skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd suggest you do some reading, there's a serious hole in your knowledge of HP. The HP history and culture that people admire has nothing to do with PCs or printers, and predates those going back many decades. (Does anyone know of a museum or collector that might be interested in my HP 300A Harmonic Wave Analyzer? I think that was their second product, a very impressive one for the early 40's... It's still useful)

HP has a long history of very sophisticated electronic test equipment. A great deal of innovation and hard work went into development of that equipment, including many things that hadn't been done before. Many other tech companies used HP (and Tektronix) gear when developing their products. Aside from the many tech contributions, their corporate culture was certainly one to admire. HP was better known to engineers than consumers, but they did do some things that crossed over. The HP-35 hand-held scientific calculator was the first product of it's type I ever saw (and owned too...), certainly seeming worth the $400 one cost back in the day (around 1972). HP was constantly pushing the state of the art. HP wasn't merely successful, they were special.

I was sorry that the HP/Compaq computing combination got the HP name. I wish that had stayed with the real tech products, but in Agilent tech lives on. HP certainly stands out from an era when the U.S. really shined as an engineering and manufacturing leader. HP wasn't another Dell or Gateway.

There are (and were) tech companies with a past that goes way back. For instance most think of Motorola as a cell phone company. They were huge in semiconductors (some of that lives on in Freescale), but how many remember them as being the ones behind the first car radio or first under $200 television set, or making communications gear that went to the moon?

In comparison, I find it a little sad to see highly valued companies like Facebook that don't really seem to produce anything. If it had never come into being, would we have really missed much that mattered?
I'm not exactly sure what is unethical about continuing to bill customers for a service they haven't chosen to cancel.

Also, "expired cards" are not the same as "expired accounts."
Interesting phrase he used, 'positive inertia.'I'd like more information on that (what causes/supports it etc).

Throughout history, there have always been those that argue that the world is going to hell, yet here we are, better off than any previous generation. Not only are things pretty damn good, but there is a lot of positive inertia that makes it likely that things will continue to improve for quite some time. We aren’t balanced at a precipice, where the result of any given election can pitch us into darkness.
thanks :) I can't bear to even think about how it looks in IE.

I'm honestly thinking of just putting an
<!//--[if IE]--
sorry this website is not supported in IE, but here's an animated gif of a dancing bear for your amusement
---!>

around the entire site.
> When exactly did he say "women >> should not run a startup."?

At the end of his message he writes: "For the case of a female entrepreneur I'd say no, you probably shouldn't have a baby and a startup at the same time.)"

Do I really have to explain what's wrong with that?

Is it really worth everybody's time for me to come up with a silly analogy like how "Jeff Goldblum cannot carry a sheep and a chainsaw simultaneously" is not the same thing as saying "Jeff Goldblum cannot carry a chainsaw?"

I'm assuming that it isn't.
I've got a site that gets ~10,000 uniques per month (www.area51.org), and I still have never found a way to make much money at it. Yes, I've got ads. And yes, I've thought about affiliate marketing. But I wish I could bust out of my boxed thinking and come up with some revenue model that's more compelling.

(On the other hand, the site is self-sustaining; I don't have to think about it much.)
See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1843248

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1841807
This approach to business feels a bit amateur and lacking in class to me. I realise there has been a fair amount of publicity after this episode, and maybe I am 'old school' but it just doesn't feel right.
China unveils powerful, 2.5-petaflop supercomputer
It's not hard to get "near production quality". It is hard to get to production quality.
As libertarian, I couldn't disagree more. The fundamental difference between us is that you would gladly have your opinions and preferences imposed upon your neighbours with the threat of force, and I believe that all human interaction ought to be voluntary. I want discussion, reason, and persuasion to be used to solve society's ills; you want the gun. Yours is the mature position?
This is sort of the elephant in the room. The only reason that you are given compensation for your work at all is because it theoretically motivates you to do more of it. The "rewarding hard work as an ethical value proposition" thing really only crept up in the past century. While I think it is a good theory, treating it as essentially the only parameter to an ethical decision is extremely simplistic.

You can argue for smaller government in ways that don't consist of counting dollars taken away from people at gunpoint. I find those sorts of argument much more compelling.
The Benefits of Bug Bounties
I hate PayPal with a passion. We've been using it for 3 years as our online payment processing and every 3 months or so they do something that causes us hassle like an auto refund for no valid reason.
I've considered changing - but then just think other payment processors are probably just as bad? Or are there really good guys out there?
Same here. I also hacked up (with Linode) a Linode Stack Script (for those that do not know, it's basically a fancy bash script that gets run upon deployment.)

It goes through the trouble of installing all of my various dpkg dependencies, setting up mysql, downloading and compiling rails and nginx w/ passenger, as well as setting up my bash prompt.
I spend a lot of time programming in Ada 83 in my day job. The software has to do with air traffic control. I also voted C, C++, Perl and Python. In my personal projects Python is the dominating language, but I also write a lot of shell scripts in both my personal projects and day job.
Well like I said... If your customers are seeing it as a service, then it is fine. However I also believe that notifying your customers and warning them that their cards will expire or that their subscription renewal/cancellation is pending would be good form.

Relying on revenue that will come in only if your customers "forget" to cancel their subscriptions is just bad business IMHO.

You see I have learned in my life that going an extra mile bears an unfathomable premium - as long as your product is actually required.

The same goes for emails and calls - If the email is a product itself (what they require of your services) then by all means - You're not supposed to work for free are you? But then again we don't say "I sold five emails today".

Of course you bill your customer for email and phone, you price it into your hourly rate, product price... whatever. But you don't go out and show it to them on balance. Whatever you have gained in transparency - you have lost on the grounds of appearing cheap or tight. This too I see as bad form.
This is usually how I go about learning a new area of development. I think through the problem, get an idea of how it might work, maybe even write some code, then go spelunking on github & google to see how other people solved it.

Sometimes I'm surprised to find my method was spot on. Other times I find someone who already iterated the solution a few times and I can jump over those mistakes to a more mature solution.

Learning to read other people's code and quickly get the gist of how it works and recognizing patterns is crucial in becoming a proficient programmer.
I can't tell you specifics yet since they haven't published (expecting it sometime in November), but there is a client who will be something like six figures richer twelve months from now on the strength of two content edits to a ten year old blog post by their CEO. ("What do you mean, the blog post outranks the product for our most valuable keyword!?!?!?")
Download Free iPhone & Mobile Ringtones
Make & download free ringtones for your mobile phone or iPhone. Download free ringtones for Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile carriers. Here are a number of ways and resources from where you can get ring tones of your choice for any mobile phone and iPhone.
Count money? I'd be happy if they just read the bill and showed up for the vote!
The CALM Conjecture: Reasoning about Consistency
This might be what you're looking for:

"When glass touch screens feel like sandpaper" : http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/10/08/tesla.touch.di...
It does at first, but upon reading the entire essay I was convinced his intentions are honest.
I agree with everything he said, as long as he also applies the notion to defense spending, providing financial security for the elderly (either as Social Security or as pensions), and subsidizing liquidity in the financial markets (via debt). If these are ignored (as they almost always are by self-anointed 'fiscal conservatives'), then it's a bogus argument. If they're not ignored, then I'm on board for the discussion.
Have to agree with John here. All the zepto promotion efforts I've seen have been playing up "jQuery-compatible", but that's pretty misleading. Seems like using the "jQuery" buzzword to get attention, but not exactly delivering the goods.
Upvoted. Just for once, I'd like for an interviewer to present a question that they themselves don't know how to solve (or didn't know how to solve in the first few times they thought about it).
Why HP Bought Palm
Good job. There's a similar story about then Russian president Putin. He rewarded a Gazprom employee with a pen for saving the company about $5M a year. Only that was a $150 000 pen.
Since neither of those has any comments yet, I'm prepared to declare this the official thread.
It's interesting to read the Editor's Note in the right sidebar of that PBS piece which basically says that the interviewee is a liar.
+1 for stock Android. I sure as heck don't want carrier modifications. Note to carriers: your job is radio frequencies and call routing. That's all I want you for. You are not a software company. It sucks to be a commodity, but it sucks more to be an anchor on an airplane, which is what you are for the quality of your phones. Give them a connection and free reign.
Meet The Computer Virus That's Trying To Blow Up Iran
Everything you need to know about Stuxnet, the world's first weaponized computer virus.
No, I'm only embarrassed by my incomplete projects.
I've found this to be an excellent method of learning patterns through different languages.

This approach only truly works if you understand what you're doing after you've 'borrowed' code. If you just blindly copy down the concepts and paste where you need them without understanding why that block works the way it does then you're not going to be up shits creek when it comes time to debugging that part of the application.
I have to disagree with your tip. When someone IMs me out of the blue without any prior contact I think it's a little too eager. I prefer to start with a message or two and then move into more real-time interaction.
"Car design"? So that means when they start selling Cherry Motors cars over here they might meet federal safety standards on the first try?
It appears that it is specifically converting to SVG (+ javascript animation), given the speaker’s comments about how high-res (not PNG or <video>) and not computationally expensive (not <canvas>) the exported graphics are.
You only want to grow your business based on sustained clients with a lot of work. Do it very slowly and carefully, one of the most common ways for a business to fail is to get too big, too fast.

Are you totally certain that you will have a lot of work 3 months from now? 12?
I think uses those Loongson MIPS processors.

Edit: According to the PCMag article they're Xeon processors.
Beta testers wanted - search for products from local brick-and-mortar stores
How 50% Discounts Really Work
It's called Chery, and... no, probably not.
Of course not, because the cameras don't record every number plate reliably.

So politely ask the person to pay the original fee, and fine them if they don't pay promptly. The problem is that the system assumes bad faith.
> One more. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/14....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Con_Coughlin#Habbush_letter

> Heres one. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/00....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_F._Hayes#Writings_and_p...

> http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/03/25/1017004766310.html

This is well known. Saddam provided/ claimed to provide compensation for the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. There is no connection with the Al-Qaeda here.

> Oh, here's another one, PBS this time. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/gunning/interv....

You did not read he editor's note

[Editor's Note, November 2005: More than two years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, there has been no verification of Khodada's account of the activities at Salman Pak. In fact, U.S. officials have now concluded that Salman Pak was most likely used to train Iraqi counter-terrorism units in anti-hijacking techniques. It should also be noted that he and other defectors interviewed for this report were brought to FRONTLINE's attention by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a dissident organization that was working to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Since the original broadcast, Khodada has not publicly addressed questions that have been raised about his account of activities at Salman Pak.]

If you want an overview of the planning/preparation of Sep 11 attacks it is easily available here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_of_the_September_11_at...
Yeah, I built it because no others worked the way I wanted them to. With that in mind, I wouldn't mind if nobody ever signed up for it, but I'd like to give it a good shot and see if there's interest.

As for finding other like-me users, I'm not sure...it's specifically built for single-person devs and at this point doesn't allow multiple users per account, so I suppose any number of freelance forums or communities would be good places to start (freelanceswitch.com comes to mind).

To answer your last question, I'm more looking for strategic feedback - I'd love to get a few testers to tell me if they would use it and if not, why not. And I'm sure that a couple bugs will be exposed in the process.
Original comment corrected.
It's far from clear that the things you list couldn't have been developed without government intervention.

Unfortunately, without an alternate fork of reality to try the experiment, we'll never know. But the idea that because something was developed using government funds, it could never have been developed without them, is a logical fallacy.
One of the articles mentioned they may try to move THIS machine over to the Chinese made processors in the future.
:)

1. DHHS != Social Security
2. The core point is choice. I prefer donating to a neighborhood charity that I can confirm is spending money responsibly. If you believe the government generally provides healthcare with lower overhead and more efficiency than a private nonprofit, one might politely point out that same government has spent several hundreds of billions has been spent blowing people up in Iraq. I don't think even the Red Cross spends its 9% on that...
I think the take home message is that most guys' profiles set the bar pretty low. It doesn't take much to rise above the noise floor: by simply attempting to be personable and have a decent photo you're well ahead of the game.

Sounds obvious, but I used to check out men's ads just to see what I was up against, and I was definitely not impressed!
I don't want to lose any more karma over this, but that isn't at all what I was talking about.
My biggest issue with Feedburner is that the feed count seems erratic (and often inaccurate). After I post a new article to my blog, the Feedburner count sometimes jumps dramatically, and then within about 24 hours drops by 50% or more.
A Hidden Genius at the Apple Store
I am usually too busy regretting the lost time to be embarrassed.

I always choose projects that, if they succeed, will become a launching point for something(s) larger. They represent the beginning of an exponential growth curve, where the x axis is the seconds I have to spend (before I cease to be) and the y axis is the derivative of accomplishment. A failed project represents a wasted fraction of those seconds, which pushes the exponential growth curve to the right (and some portion of it is pushed beyond my allotted lifespan, which is the right-hand limit of my integral). My integral is irreparably reduced.

You can expand your accomplishment-integral bound beyond your lifespan. Still, that axis is probably finite, and the integral will never catch up with where it could have reached had I/you not failed in the first place.
You're missing the main reason the Libertarian party was created - to preserve personal freedoms. For example, they also advocate the legalization of drugs.
Product Engineering at Airbnb is Growing
Want to join a promising early stage startup that is growing rapidly and make a big impact?

Joining Twitter as employee #301 not early enough for you?

Come join our engineering team at Airbnb. We're 6 engineers, you can be engineer #7.

If you're interested in a front-end role, you can be front-end engineer #2!

We're building an engineering team that can produce what teams 10 times our size can do. We love what we're building. We talk about product daily, how we can enrich the experience of our users further. We love working on challenging problems and working with smart engineers that can help us grow individually too. Most of all, we value engineering.

Check out some of the challenges we're working on: http://blog.airbnb.com/hard-problems-big-opportunity

Email me at barry@airbnb.com if you'd like to chat and hear more.
Not to step on your toes glasner, as it is an easy mistake to make, but match type DOES NOT affect quality score. All keywords on phrase and broad match are judged ONLY on instances in which the search query precisely matches the keyword, regardless of match type. This is referred to as the exact match subset.

You can find more info here: http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2010/09/28/negative-keywo...

Do you maintain "scent" from keyword to ad copy for this keyword? http://www.grokdotcom.com/topics/senseofscent.htm

If scent is not maintained you are hurting your clickthrough rate which accounts for a majority of the weighting behind quality score.
It might be actually. Are they small enough that I can fit both the phone and the keyboard together in my pocket?

Wouldn't it be smaller if the keyboard was integrated into the phone?
While this will probably cause a certain amount of hand-wringing in the US, it's nothing to be too concerned about. The bragging rights for "World's Fastest Computer" are pretty cheap, even cheaper than the bragging rights for "World's Tallest Building", so you can expect 'em both to be fought over by secondary countries with something to prove.

All I know about supercomputers based on GPUs is that they're very cheap, very theoretically fast, and very hard to program for effectively. Any experts in here who can enlighten us?
Asynchrony in C# 5
There are plenty of 'impossible' things you can do blind.

For example, there are blind golf players. They have their own golf associations and tournaments. One of my old co-workers used to assist blind golfers by describing the location, distance, etc. The golfer does the rest.
Lessons from Freemium Summit
Your web scale number is the Levenshtein distance between your company's operations and Google.

To me, "web scale" means "We can consume, store, organize, process, transform, and deliver information for the entire world." Web scale is planet scale information technology.
this seems like a terrific idea, until you think of the practical implications...
Yeah, I just finished the Business Week article which also stated that the interconnects are currently a Chinese design.
Want to join a promising early stage startup that is growing rapidly and make a big impact?

Joining Twitter as employee #301 not early enough for you?

Come join our engineering team at Airbnb. We're 6 engineers, you can be engineer #7.

If you're interested in a front-end role, you can be front-end engineer #2!

We're building an engineering team that can produce what teams 10 times our size can do. We love what we're building. We talk about product daily, how we can enrich the experience of our users further. We love working on challenging problems and working with smart engineers that can help us grow individually too. Most of all, we value engineering.

Check out some of the challenges we're working on: http://blog.airbnb.com/hard-problems-big-opportunity

Email me at barry@airbnb.com if you'd like to chat and hear more.
Command line HN polls graphs
A quick-and-dirty python script that creates a graph for a HN poll, on the command line.
Download it from: http://goo.gl/jDu8

Use:

To see the poll at
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1843083

Run
python hnpoll.py 1843083

Known problem: if some of the poll items has a '<' on the description.
Unknown problems: lots, I guess :)

Remember, it's a quick-and-dirty, 5 minutes work.
There's a talk by Anders Hejlsberg going on right now at http://player.microsoftpdc.com/Session/1b127a7d-300e-4385-af...

Eric Lipper has a good post at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2010/10/28/async...

This is particularly interesting to me since I've been writing a network bound Windows Phone app. Writing concise code to express 'Do network work foo, don't block UI thread, let me cancel if necessary, execute this piece of code when done, execute this other piece of code on failure' has been challenging and makes my code ugly. I love how this makes it simple
Google CEO: Don't like Street View? 'Move' - Computerworld