company, you'll realize we all have a lot to learn.
Sounds like you are looking to leave one job to get another job. Take some time to think about why joining an as of yet unknown "startup" would be better than the job you currently have. If you don't know where you would be going, then it might just be filling in imaginary holes.

One of the biggest things that's different between a big corp job and a startup might be that you are "closer to the metal" of the business part. What you do has a much larger effect on the ability for the business to succeed or fail when you are part of a small development team. Perhaps you could go even further and build your own business. This might prepare you better and give you an idea of what it is about a startup that you really would give up your current job for. Perhaps your new business would even do well enough to provide the income when you quit your day job.
I can't agree with this more. It's really frustrating to write web apps that work on all the standards compliant browsers, and then have to make all sorts of hacky changes to them because Microsoft decides to do its own thing.

We're a .net shop, but now we just recommend that our users use other browsers to get the best experience. It looks like that won't be changing when it comes to mobile access either.
Alternate title (and quick summary): Douglas Coupland hits midlife.
This headline makes for a misleading soundbite. The context is that Sculley is saying that Apple's biggest mistake was making Sculley CEO instead of Steve. The board "wasn’t prepared to make [Jobs] CEO when he was 25, 26 years old."

Thankfully that kind of thinking has changed in today's tech world.
yes please! I'll email you now, thanks!
I actually considered making that fact #1, since I personally consider it to be more convincing. At any rate, we agree.
I think that this says a lot about John Sculley's character. He has the strength to admit the realities about Apple. I find it surprising that so many former-CEOs are unable to admit the obvious.

I used to own his book Odyssey which describes his view of the world in 1987.
Hm... What I really need is foot traffic - Commercial areas have a huge amount of foot traffic but very low population density.
umm, isn't that what svn export is for :)

why stop at .svn, how about .~, .bak, .tmp, .swp !
No. When I first saw it, I thought "Yes, I found styling for tables!" but no, it's not. Basically, you are still setting each table an individual style. And if you are dealing with a lot of tables, this can be a lot of updates.

Here is the open bug report: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=11121
The business opportunity is probably just getting big enough to get a buyout offer from one of the bigger dogs.
Thank you for asking this. I am in a very similar position and just recently threw myself out there for a rails job. After showing off some small and simple projects I've done, I was told that I need to learn more (specifically: TDD). So, I'm reading and trying out everything I can and will repeat the process.
Individual action is good and all but if we really want to be effective we need to organize. We need a hacker's trade association that can raise money and lobby to protect our interests.
I'm not a biologist, either, but there are e.g. repair enzymes, which may denaturate and lose their function when heated. Reader "Richard2010", comment #2, named a few more mechanisms for causing cancer using non-ionizing radiation. Whether they are practical, I don't know.
> It certainly seems to me this would work for software, probably even better than it does for fashion. Arguably it already does.

Yes, it would work better for software! I'm unsure why you and my other interlocutor considered this an interesting point to make: my post is clear that I believe software patents should be abolished, but not all patents.

> Yes, this is the standard argument. Do you have any evidence that it actually works that way?

Yes. The fact that innovation has marched on and that small-time inventors have invented new and relevant products is evidence for my claim.

> I don't see a lot of small companies making it big on a patented product where they get a lot of protection that works;

Sure you do. Segway is one. Many of the products by Dyson would be others.

> I do see a lot of companies of all sizes being stomped on.

Please, by all means, provide examples.

> The effects in reality do not seem to be a net positive for the "little guys", who can't afford the patent process in the first place

Tell that to James Dyson or Dean Kamen.
It's nice if you move your laptop around a bunch. You can carry it in open position with one hand without your wrist getting tired.
You'd also want to consider making a company ownership hierarchy. Most patent trolls work through a dizzying number of shell companies.
I don't think a community has ever had a man-crush on a member, like we all do on Patrick. They should teach him as an example in future "Personal Branding" courses.
Does this kind of reductionism pass for science journalism? I have no idea if cell phones cause cancer. But if I have a model of carcinogenesis and cell phones happen not to fit the model, that's nothing like proof that they cannot cause cancer.

Knives are proven to cause stab wounds. A sharpened stick is not a knife. That is not proof that sharpened sticks cannot cause stab wounds.

Edit: apparently the meaning of what I've written varies depending on what you think my motives are. That means I've been unclear. I'm not advocating the precautionary principle. Kind of the opposite, actually. You cannot prove a negative, which means that it is unscientific to use a model (especially one as poorly understood as the one for carcinogenesis) to "prove" that something cannot happen.
that's what I was using for Twootball, the problem is that it breaks during the playoff.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll have to work on that. I thought about putting a little graphic below on startup that explains the site more.
Ironically, LAPACK is for the most part pretty straight forward. Most of the code is simply shells out to BLAS routines. Because everything is matrix-matrix, it all maps reasonably well to how you'd explain it in a math textbook.
I'm not worried - me and Aslan get on just fine. So long as you remember he's not a tame lion.
I don't know about other sports but I have researched this for the Premier League (soccer) and they own the stats lock stock and barrel. Even if you hired a bunch of mechanical turks to watch every game and jot down every shot and tackle the stats still belong to the Premier Leageue because the games are arranged by them. If you list the Premier League schedule on your blog you'll get a cease and desist unless you pay them a fee.
"Matz originally created it kind of as a spiritual successor to Perl"

Really?

Matz has called his language "matz-lisp". Yes, he glommed stuff from perl, but from CLU, smalltalk, lisp, and other languages.

I agree that anyone serious about programming needs to learn what happens under the hood, but an advantage of using something that is easy to jump into yet still amazingly powerful is that people get to first see if programming is really what they want to invest time in.
Great honest and fair comparison, Paras.

One benefit you forgot to mention is that your cheapest plan ($49) comes out to $0.0049 per visitor. Optimizely's cheapest plan ($19) comes out to $0.0095 per visitor.

One thing I think we do well is allow you to try Optimizely and create your experiment without needing to create an account or give us your email address. The only time you need to create an account is when you want to save.

We also offer cross-browser testing and uptime monitoring and reporting.

One small correction: we do support testing behind login wall pages. You just need to put the embed code on your page and the tool will load your site even if it's behind a login wall or on your own local intranet behind a firewall.

Our biggest competitor is non-consumption. I'm glad there are other startups out there helping to educate the market about the benefits of A/B testing. A rising tide floats all boats!
Want WebP today? Implement it in JavaScript
Windows desktop runs on the AMD64 platform as well as Itanium. It used to run on some other platforms like Alpha.

Windows Embedded runs on ARM and SH, in addition to x86.

I just find it funny that the same people who will make this sort of complaint, will then use Apple products that have an order of magnitude less diversity.
Is the startup echo chamber so bad that people literally get booed for asking how a startup will make money?
A startup is, at least in theory supposed to be a business(vs a side project, which doesn't have to be one). Have we forgotten that?

This article's either greatly exaggerating the prevailing attitude, or the tech community is in big trouble.
>...whatever level you're at, there'll always be other developers to look up to and aspire to. You should never let that discourage you.

In fact, it should be considered a great form of encouragement! I'm a very green developer (1 year experience), and the fact that there exists individuals orders of magnitude more impressive than me at my craft gives me great hope for future growth.

It's a challenge, an inspiration, and direction all wrapped into one.
Something I've learned in the last few years is that I can almost always think of a reason why I will be unable to accomplish any goal. Which is to say, if I only pursued goals I was sure I would accomplish, I would never pursue anything (which is effectively what I ended up doing for a few years, without really noticing the hole I'd dug for myself.) My current MO is to not deny myself preemptively and to just go ahead and pursue the goals I want to achieve. As it turns out, it's OK to try and fail. It's even better to try and succeed. I'm not haunted by failures in my life as much as I am haunted by roads not traveled.
Playing the devil's advocate here, but wouldn't exposure rates be more important than usage? Most people would likely be exposed more to other phone's radiation than just their own phone's.
I might be at some of the events afterward. Maybe we can coordinate by email? My address is in my profile.
Ugh! This sounds exactly like pseudo-context as described by Dan Meyer (http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=8002). There are so many awesome things to inspire someone in math, and slapping a popular movie character on rote drills seems like a misguided approach to motivating the challenge. I mean, on the one hand, good for you if you can find some trappings to make doing drills more fun. But while you're getting them to exercise skills, you're really missing out on the deep and fulfilling motivations that exist for math!
Funny, I do the same exact thing with John's MongoMapper codebase!

(Not trolling, there is an acknowledged lack of documentation for MongoMapper; I'm just poking fun at John)
In the video, is the guy saying "brilliant!" a sample from a Guinness commercial? Well played.
Google Announces Third Quarter 2010 Financial Results
The article is not very accurate. I've attended the NY Tech Meetup dozens of times and I've seen the questions "How will you reach a critical mass of users?" and "Aren't you doomed to fail because X already does the same thing?" asked a few times with no backslash whatsoever. The third one ("how are you going to make money") is the only one that gets the "boooos". BTW, I happen to like that. After all, the meetup is about technology and innovation and not about making money.
>>he technology is trivial but getting traction with such a website, bringing it to the attention of major blogs and news outlets is the main work to be done.

Like always! ;)

A more pressing question is: Is there any possible legal repercussions of building such a site. I live and host in the UK if that makes any difference.
Single Point of Failure Is Not Just a Hardware Issue
try tiny c compiler
Apple’s Big Mistake Was Hiring Me As CEO
Why? He's pretty much correct unless you are taking the statement hyper-literally.

Few web applications are technological breakthroughs. You can find exceptions in things like Google maps and such, but for the rest of the startup scene, it is all about the execution and the marketing.
A good friend of mine told me that, the minute I start affecting my personal brand and reputation negatively at a job, I need to start thinking about what to do next. The worst thing is to leave on a low note than a high note.

If you think leaving the job is inevitable, then you should start preparing for that - i.e. work hard, because the last memories in their minds will be the ones that stick the most.

I've been through this, and I have an open invitation to return to an old job because of it. For now I've left it all and I'm building my own company. Just make sure you understand your costs, and make sure you have health insurance. Don't buy into all the crap about - i'm young, i'll just buy the cheapest insurance on the market. The insurance is for the things you don't expect. Not being able to eat or pay rent are small problems, but neither can bankrupt you. Medical costs can. My buddy broke his leg on a mountain; fortunately he has insurance, but if he didn't the costs would have bankrupted him. He's a young and healthy guy otherwise

Also, people start their own companies with far less than 1 year of savings. You'll find, even if you have 5 years of runway, the prospect of jumping the safety of your paycheck is going to be terrifying. Once you do it though, you'll stop thinking about it very quickly. Look at it differently - 1 year of runway may force you to work harder than ever; you know, necessity is the mother of all invention.
Yeah, I would include it if I could edit it (it doesn't appear to be editable).
This is actually an idea I took from my current employer. We did this from the beginning so we don't really have numbers on how it effected our signups. The real motivator behind was mitigating our costs. The previous company I worked for was a video hosting company and there were lots of issues with abuse. Lots of people would sign up for free accounts, upload full tv shows or movies and post them on popular sites for illegal tv or movie watching. We'd delete these accounts as quickly as we could, but the second we did that, they would just open another. The cost of storing, encoding and streaming those videos to get a few paying users was something we didn't want risk. I can tell you that the majority of users who have signed up for a trial have yet to cancel their account. So, I don't know if we're getting less signups, but I have a feeling the quality is higher.
Full transcript: http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full...

Provided in: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1792349
What was the reason for developers to switch over? "A better protocol" isn't a good one.
Credit dwarfs money supply
Not all presentations are made by startups. More importantly, not all innovations have to be profitable, nor they have to be a business.
Wow, you see from Drew's application is that he's a good writer and a great communicator. I've been using dropbox happily so I'm sure he's a great coder too, but I wonder if 90% your application conveys is how well you'll sell users on your product down the road.

(also there seem to be a fair number of concrete examples)
"How I won the KDD Cup 2009 (using R)" (slides+video)
From http://mobilelearningblog.com/2010/10/14/how-to-make-any-3rd...:

The Hermione Granger math app that was created was purely for individual use. This app will not be distributed, sold, shared or otherwise provided publicly. We respect the rights of copyright holders.

That just makes me sad.
RubyGems needs a public mirror network
Did you even read the article? What you just said is exactly the initial complaint the author is making about the misapplication of the precautionary principle.

"I have no idea if <pigs can fly>. But if I have a model of <flight in biological animals> and <pigs> happen not to fit the model, that's nothing like proof that they cannot <fly>.

<Birds> are proven to <be biological animals capable of flight>. A <pig> is not a <bird>. That is not proof that <pigs> cannot <be biological animals capable of flight>."

Does this make absolutely any sense to you?
That may ruin your job, but it shouldn't ruin your career.
If you'd stopped at "Managers love Excel", I'd agree with you. Unlike the lucky duck up above, I've never seen a manager write a spreadsheet that included a single macro, active cell or calculation.

I've only seen managers use Excel to format columnar data, and then only because "Word" does such heinous things with text in the cells.
Link to the shorter version, if anyone is interested:
http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-the-secrets-of-steve-j...

HN discussion of shorter version: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1790566
In the glory days of IRC, everyone was using it. Now most social medias have replaced the need for it. I think that what really killed IRC was msn/icq, specialised and targeted chat instead of meeting random people (which is quite hard to do these days).

IRC was the precursor to many specific stuff that later gave whole industries. Stuff like online dating didn't exist, interest groups like #linux or regional chatrooms like #Montreal. I think that jabber rose during the fall of IRC but they didn't manage to catch the fleeing users since their service is quite similar to what people were leaving. Since the web caught on online dating and such, IRC and jabber became less and less interesting for most of their former users.
I figured most people who read HN know what YC is (the post was on HN).

This comment thread has been pretty helpful in figuring out future revisions. Thanks for the tip.
Why not start a few days (at least) before you start coding?

"Sell before you build" is my new mantra.
You want to be working right on the edge of your abilities. If you're in your comfort zone you aren't going to learn anything new. If you're completely in over your head, you'll just flounder. Working right on the edge lets you make the incremental improvements in your skills that can take you to excellence.
I'm glad you don't believe it, but isn't there some harm to even entertaining the idea when people react so strongly to someone mentioning a 'possibility' however obscure?

It's good to play devil's advocate and conceive of possibilities within our knowledge of biology/physics or what-have-have but I'm afraid that a large portion of the public wants to jump to conclusions on mere thought experiments.
I don't think he meant to be formal. I think he said "Sir" in the dick-headed way that Keith Olbermann says it.
Even Steve Jobs was not trusted by his board because of lack of "experience". Those with experience tend to always overvalue it and rarely see their own limitations.
"I hope PG doesn't read this, but I tell people all the time that in hindsight I would've done YC for zero dollars and still given them the equity percentage. You will leave YC on the "inside" of the SV bubble. You will have personal relationships with founders and investors that you read about on TechCrunch. How can you put a price on that?"

Is it just me, or is anyone else getting really tired of this type of fanboy, love-fest dribble? I have no doubt about the validity of YC as an accelerator, but it's just tiresome to read this type of stuff what feels like so often.
How much is decent health insurance these days for someone young, in good shape, and with no existing conditions?
James Dyson doesn't admire lastminute.com
Ask HN: Why isn't News.YCombinator.com/best linked from the header bar?
I'm fairly new to HN, so as I Googled for the best of HN, it brought up the /best page. This page adds a "Best" link to the header, but it doesn't show up anywhere else? Any reason for this? Why hide this page?
Twitter’s @OnTheRoad Video Is Way Cooler Than You
Really large boots.
Anyone use Cloudkick here? On EC2? Recommended?
If you're not paying for a service or product, are you really a "customer" of the product/service ?

I bet a car salesman considers you a "customer" even when you are "just looking."
Inverse square law. Radiation from a phone 10 cm from your brain is 100 times more intense than radiation from your friend's phone a meter away.